Rules for 50/50 Chances (19 page)

“I'm sorry I told Caleb first,” I say.

“I mean, I get it. We've barely even hung out in the last month,” she mumbles. I start to protest, but then I stop. She's kind of right. We've seen each other in class, obviously, but it hasn't been like normal Lena-and-Rose hanging out time.

“Blame the
Nutcracker
.”

“You know it's not the
Nutcracker
's fault,” she says, looking me squarely in the eye. I don't say anything. Finally, Lena flicks a balled-up piece of paper at my head and sticks her tongue out. “It's fine. You can make it up to me by going out on a fancy double date for your birthday and wearing your yellow heels.”

Lena's been trying to get me to go on a double date with her and Anders for ages. She's met Caleb a couple of times now, but I've been avoiding the double date like an infectious disease. It just seems so … coupley.

I groan. “Please, do we have to do a big birthday thing? You know I'm not a party person.”

“I didn't say a big thing. I said a double date. You, me, Anders, Caleb, and dinner. That's all. Fine?”

I sigh. I can tell I'm not going to win this one, especially since I'm already disadvantaged by my stupid slipup. “Fine.”

Lena claps twice, then quickly slips her hands under the table when she spots the librarian eyeing us again. “Good,” she whispers. “This will be most excellent, I promise.”

“Just please, no candles or singing. Promise me that, too.”

“Whatever you say,” she says, her mood significantly brightened by the prospect of planning an event. “But getting back to this audition situation. It's awesome. What's your hang-up?”

“Honestly?”

“No, dishonestly, please.”

“Here's the thing. I'm not really sure I can make any decisions about the rest of my life … without knowing,” I say.

“Hence seeing your mother's doctor.” It's not a question; Lena already knows she's right. She looks thoughtfully into the air over my head. “Yeah, I mean, dance isn't the most lucrative career. Maybe you should get rich fast if you have the gene. So you can get a really fancy house with an elevator.”

This is why I love Lena. Because who says stuff like that? I hadn't even thought of it that way. But now I remember playing in our living room when her dad was sick, and Lena whispering to me that her mother was going back to work. They celebrated Christmas with us that year, not that it was much of a celebration. My dad joked that it was perfect because of the whole Jews-eating-Chinese-food-on-Christmas thing, but I don't think anyone laughed. Lena and I got all the same presents that year. My parents must've bought them for us both.

Lena gnaws on the end of her highlighter. Then she gets a kind of quizzical, serious look on her face and puts the marker down. “You know I'd take care of you, right? If you need me to?”

A rock forms in my throat. Then the absurdity of having this conversation in the reading room of the school library hits me, and I start cracking up at the same time that my eyes flood.

“I'm serious!” she says. “What's funny?”

“I love you, friend. Thank you,” I say through my laughter-meets-tears. “But, like…” I gesture around the room.

“What? What's wrong with the library for a heart-to-heart?” Except by now, she's laughing too. The librarian has mercifully disappeared.

“But seriously, let's think about this,” Lena says, pulling herself together. She twists her hair into a huge, loose bun and secures it with a pencil. “Have you ever considered that if you test positive, you could just, like, do whatever you want? Live it up. Travel anywhere you want, see all seven wonders of the universe or whatever, wear ball gowns to the movies. You know, anything.”

“If you could do anything, you would choose to wear ball gowns to the movies? Seriously?”

She flicks her hand in the air. “It was a hypothetical. You know what I mean. In your case, you'd what—ride all those crazy trains? You could do that, couldn't you?”

I slump back as much as possible in the straight-backed library chair. Lena has a point, actually. I haven't considered that side of the equation. “That's what my mom was going to do,” I say.

She nods. “I know. All I'm saying is, no matter what the test says, you don't
have
to call everything to a halt. You don't automatically have to stop living, stop dancing, stop falling in love with Caleb…”

“I'm not falling in love with Caleb.”

Lena studies me, a smirk spreading across her face. “Whatever you say. Anyway, you get my point.”

“I get your point. And my point is, if I know my HD status, at least I'll be better equipped to make choices about all those things.”

“Okay,” Lena says. “So you're taking the test. It's your call. I mean, I don't know what's right for you. Only you do.”

I check my phone for the time. Five minutes until next period. I pile my notebooks on top of each other and slide them into my bag in one stack. “Well, this was productive,” I say.

Lena looks down at the open notebook in front of her. “I highlighted one sentence. I'm glad we solved your life, because otherwise it would've been a major waste of time.”

We're about to part ways in the hallway—I'm going to English, she's going to psychology—when she grabs my arm. Her eyes are sparkling, mischievous. “So when are we making that tape?”

 

 

I book Studio A for first thing on Saturday morning, before the first class starts at nine, because Lena says we have to have natural light for the recording. The truth is, I still feel uneasy about the whole thing, but I try to shake off those misgivings as I warm up. Whatever doubt I'm feeling, it can't come out in my dancing.

Caleb insisted upon coming along “for moral support,” which is in fact making me considerably more nervous than I would be if it were just Miss Julia and Lena in the room. But I'm hoping that if the nerves wear off, I'll dance this solo as well now as I did in December—the first time I thought I was dancing it for him.

“I can't tell you how pleased I am about this whole thing.” Miss Julia buzzes around the studio, making sure there aren't any stray ballet slippers or towels strewn where the camera will catch them. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. What'd your parents say when you told them?”

I stretch at the barre in the corner while Lena attaches her tiny camera to a tripod. To say I was anxious about telling my family about this would be an understatement. Mostly I was worried that my mother, so unpredictable these days as she loses her ability to regulate herself, would say something horrible, tell me I'd never get in, or that I didn't deserve it. But she didn't. For that moment, she was her old self, who remembers that ballet is a love she and I share. Even Dad—who I predicted would grumble about how “dance isn't much of a career path”—had nothing to say but carpe diem, more or less. Maybe Mom's good day was wearing off on him. Or all the bad ones were.

Of course, I didn't tell them the entire story—which is that in addition to booking the studio to make a tape for UVPA, I also booked an appointment with the genetic counselor to talk about getting tested for the Huntington's mutation. That seemed like it might sour the mood.

“They're excited,” I say as I press my face against my leg.

Caleb comes up behind me and massages my shoulders while I stretch. He's wearing this black, Boston Rugby League hooded sweatshirt and jeans. I don't know where the sweatshirt came from; he doesn't even play rugby, but it looks good on him. I know I'm supposed to think he looks best dressed up, like he was when we went to the BPC, but the truth is, I think he looks pretty cute when he's all casual. It's mildly distracting.

“Your mom must be super-proud,” he says softly in my ear.

For today, she is. Tomorrow, who knows.

“Okay, people, we're all set here,” Lena announces. “Are you warmed up?”

“Hold on,” I say. “Not quite.” I move to the middle of the floor and do a few quick leaps and turns, shaking my out muscles in between.

“Sit over there,” I tell Caleb, pointing at a folding chair in the corner, next to Miss Julia. “And don't say anything. And don't laugh. And don't, I don't know…”

“Should I also wear my invisibility cloak?” he asks.

“I wish. Okay, I'm ready. We might need to run this a few times.” I let Lena direct me to the right spot on the floor.

“Three, two…” Lena mouths the one like a movie director and points to Miss Julia, who starts the music. I close my eyes and take myself back to the theater. I can almost hear the quiet shifting of the audience in their seats, their anonymous faces packed in the dark. And then there's just me and the floor, and Tchaikovsky's music, calling me home.

 

 

Lena said she'd edit the footage and send it over later, so I go home after my last class and try not to think about UVPA for the rest of the evening. While I wait, I lie in bed with my laptop propped up on a pillow, staring at my online application to Cunningham College for the umpteenth time.

Last spring, Cunningham was just one stop on an epic road trip of practically every college within seven hours of Boston. Most of my classmates came back from their own college tours complaining about how annoying their parents had been—asking questions about things like shuttle buses around campus after midnight—but our trip was pretty fun. Mom's symptoms weren't that noticeable yet, certainly not to the strangers we took the campus tours with, and we strayed from the groups after a while to hunt out the best local ice cream and bookstores. It felt like a normal, family-ish thing to do. But for the most part, the colleges all felt the same to me—nondescript collections of old buildings around lush lawns, invariably dotted with college-y types throwing Frisbees.

Cunningham had its own share of Frisbee throwers and old buildings. But when we were wandering around campus, Mom spotted a flyer stapled to a bulletin board. “Common Ground: DanceWorks Spring Show.”

“There's a dance performance tonight,” she said—with total clarity, I remember that. She was slurring less back then. “We should go.”

“We have to get on the road, ladies,” Dad said. “Otherwise we won't get as far as Ithaca tomorrow.”

Mom pulled the flyer off the board and scrutinized it more closely. She shook her head. “I think we should g-g-go to this. Ithaca will still be there on Friday. Rose wants to, don't you, Rosie?”

I shrugged. “May as well. We're here.”

That's how we ended up in this black box theater space at Cunningham College on a Thursday night. The house was packed with all these college students carrying bouquets of tulips and bright gerbera daisies. And the show—which was a mix of jazz, modern, some hip-hop, and some that refused to be boxed into a category at all—was crazy good. Like stuff you expect to pay a lot of money to see. I've never danced much beyond ballet—there's something about modern especially that feels too uncontrolled, too lawless to me—but I know enough about the other genres to recognize that these kids were good enough to be dancing professionally. And there was a
feeling
in the theater that night. It reminded me of the annual showcase at NEYB, the buzz and energy in the air, the anticipation—a complete and absolute shared love for dance. Even sitting in the audience, I could feel it. I liked it.

Plus, as I pointed out to my father, at Cunningham, I could dance
and
major in business, if I felt so inclined. He seemed to like that idea.

The application is due tomorrow by 11:59 p.m. Mine's finished, just waiting there, ready to go. I give my essays one more read, and hit send. At least I'll have a backup plan. Because I probably won't get into UVPA anyway.

It's almost midnight when Lena finally sends a text: “Just sent over your video. It looks awesome!!” My whole body tenses up, as if it's preparing in advance to be mortified. I almost never watch my performances on film. It's too torturous. Video never seems to capture the whole moment, the intensity and magic of it. But then I think of Caleb's face when I finished dancing this morning. He'd looked at me like he'd never seen me before. Is that because he's Caleb, and he doesn't know anything about ballet? Or because he's biased about me? Or is it really because of my dancing?

I open Lena's email and click Play. She was right about the natural light—the sun streaming in through the studio windows gives the whole room a kind of soft glow. But there's more to it than Lena's videography skills. I think I forget for a moment that I'm watching myself. It's like looking at Caleb's drawing of me. I don't recognize her, but the person in this video is good—maybe good enough to have a shot at this.

Sixteen

Roxanna, the genetic counselor Dr. Howard referred me to, looks like a typical Cambridge therapist—flowy linen pants, a kind of purple tunic top and a heavy beaded necklace. She has one of those granny chains attached to her glasses so she won't lose them, although it doesn't seem to help much. In the first ten minutes of our first session, I watch her search high and low for those glasses while they're perched right on top of her head, nested in her spiky white hair.

She looks like a therapist, but the thing about genetic counselors is that they're
not
therapists exactly. Although they're supposed to be, more or less. I researched this. Officially, they're supposed to practice something called “patient-centered therapy,” where they don't tell you what to do—they're supposed to help you make your own decision. That's how the field of genetic counseling started out, anyway, when the main recipients were pregnant women who were at risk of carrying babies with genetic conditions. Of course, that was before there were actually any tests for the stuff, so the counselors were just working off the knowledge that something or other bad ran in the woman's family. Back then there really
wasn't
a right answer: all a counselor could tell the woman was her general risk, but they couldn't tell her anything for sure.