Standing O
I SLIP BEHIND the curtain—it’s almost time, get the spotlight ready, soon I’ll be on.
This’ll be my last dance before I leave town. My last chance to make them remember me, and remember me they will.
When I’m onstage, I’m all for them, and they’re all for me. I feed off what they give me, and they bask in what I give them.
When I’m offstage, these people are nothing to me. I’ve got some level of hate for practically almost everyone I run into on any given day. But in the midst of dancing? When they’re watching me and I’m letting them watch? I’ve got so much love, I’m like a whole different person.
After tonight, the final Saturday performance, I’ll be packing my bags for Juilliard, for the city. I got in. I graduated high school two months ago. I sold my car as of last week. I have my dorm assignment. My roommate’s a modern-contemporary dancer from Oklahoma or some tornado state. I’ve stocked up on Grishkos in the size and style I like, since I have strong feet and high arches and can kill a pair of pointe shoes every ten days. I’ve been tracking the time left like this is a prison sentence and by the end of August the cuffs will come off and I’ll be free.
I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t even think it. Not after what happened to her, where they sent her. Aurora Hills is a real and actual prison, with barbed wire and chains and those baggy orange puff suits you see on TV, though they don’t call it a prison. Since it’s for under-eighteens, they say it’s a “detention center” instead.
It was August when she got bussed up there. Early August, almost exactly three years ago.
I should stay positioned in the wings, since my solo is the second number after intermission, but I pull on some socks over my pointe shoes and cruise away from the stage area. I head for the exit out back, like I’ve got something radioactive to chuck in the Dumpster.
Back behind the Dumpster is what the older girls called the smoking tunnel, for obvious reasons. The thing is, it’s not technically a tunnel. The trees are thick overhead, and the branches hang low, playing ceiling. But it dead-ends against a thicket of trees, so if it’s a tunnel headed somewhere, I’ve never seen where.
The tunnel is all entirely green inside, and in August surely infested with deerflies and mosquitoes. You’d think someone would have chopped down these trees since, made a memorial like a park bench with the girls’ names engraved on it or at least a fountain, but I guess people don’t do that with places they’d rather not remember.
I don’t go in, but I don’t leave, either. I throw a backward glance at the theater door.
If anyone notices the cinder block propping it open, I’ll say I’m getting fresh air before my solo. Could be that all the most elite soloists, from the New York City Ballet and ABT to the Royal Ballet and Bolshoi and beyond, go out to grab a few breaths behind the Dumpster before dazzling everyone onstage. No one at our studio is near as good as I am anymore, so they wouldn’t know.
It’s not air I need. It’s to take one last look inside.
No one’s in the tunnel. No one’s huddled under the web of tree branches, only leg warmers and crisscrossed pink ribbons visible from the outside. No vicious little titters. No smoke. No giggle fits. No toe shoe slamming down on a blazing butt, crushing it in the dirt. There’s nothing. There’s nobody.
I can’t even explain why I thought there might be. Why I keep looking for her, everywhere, why any sudden noise or shadow-shift gives me the creeps.
Every August it’s like Orianna Speerling forces her way up through my brain. Every August it feels like Ori’s back—I’m the one who gave her that nickname, Ori—but she’s not here in the smoking tunnel, there’s no trace of her anywhere out here, and why would there be?
Intermission’s over, and I’ve got to get to stage. It’s when I’m circling the Dumpster again that I catch sight of the exit door swinging shut. Someone’s kicked out the cinder block. But whoever’s done it isn’t fast enough for me, because I leap for the door with all I’ve got, crossing space and time like I do in my choreography, and the door’s in my hands before it hits the jamb, and I coast through it, and they thought they could get me to miss my solo, and they were wrong.
Fast before anyone spots me, I’m in place, in the wings. I don’t know who was messing with me, but I do know no one’s looking at me, not directly. All the other dancers, they’re avoiding eye contact, they’re not even wishing me to break a leg. This tells me everyone’s guilty, every last one.
It occurs to me as I hear the hush of the audience members taking their seats after intermission. It occurs to me. Everyone here wants me to go away, don’t they? They can’t wait to be rid of me.
So let them be rid of me. Let them wish they never met me. I’m up next, after this medley.
The curtain sweeps open. Some predictable music, some off-count blur of movement—nothing worth watching like I’m about to be.
I shift in the wings and peek through the hanging velvet to scan the seats at orchestra level. Miss Willow, my dance instructor, has rented this theater for the studio’s showcase as she does every season, and I forget, each time, how big the place is, how many seats. I spot my mother. My father. My aunt and cousins, who probably got forced to be here tonight, and I don’t even care. My mother’s friends, too, a whole row of them. My dance coaches—the old one my parents fired when I didn’t get into the summer intensive and the new one I’ve had since. I spot my boyfriend, Tommy, yawning and playing some game on his phone. Some of the older girls have even snuck out from backstage to watch me, slipping into aisle seats so they can rush back in when my piece is done. I see Sarabeth, sitting alone. In another row I see Ivana and Renata and Chelsea P. and Chelsea C. I see people from town, like the handsy lady from the flower shop, the nosy guy from the coffee place. I see my math teacher. I see my mailman, though he has to be here because his daughter is a tulip in beginning ballet. But most of these people have come here tonight to see me off. I’d say the great majority of the audience is here for me.
Besides the people I know, I also see strangers, a whole bunch of strangers, out into the back row and up into the mezzanine. I’ve never performed for this many people before. Even in court during Ori’s trial there weren’t this many people. The music stops, and horsey Bianca—she shouldn’t have had a solo, but she’s a graduated senior, too, and off to SUNY Nowhere where they don’t even have a dance program—tramples offstage into the wings. The applause is faint, polite. “Good luck out there, Vee!” she says as she passes, though “luck” is the last thing you should ever wish an oncoming dancer.
Vee is the nickname Ori gave to me.
The lights go down before I can check the nosebleeds, which tells me that’s where she’d be seated if she were here, up as high as the rows go, looking down on me.
But she’s not here. Of course she’s not. The reality is she’s dead, and she’s been dead going on three years.
Ori’s dead because of what happened out behind the theater, in the tunnel made out of trees. She’s dead because she got sent to that place upstate, locked up with those monsters. And she got sent there because of me.