“I’m so sorry,” you said, shaking out your left arm.
“It’s not easy. You have to really hold your position, Joy, otherwise the whole thing will fall apart,” Mr. Dyshlenko instructed, lifting me up gently to demonstrate. Even though he must have been fifty, he felt like a redwood, and suddenly I was weightless. “You see?” he asked, as you looked up at me from what felt like miles away. “You hold on, hold on, and then—quickly! Before you even think about it!—let go.” I felt myself swaying a little, but I kept my eyes on you. We were always being told to pick a focal point, something steady that we could return to again and again, that would keep us balanced.
That was you. It had always been you.
“Trust in her,” Mr. Dyshlenko said, looking up at me. “And she will trust in you. Feel that risk of falling and accept it, but do not give in.”
As he righted me and set me back down, I looked at you expectantly.
“Want to risk it?” I asked.
“Say the word,” you said. “I’m ready when you are.”
? ? ?
You picked me up after breakfast on Saturday, revealing that despite its many confusions, the absolute best thing about going on a first date with someone who had been placed firmly in the friend zone was that your parents didn’t notice the shift.
“Have fun with Diego,” Mom said without looking up from her newspaper.
“Tell that boy to cut his hair,” Dad called.
I took the elevator down, trying not to think about how I looked, or more specifically how hard I’d worked on looking like I wasn’t thinking about how I looked. I had my hair pulled up in a high puff—my go-to style, nothing fancy—and was wearing my glasses, just in case. Below the neck, I had on jeans and sneakers (and, under my jacket, a gray sweatshirt I’d cut so it fell off the shoulder like the one Jennifer Beals wears on the poster for Flashdance). So far, so normal. But I’d also stolen into Mom’s makeup drawer and dusted something called Candlelight Glow highlighting powder onto my cheekbones, rubbing some on my eyelids, too, for good measure. That was new. I turned my head side to side, peering up into the tiny, triangular elevator mirror to see if I looked even the slightest bit more luminous. Given that the mirror looked to have been installed in the 1890s, it was hard to say.
You were waiting out on the sidewalk, hiding something behind your back. Don’t be flowers, I thought, cringing a little, ungratefully, at the thought of having to hold them on the subway, or explain them to my parents. But it wasn’t flowers.
“Your chariot awaits,” you laughed, whipping out a pair of janky crutches. “They were my abuela’s.”
“Doesn’t she need them, though?”
“Nah, she’s in a wheelchair now.”
You helped slip them under my arms and watched as I lurched and heaved myself over to the crosswalk. The crutches were a few inches too short, and the rubber was nearly worn off the bottoms, so they clanked a little on the pavement, but other than that, if I kept my left leg bent, they worked perfectly. “I know it’s not exactly flowers,” you said, holding my arm as a bus careened past. “But this is your rest. This way you can stay off your bad foot.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling foolish for rubbing all that fake glow on my face when you’d managed to give me the real deal in less than five minutes. Sure, hand-me-down walking aides from a disabled grandma wasn’t the usual way of sweeping someone off their feet, but I decided that it definitely passed anyway, on a technicality.
“So where are we going?” I asked as we shoved ourselves onto a crowded downtown 1 train.
“She will trust in you,” you said teasingly, in a bad impression of Mr. Dyshlenko’s thick Russian baritone that came out sounding more like Yoda.
At Times Square, you squeezed my hand, and you must have seen the look of horror on my face—crossing 42nd Street on the first nice spring weekend of the year was definitely what Dante’s inferno was originally based on, I was pretty sure—because you laughed. “Don’t worry, we’re just switching to the Q.” The station turned out to be just as crazy, though, with huge groups of tourists and school kids lumbering through in seas of matching Tshirts, getting in the way of the fast-walking native New Yorkers, who bobbed and weaved around elbows and suitcases like weary-looking ninjas. At one particularly tricky intersection, where a team of break dancers was performing for a semicircle of onlookers, I got hip-checked so many times that you actually picked me up and carried me piggyback, holding the crutches out in front of you like a divining rod.
“This is practice,” you explained, as I wrapped my arms around your neck. “The one-handed commuter clusterfuck lift.”
“Criminally underused by Balanchine,” I said.
“See? I’m bringing ballet to the people.” You grinned.