“She doesn’t like him really,” Summer said, that night in April, the night of the dance. Spinning around my bedroom, wearing a tank top she’d stolen from my drawer without asking and a full tulle skirt that fanned around her knees. It was the first time in weeks—maybe months—that we’d seen her this way, happy and bright and ours. Her blond hair glimmering, eyes smoky with makeup I wouldn’t have even known how to buy. Falling backward onto my bed, snow-angel-style, next to Brynn. “You don’t really like him, do you, Mia? It’s just a game. You’ve never even kissed him.”
I do like him, I wanted to say. I wanted to scream. I like him more than anything. More than dance. More than breathing.
More—so much more—than I like you.
But I waited too long. I hesitated. The words built up backstage, and I couldn’t find them in the darkness, and then I’d waited too long.
Summer laughed.
“See?” she said to Brynn. She took a pillow and hurled it at me. “What a tease. Someone should give that poor boy a break.”
What do I remember about the dance? Zigzag red and blue lights, patterns of strobe on the floor, an awful sound system beating its patchy rhythm into the air. Standing with Brynn and Owen and Summer in a group, all of us with hands up, laughing, breathless. Whole. It was as if time had simply rewound. As if the past six weeks—the way Summer had avoided us, the way she’d sneered at Brynn in the cafeteria and said in front of everyone, “Stop drooling, McNally. I’m not into girls, okay?”—had never happened. As if they’d been one long nightmare and we had all woken up.
What else? Letting the music flow through me like a river, forgetting form and structure and point your toes and turn out and spine straight, just letting myself swim in the sound.
And Summer the thread, the connection, the spindle weaving all of us together, beautiful and sharp and deadly.
“Mamma Mia!” She grabbed my hands and spun me around in a circle. My palms were sweating. Hers were dry. “You’re going to be famous someday, you know?”
And afterward, when a slow song came on, and Brynn looped an arm around my shoulder and we went, sweaty and still laughing, to get punch from the cafeteria table and whisper about the couples walking stiff-armed, zombielike, through a cheesy rendition of a Taylor Swift song, turning around, suddenly realizing Owen and Summer hadn’t followed us.
I spotted them right away, but it took me a moment to understand.
Owen and Summer. Summer and Owen. Summer and Owen. So close they’d become one, a single figure in the middle of the gym: the end of the dance, the crescendo, the moment the music swells, just before the stage goes dark.
Kissing.
And the strangest thing was this: in that moment, all the music—the bubbly, fizzy vivace, the lazy andante and the yawning adagio, which for years had lived inside of my bones and blood and marrow, so that when I danced it wasn’t so much moving as becoming the music—drained straight out of my body. I could feel it happening. The dancers withdrew and retreated into the wings, and they’ve stayed there—trapped in the darkness of my mind—ever since. It was as if for years I’d carried this live, humming secret inside, a secret rhythm that tugged at me to leap and spin, bend and turn, and suddenly the secret was revealed and it wasn’t mine anymore and it didn’t matter.
As if someone had cored me like an apple.
I tried. Believe me, I did try. After weeks of avoiding Madame Laroche’s frantic phone calls, of making excuses to my mom and dad about why I wouldn’t go to class or rehearsal; after Brynn forced me back to Lovelorn, hoping it would make me feel better, only to find that Lovelorn, too, had vanished; I put on my tights and my leotard and my favorite pointe shoes and went back to Vermont Ballet.
For a week I fumbled through classes, missing turns, hitting my arabesques just a second too late, losing track of where I was in the combinations, while Madame Laroche went from encouraging to furious to silent, tight-lipped, and the other girls began edging away from me, as if losing the ability to dance was a disease and might be contagious.
“What happened?” Madame Laroche pulled me aside after the last class I ever took. “You used to dance from here.” She pointed to her heart. “You used to dance like singing. Now I don’t know who is on that stage.”
How could I have told her? How could I have explained? There was no heart left to dance. I had no voice to sing.
Instead, I said, “I know. I’m sorry.” #47. Truths you can never say, because they will strangle you on the way up.
When I got home, I threw out my pointe shoes. My leotards, too, and my collection of leg warmers. My sewing kit with my lucky purple thread that I used to fix elastic onto my shoes.
And when Summer came up to me, shyly, after a week of barely glancing in my direction, of piloting Owen away whenever he made a move to talk to me—when she giggled and slipped a hand in mine and leaned in, smelling like apple shampoo, to ask, “You’re not mad, are you? You know I can’t stand it when you’re mad at me. You know I’ll just die.”
I said, “No, I’m not mad.”
#46. Lies that feel like suffocation.
Here’s the real truth. She didn’t just steal Owen. She took dancing too—just evaporated it, like cupping a mouth over a window to fog it and then leaning back to watch it disappear. She took both of the things I loved most in the world.
It was my fault she died. I wanted it. I wished for it.
And then it happened, and I never got the chance to say I was sorry.