“Because if it doesn’t work on Dais, it doesn’t work at all.”
Daisy arched her neck, smiling. “I’ll help you,” she said.
“Good,” Will said. “I need it.”
James looked up hopefully, but if there was a need for his help, Will didn’t voice it.
Spirits and energy were high as the semester began. The weather was unusually mild with plenty of sunshine, which kept at bay the customary mid-winter blues. Will was on fire with “Anthem,” the new section of Powaqqatsi. In contrast to the fiesta feeling of the opening section, “Anthem” was stately and majestic. A winding, synthesized baseline in five-four time set an almost foreboding tone, like the rumblings of a volcano. Then the brass erupted in the refrain, echoed by flutes and tambourines.
Aisha Johnson wrapped her six-foot, sinewy body like a python around the sensual choreography. She coiled her limbs about the music and squeezed every atom of oxygen out. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.
“Dude, she is smokin’,” Erik muttered to Will, after peeking at one of the rehearsals. “Like Tina Turner.”
“More like Grace Jones,” Will said. “She either gives me a total hard-on or scares the living shit out of me.”
Over in the ballet division, Marie Del’Amici was staging a work called Who Cares? A collaboration between the famed choreographer George Balanchine and the composer George Gershwin. It was a light-hearted ballet—jazzy and schmaltzy, pure spectacle. David would be lead set and lighting designer for the production, which would serve as his senior project. He envisioned a New York City skyline across the full length of the stage. They’d go all-out on the lighting, David planned, wiring up eight full boom stands and all of the overheads. Plus the set itself would have built-in lights.
“No fish in tanks,” he said, sketching out his idea in the set shop of Mallory, surrounded by his crew. “These are people dancing as people.”
Daisy had a solo, and was cast with James in a pas de deux to the song “The Man I Love.”
“Great, you get to babysit again,” Erik said.
Daisy exhaled and shrugged.
“Why wouldn’t Marie cast you with Will?”
Her smile was tired and resigned. “Because this is ballet, honey. A lot of times it’s not how well you dance but how well you deal.”
Will, besides dancing in Powaqqatsi, was featured throughout Who Cares? But his main pas de deux was with a girl named Taylor Revell. He and Daisy were crushed not to be cast together, but they wisely opted to be professional about it. “Man up and dance,” Will said, sighing.
“James is a wild card,” Daisy said. “And he’s taking anatomy this year and already flailing. Anything could happen.”
“Yeah, and anyone with half a brain can see your boy Johnny learning James’s part.”
“No stupid boys are in ballet,” Daisy said.
*
Erik was out running one Sunday afternoon in late February when a car slowed on the other side of the street and tooted its horn. Erik squinted and saw it was James. Checking traffic, he jogged across as James rolled down the window.
“Where you off to?” Erik said, panting.
“I gotta go home a couple days.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah. Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of Dhahran.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Dhahran. Where my sister was killed—”
“Oh, right, that’s right. I’m sorry.”
“They’re dedicating a monument at the army reserve center. Some general is coming. Big to-do. I gotta be there.”