Bunheads (30 page)

“Zoe got promoted!” she cries. Then she turns back to the mass, and they scream and start jumping up and down in a tangle of arms and legs.

Zoe got promoted.
I say the words over again in my head. The bundle of bodies parts, and Zoe is in the center, her face damp and blotchy from crying, her arms open and inviting. “Hannah!” she cries.

I go to her and hug her stick-thin body. My heart has not stopped pounding. I’m holding her, and her arms wrap tightly around my shoulders. I am shocked.

Shocked. Devastated. Impossibly confused.

“Congratulations,” I whisper. I feel like I’ve just been kicked in the stomach.

“Thank you,” she says. Her tears wet my neck. “Thank you so much.” She pulls away from me and looks me in the eye. Then she turns around to the rest of the room and raises her arms up in the air. “Aaaaaaaah!” she screams gleefully. “Aaaaaaaaaah!”

I flop down onto my chair and twist my hands in my lap.

“Guys!” Daisy yelps, pointing to the clock. “We’re going to be late for rehearsal!” She gathers up her dance bag and hands Zoe hers. “Hannah, get up.”

But I ignore her. In a flurry of activity, everyone else disperses—everyone but Bea and me. She comes over and sits next to me, and she puts her hand on my knee.

I’d just wanted to tell her about being cast in my first solo, but now the news has been completely overshadowed.

“You okay?” Bea asks.

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. “I—I don’t know what to say.” I pick at my cuticle and stare off into space. I think about seeing Zoe flirting madly with Otto before our
Rubies
rehearsal. Did that have anything to do with her promotion?

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Bea says. “She’s a
soloist
now.”

I nod my head. I’m just sitting there dumbly while Bea pats my knee. After a while I look up at her. “I got the
Rubies
solo,” I mumble.

“I know.” Bea smiles. “Word travels fast when Daisy’s around. Congratulations. I’m really proud of you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say, avoiding eye contact.

She stands and wraps a sweatshirt around her waist. “Come on,” she says. “We really should head up to rehearsal.”

“I’ll catch up with you in a sec,” I say, forcing myself to smile a little.

Alone in the dressing room, I stare in the mirror, but my eyes won’t focus. I am nothing but a pale blond blur.

Bea opens my cupboards one by one, trying to find something worthy of snacking on, but they’re even barer than usual. I’m slumped on the couch, stabbing a pencil into a coaster. It’s eleven thirty at night, and we’re half-dead from the performance.

“I just can’t believe Zoe got promoted,” I say.

“Really? She’d have given her left arm for a promotion.” Bea starts opening drawers, as if she might find something delicious next to the forks and spoons. “Don’t you have any tortilla chips or anything?”

“No, I threw them out when Olivia and Eliza got promoted.” I snap the point of the pencil into the coffee table. “I saw her walking over to him like she was going to jump his bones. Do you think she slept with Otto?” I toss the pencil onto the floor. “Because she’s not a better dancer than me.”

Bea comes into the living room and flops down on the couch
next to me. “You’re right, she’s not,” she says, nodding. “But she didn’t get ahead because she slept with Otto—I don’t think even she would do that. Sure, she might have flirted with him. But come on, do you know how many girls bat their eyelashes at Otto? And Zoe will flirt with a park bench, for god’s sake.”

I bite my lip and don’t say anything. Bea puts her hand on my knee and continues. “Zoe got ahead because she’s a fixture at the theater—”

“But we’re
all
fixtures at the theater,” I blurt. “We might as well sleep there!”

Bea nods understandingly. “But Zoe’s always going to rehearsals she wasn’t called to, just to work,” she says, “and she’s never missed a single company class. And more important, Zoe is willing to give up everything else to be a soloist. Did you notice she stopped dating entirely? She’s
happy
to give the rest of life up. And I don’t think you are anymore.”

My eyes search Bea’s pretty, freckled face. I can’t believe that she, of all people, is defending Zoe—she doesn’t even like her that much. “What are you talking about? I’ve worked my ass off! I can’t imagine dedicating myself more than I already do.”

“But you’re conflicted every day. I can see it,” she says gently.

“No, I’m not.” I can feel my face burning.

Bea sits back and crosses her arms. “Han, you know I love you, but at least be honest with yourself, if not me. I know you love dancing, but are you sure you even
want
to be promoted?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I do!” I leap up from the sofa
and start pacing the room. “What do think I’ve been chasing my whole life?” I knock over a stack of old magazines, but I don’t care. “I didn’t have a prom! I’ve never had a boyfriend! I’ve hardly seen my parents since I was fourteen! I can’t even finish one damn book!” I feel hot tears burning my cheeks. “I’m exhausted all the time, every single day. What more am I supposed to do?” The tears stream down my face.

Bea looks at me, her blue eyes affectionate and warm. “But what do you think happens after you get promoted, Hannah?” she asks softly. “You have even less of a life than before. It only gets harder.” She stands to face me and holds my gaze. “The
Rubies
solo is huge. And you probably
are
on your way to being promoted. But you have to make up your mind. You can either have a life, or you can dance. But you can’t have it both ways.”

“But I don’t want to choose,” I moan.

A tear sparkles in the corner of her eye as she answers. “But you
have
to, Hannah. You have to make a choice.”

I feel a lump in my throat as I try to catch my breath. “Maybe you’re right,” I whisper.

“It’s okay, Hannah. It’s really okay.”

I nod silently. And I realize I’m covered in snot.

Then Bea puts her arms around me and gives me a long, hard hug. “Now, I don’t know about you,” she says, pulling back, “but I am
famished
. Let’s order some goddamn sushi, and we’ll open a bottle of red.”

“Takeout menus are in the kitchen,” I say, still sniffling.

Bea smiles at me. “That’s my girl,” she says.

The next morning I go to the dressing room before class to see Daisy, red in the face, flinging things out of her theater case. Leg warmers, socks, and T-shirts land all over the room. A pair of pointe shoes goes whizzing past my head and collides with the cinder-block wall. She’s cursing like a truck driver stuck in rush hour traffic on the BQE.

The reason? Caleb has kissed another girl.

Though she’s not exactly a girl: Her name is Margaret, she’s twenty-seven, and she’s one of the Manhattan Ballet soloists. She dances Odette in
Swan Lake
, and last year the
New York Times
called her “a dancer of thrilling athleticism.”

“I can’t believe he found someone he likes better than me,” Daisy whines. “Do you think he’s been ogling her ass the whole time or what?”

“I still can’t believe he’s not gay,” Zoe whispers.

I feel terrible for Daisy, and I try to give her a hug, but she shrugs me off.

“Do you think his mother knows he’s a cheating, lying bastard?” she hisses. “I’m going to call his mother.”

“Don’t,” says Bea quietly from the corner, where she has gone to avoid being hit by Daisy’s warm-up clothes and pointe shoes. “Tattling isn’t the answer. Caleb is the person you need to confront.”

Daisy rolls her eyes and looks over at me. “Who invited Dr. Phil here?” she demands, picking up a shoe and then throwing it down again.

“She has a point, Daze,” I say.

Daisy ignores us both and huffs over to the door. “I’m going to vending,” she says. “I need a Diet Coke and a bag of Fritos.”

The door slams behind her, and the dressing room is suddenly silent. Bea gets up from the corner and begins to pick up Daisy’s things and fold them. I’ve never, ever seen her fold clothes before. “I feel really bad for her,” she says.

I nod. As I bend to help Bea gather Daisy’s scattered clothes, I try to will Daisy strength.

“She’ll be okay,” Bea says, as if reading my thoughts. “But it’s funny in a way. How it takes something like this to remember that there’s more to life besides ballet.”

And Bea’s right, of course. We forget that the world doesn’t revolve around us and our pointe shoes, and that our disappointments (and our triumphs) don’t all stem from casting decisions and Otto’s whims.

And this makes me think of Jacob.

On Monday, the May sun is shining after days of rain, and the air feels almost like summer. I slip on a little cotton shift and a pair of ballet flats (it always seems weird to me that they’re called that) and take the subway downtown.

I asked Jacob to meet me for coffee after his last class of the day, and because I’m early, I sit on the steps outside the building and watch the NYU students scurrying to and from their lectures, their backpacks and satchels crammed with books and pencils and laptops. Most of them are wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Some students are talking on their cell phones, some are walking with friends, and some are trying frantically to catch up on their reading while threading their way through the crowd of their peers.

Zoe’s voice comes back to me, faint and faintly mocking. “
Pedestrians
go to college, Han.”

A kid who doesn’t look a day older than sixteen plops down on a step near me, lights a cigarette, and opens a dog-eared book. Ironically, it’s
Frankenstein.
His syllabus slides out from one of the pages and blows against my shoe. Before I hand it back to him, I have a chance to see the course title:
The Feminine and the Fantastical: Mothers, Monsters, and Mad Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature
.

Jacob approaches me, squinting from the sun, but his face is otherwise unreadable. “Hey,” he says.

I stand up. “Hey.”

There’s an awkward silence. I dig the toe of my shoe into the steps, scuffing it a little.

“Well,” he says. His hands are shoved in his pockets. “So you wanted to get coffee or something?” he asks eventually.

I nod. “I wanted to talk to you. I need some perspective.”

He raises his eyebrows. “So you didn’t come here to apologize for being so impossible.” But he smiles after he says this. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Please.”

He holds out his arm, elbow bent, and I link my arm with his. To touch him fills me with something inexpressible—a mixture of anticipation and longing. It feels like he’s impossibly far away, even though he’s right beside me. The sun shines on his dark hair, and the wind blows it into his eyes.

We walk west, past boutiques and cafés, past shoe repair shops and dry cleaners. Girls are out in their first summer dresses; they seem shy to show their pale arms, their delicate white necks. Every corner deli has buckets of flowers out front: tulips, irises, freesias.

“Where are we going?” I ask. It’s the first thing I’ve said in blocks.

“To the river,” Jacob says. He takes my hand as we cross the West Side Highway, but it doesn’t feel romantic. It feels merely protective, the way he might hold one of his students’ hands to keep him or her from running into traffic.

On the other side, we’re right at the water. I always forget that Manhattan is an island. It seems so solid, so gigantic—how could it be one small piece of land sandwiched between rivers? You hear the word
island
and you think of sand, palm trees.

We sit down on a bench. The sun glints on the river. Depending on where you look, the water seems either brown or blue.

I have so much to say to him that I don’t have any idea where to begin. The breeze whistles by us, a few gulls turning lazily in it.

“So,” Jacob says.

“So,” I say. I fiddle with the edge of my skirt. I don’t know why I can’t find the right words to begin. It’s not that Jacob makes me feel uncomfortable—it’s the opposite of that. He makes me feel calm; it’s my own self that’s making me feel anxious.