Loud Awake and Lost (19 page)

“Come on, Ember, you know this cold!” Now the camera zoomed somewhat mischievously, I thought, into a close-up on Birdie's face. She looked strained. As if urging me to get into the spirit of it.
She
really
wanted
me
to
get
the
part.

I watched the muscular cut of Birdie's arm and the spin of her body as she took up the routine. The capable flex of her hard calf muscle as she landed a jump. She embodied Roxie fully and thrillingly.

Then the camera swiped another look at me. Next came a quick camera pan of me watching Birdie. And now I was speaking. The camera swiveled and closed in on me like a predator. It shocked me a little bit. There I was. My forehead was clear of its scar, my hair loose and Rapunzel-long, and my voice was soft and strangely girlish. “…because I don't, I just don't want Roxie. I don't want to be trying out for her if I can't commit to all of this work.”

Birdie's profile was impassive as she answered. I picked up the general gist of it—something about trying out again, tomorrow, maybe. When I was more up to it.

“I want chorus.” My voice came in a decibel stronger. Clear enough so that there was no confusion. “I just want chorus; that's all I can handle, Birdie.”

Birdie must have made a joke or something. As I turned away, the camera sneaked in to capture my uncertain eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I said, half to the camera, half to myself. “I'm done.”

And then the screen cut to black.

I glanced at Birdie, who had obviously looked at this video clip many times.

“So, yeah. That's that.” Her voice was kind. She wasn't harboring anything. No hard feelings. Not then, not now, not ever. She'd always been such an excellent role model, and my exit from dance never would have diminished that.

“Lissa said I bombed it.”

Birdie shrugged. “Yeah, it was funny, that's what you told everyone. Maybe it was easier for you. You never attempted to reschedule the audition. I put you in chorus, and you were fine with it. You were worried about your parents, and their disappointment. But you knew what was best for you. You said you'd rather razzle-dazzle with a perfect four-cheese lasagna.” She smiled. “And then you actually brought in a lasagna, and of course none of the dancers would touch it. Maybe that was your point. Anyway, I had a big wedge of it.” She winked. “And it was delicious.”

Just sitting here with Birdie, talking with her again, was an old familiar ease. “I'm sorry I've been avoiding you,” I said. “But I didn't want to deal with the fact that being part of this world isn't a choice anymore. Maybe I walked away from dance once, but I could never reclaim it now, even if I wanted to.” I rolled up my sleeve, exposing the scar. “My body just can't do what it used to. And I don't have that extra determination that would push me past my obstacles, to try and become what I'd been.”

“You have to let your training serve you better than that. It was the one thing I gave you that might have qualified as advice. I told you not to let the fact that you weren't studying dance mean that you had to put away your passion for it.”

I thought of Areacode, my nights out with Lissa. “I think I took your advice.”

“I'm glad. You were wonderful to watch. But it's not what the audience sees that counts. It's what the performer feels.”

Once upon a time, all I'd wanted to do was perform. Once my life—just like Lissa's and Hannah's and Birdie's—had been cleanly divided into timetables of dance schedules and rehearsals and steps to memorize, all for a chance on stage. I'd breathed daily inside that choreography. I'd followed the rules, made mistakes, and tried harder next time. I'd put my hours in, and then at some point center stage had not been what I'd wanted after all. Whereas in a kitchen, backstage was also the spotlight. Still, I was relieved to know that I'd made the right choice before the choice had been made for me.

“Thanks for this, Birdie,” I said as I stood to go. “It means a lot to me that you showed me that clip. It was kind of painful, but also a relief to see it.”

Birdie's gray-blue eyes met mine in empathy. “Thought that might be the case,” she said. “And you'd better not be a stranger around here, okay? And maybe next time you come bearing gifts? I can't stop thinking about lasagna.”

“You got it.”

And we let our smiles hold the promise, before I reached for the door and she turned back to her computer screen so that I could steal away in peace.

Carroll Gardens was a considerable distance. I ran it. I wanted to see it again. I cut around back; the symbol was far away, that dry splash on the bottom of the wall. The silvery, fallen-down
A
—the same one I'd jotted on my hand, on the Halloween scrap paper, those first early days back from Addington, and the same one that was at the Lincoln Center subway stop.

Quick as an infielder, I shifted direction to sprint toward it.

A
tag,
Hannah had said. A way to show you'd been here. A territorial mark.

Obviously, I'd grown up seeing all kinds of tags, all over the city. I'd just never really paid attention to them. Not till now.

Why did I keep finding these tags? They haunted me, but how could Anthony continue to shadow new places I went to, when he was no longer here and couldn't possibly have known about the direction of my life now?

I stared at the mural, willing answers. Defiant but good-humored, the tag also seemed smart-ass—with a dash of lighthearted. I touched the grimy drywall and traced the symbol. The pad of my finger came away blackened. There were no more answers here.

I turned and left the park.

El Cielo had just opened, but it was too early for customers. Some 1950s rockabilly music—my dad's favorite, Chuck Berry? Yep, I was pretty sure—was blaring tinny from the speakers. At a corner table, the busboy was rolling silverware into individually bundled settings. He looked up and tipped his head toward the back kitchen.

Deeper in, I caught sight of Isabella, as if she'd never left. She and the prep cook guys were busy with kitchen work. The blond waitress was making pots of regular and decaf coffee for the busing stands. Kai was nowhere in sight. His shifts were erratic and depended on his classes. I hadn't seen him since Coney Island, but I knew if I came back here, it would only be a matter of time before we would intersect.

But even Kai didn't matter right now. Right now, I just needed it back. The secrets of this kitchen were mine if I was willing to work for them. I had to be part of the kitchen theater. To feel the heavy handle of the knife, to bisect onions into tom-tom drums, to decrown parsnips and send potatoes and shallots off to their translucent sizzle.

When Isabella murmured something to one of the cooks, he immediately stopped what he was doing and unhooked an apron from a peg near the stovetop, balled it tight, and lobbed it high through the air to me. I caught it and shook it out, slid it on, and secured it by its long ties.

They would allow me to be here, and being here was all I needed.

Isabella, kneading dough for tortillas, waved her flour-dusted fingers at the heavy bouquets of carrots and the bin of red, orange, and yellow bell peppers up from cold storage. I nodded, reached for the cutting board, and attacked a Spanish onion; good-bye top, good-bye base. Right from the first moments, I began to tear up.

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” I muttered to nobody in particular, wiping my watering nose on my sleeve. Stinging in my eyes and bluesy electric guitar in my ears. This music was even older than my parents' era, but at least it did me the favor of conjuring up no memory, nothing at all except the cheerful, jangly background noise to a much-needed blast of right now.

In this kitchen, I was beginning again. I was turning into me. Not a dancer. But someone else. I'd catch up with myself; I'd retrace my steps any way I could, even if I wasn't able to see my own old footprints marking the path.

Working the knife across the board. One-eighth cuts, presto. Tears were dropping off my face and rolling down my neck. Here was my passion—I chose it once, and I'd choose it again.

Dice dice dice, mince mince mince, chop chop chop. The sound was rolling motion and maybe I was on my way.

The moon was a scrubbed white dish—or possibly it only looked like that because five minutes ago, I'd unloaded, oh, at least forty scrubbed white dishes from the industrial dishwasher—by the time I left the restaurant. I didn't like walking by myself anywhere after ten, when Smith Street seemed to change hands from a café and restaurant crowd to a rowdier bar scene. I texted Mom and kept up a quick pace.

There hadn't been much for me to do after all the prep work. So I'd polished off another of Isabella's customized delicious dinners at the bar—fish tacos, along with tiny avocado bean cakes—and afterward she'd let me go without a word. The acknowledgment that I'd be returning was unspoken.

“Hey! Wait up!”

“Hey, you.” My chest constricted. Kai. He hadn't been at the restaurant all night. I truly hadn't thought he'd be there, though I'd yearned for him, of course, and had been half watching for him around every corner. Seeing him now, I could feel myself ache with joy and relief.

“Got an idea,” he said. “What do you say we hit the theater down the block? It's all film geeks who run that place. We won't have to pay, for one, and they're lax about letting you sit in the balcony.”

“Sounds good.” Maybe it was because I'd bailed on the physical therapy earlier, but I felt pulled as a puppet from being on my feet for hours. The prospect of sitting down for a movie sounded perfect.

Kai's presence was gravity. I was conscious of the heavy lift and fall of my boots, the weight of my sleepy eyelids as we ducked inside and slipped upstairs in the creaky old Cobble Hill Cinema, and then settled ourselves into the astoundingly comfortless iron seats. A movie was playing—something in German with subtitles, one of their typical esoteric offerings.

And there it was. Scratched onto the exit door, not to be missed, like a smirk.

Excitedly, I pointed to it. “It's you, right?” I asked. “The graffiti tagger? The sideways-
A
guy? It makes sense that it's you. Is it?”

“The tagger,” he repeated.

“Come on! Don't play innocent! You keep putting them where you know I'll find them. There's a tag below the mural at Cobble Hill Park, and one at the Lincoln Center subway stop. There's even one on the boardwalk on Coney Island.”

“Ha, listen to you. Are you an undercover cop?”

“Except that you are looking very guilty. You did it, I just know it. I thought it was another letter, an
A,
but it's a
K
—a
K
for
Kai,
right?”

“Okay, guilty.
K
for
Kai,
” he admitted, but he seemed pleased that I'd figured this out.

“How many are there, in all?”

“Two hundred? Two hundred fifty?”

“Seriously!?”

“Yeah, around there. I don't keep count.”

“Kai.” I sat back, knitting my fingers under my chin, contemplating the city as a city of silver
K
s. All the ones I'd found and all the ones I had yet to find. “That's a lot of tags. What's the deal? Is it some kind of project?”

“It's more just something I've always done, since I was a kid. It was my thing, a way of owning something that can't be owned. Call it a way of feeling special, maybe. Or call it, I don't know, my way of making the world hold on to me—till someone scrubs me off the wall and back into oblivion.” He waved a hand through the air, as if it was all the same to him.

But it was personal for him, these tags. He wanted to talk about it, but at the same time he was self-conscious. He pulled out his flask and passed it to me. I took a tiny sip of coffee.

“I'm going to start looking for them,” I decided. “I bet there's some at El Cielo—I'm starting with the men's room.” I passed back the flask. “And I'll check some key warehouses in Bushwick, for sure. And around by the St. George and…I can't think where else.”

“There's plenty more places. I guess you're just going to have to get to know me better, if you want to find them all.” He leaned in to steal a kiss, ending the discussion.

We stayed until the movie was over, though neither of us had any idea what it was about. Kissing in a movie theater—it was so stupidly, deliciously middle school, but with Kai the act also became a high-octane thrill.

Afterward, he walked me home, all the way up to my front door. The casual nearness of him made me dizzy. I was conscious of holding my breath. “So what exotic locale is next for us, Mr. Bond?” I asked. “The Carnival in Rio?”

“How 'bout Central Park?” he suggested. “Cheap and easy?”

“Sure,” I answered. “I go where you go.” I fished out my keys. “From the minute we met, I knew that was true.”

When I looked up, I saw in his face the promise of a response, but then he didn't give me one. We stood together, not speaking. Kai used his finger to delineate each of my features in simple strokes, sketching me in the air but not touching me. We were so close that his skin radiated warmth, his eyes shone by the light of the streetlamp. He wanted to tell me something, I could feel it. But at the last minute he decided to kiss me one last time instead.

Then he turned, down the steps, moving swiftly.

“Wait—when? When are we going to…?” Too late. Kai was a ship out to sea, swallowed up in the night horizon.

But the smile remained on my lips, fading only when I opened the door to find both of my parents standing in the hall. This time, they weren't even pretending that they were occupied with anything else. They were as alert and aligned as two arrows in a quiver.

“Really, folks?” I forced an easy tone. “I checked in with you three times since after school. There's absolutely no reason for drama.”

“Your last call, you said you'd be home before seven,” said Mom. “Here it is, almost midnight. And when we tried you, you'd turned off your phone.”

“Mom, I sent a text saying I was going to a movie. That's almost the same as a call. And there
is
also such a thing as overly checking in on someone. Every fifteen minutes, it felt like. I had to turn off the phone.”

“Which movie? You never answered. Were you really at the movies, Ember? And what were you doing before?”

“Of course I was. And before? Before I was just…around.” Obviously, I hadn't told them anything about El Cielo. I couldn't. The idea that I would now balance schoolwork, yearbook, and my physical therapy with an after-school job might tip them both over the cliff of parental outrage.

“We worry about you. We worry a lot.” Dad's voice was a tiny bit accusing, and yet at the same time he was entreating me. As if he couldn't make up his mind which attitude to own. “You're so far away from us lately—and it feels like it's getting worse and worse. Locking yourself in your room, or driving off to the beach, or out till all hours.”

“It's becoming just the way it was before,” added Mom, and yet she, too, was conflicted—there was weariness along with the quiet reproach that by now I was used to. “Just exactly the same patterns. Last time, when this happened, we didn't step in, we didn't do anything. We felt helpless, of course, but we left you alone. We made that mistake. But this time, please, Ember, please don't lock us out. Let us help. We want to help. Dr. P says that you should call that woman, that colleague of his; he said he sent you—”

“If you really, truly want to help, you need to stop micromanaging me,” I interrupted. “And if you'd really look at me, you could see I'm making progress—real progress. Not just talking out my emotions to sock puppets, or progress the way you think it should be happening. Like trust-falls with Dr. P's contacts.”

“Ember, you're all we have,” Mom protested. “How do you expect us to behave?”

“But it's like you're punishing me for being all you have. I'm sorry I almost died in February, and I'm a million times sorrier that someone else did! But you can't fix anything here by guiding me along what you think are the right ways I'm supposed to heal. All you're doing is smothering me, if you want to know.”

“Smothering you?” Mom's face was crumpled in hurt. “Is that what you think I'm doing?”

“It's not that I'd think you'd want to, Mom,” I told her. “But yes. Sometimes you do, anyway. You really do.” And while I knew we hadn't talked it through to Mom's satisfaction, hadn't come to any kind of family resolve, I also knew there wasn't a solution. The rest of my life did not get fixed in one night, and it wasn't fair that my parents wanted me to pretend that I could make that happen for them.

Instead I pushed past them—plowing up the stairs, leaving behind yet another situation that would have to mend eventually, but I just couldn't deal with it right now.