And she drifted to an earlier performance, years before:
The other kids were playing in the tents or crawling over the fence line or turning cartwheels at the edges of the grass, but in the center of the lawn Emma practiced her dance for the grown-ups. The recital was just two weeks away and she’d been rehearsing constantly. The music wasn’t playing, but she felt it in her body. She was small, but she stretched to draw the lines the dance required. The adults sat around the campfire chewing on their ribs and pasta salad; her dad had a picked bone in his hand and reddish juices smeared at the corners of his mouth. The adults turned toward her, but they didn’t know how to be an audience: they laughed at the parts that were serious, oohed and aahed at the parts that were easy, glanced away from the parts that were hard. As Emma leapt into a grand jeté, her mother spilled a glass of red wine across the picnic table’s cloth and cursed, and everybody jumped up screaming and laughing as the wine skimmed over the table and flowed off the edge. “Time to cut her off!” Emma’s father yelled, and her mom fake-slapped him as she stumbled toward the house.
—
The next day, although Emma could not yet walk, Dr. Kopech promised that she would. She’d have to work at her physical therapy, he told her and her parents, but all would heal in time. Her body was young and strong, had bounced back remarkably, and would recover completely.
At this news Emma felt a tightening in her chest, a quickening. “I’m going to be able to dance?” The doctor nodded. Emma’s mom started crying, messy, sniffling sobs; she covered her face with her hand. “Oh, Emma-Bear,” she said, and enfolded Emma’s hand in hers. Emma shook her off. Her mother’s blatant joy annoyed her, though she didn’t know why. She would heal, she would recover her legs, her feet, her turnout—and yet something disturbed her. It was something to do with the stage and the freedom she’d once found there, something to do with the texts and tweets and online posts that had come to define her to the world outside this room, and something to do with the understanding that, in spite of his smug hands and satisfied smile, the doctor was as powerless as everyone else—powerless to recover her in the way that really mattered, powerless to erase the record of her shaming, powerless to bring her back to that night and undo what had happened to her.
—
After two weeks in the hospital, Emma was released to a rehab center.
On the way there, Emma’s dad pulled his Mercedes convertible into the parking lot of the shopping center across from school. “I’ve got to pick up a couple things for your mom,” he said. “Just hang tight, okay?”
Her crutches were propped in the backseat, announcing themselves, waving hello. “Where am I gonna go?”
The parking lot was rimmed by trees, but the convertible sat in full sunlight. The heat made her elbows itch. Her seat was glossy and hot to the touch, and the white leather perforated by tiny dots; the pattern blurred her vision when she stared at it too long. She hoped no one would notice her there. None of her friends had come through on their promises to visit, and she didn’t know how people from school would react to seeing her. Nor was she sure what she wanted to say to them. She wore pink Victoria’s Secret sweatpants and a black cotton tank top that absorbed the heat. She had oversized sunglasses and ponytailed hair. No makeup. She found a lip gloss in her purse and dabbed it on in the rearview mirror. Her skin looked sickly, as if the hospital’s white light had seeped into the pores.
The stillness hurt. She tilted her seat back and raised her hips, pushed against the leather to ease the pressure on her pelvis. With every adjustment, hot knives stabbed at her core. She kept rearranging her body in the seat but she wasn’t dulling the pain, only shifting it from place to place. She was sweating under her arms and there was a strip of it along her belly, a wet line through the black cloth. Her hot-pink bra strap tangled in the skinny black strap of the tank top, and she wondered, for the first time ever, if it mattered that the bra strap showed. If this said something essential about her. If it was true, after all, that she was what they said. Slut. Cumbucket. Victim.
Her life had now been split. There was the girl waiting alone in this open-air car, roasting in the sunshine of a June afternoon in Mill Valley. Then there was the girl on the Internet, the girl in the pictures.
Fifteen minutes passed, and her dad did not return. She picked up her phone and texted:
Dad where R U? Boilling to death out here!!