Up to This Pointe

Six Feet Over It

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Longo

Cover art copyright © 2016 by Noelle Stevenson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

“The Age of Anxiety,” copyright © 1947 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1975 by the Estate of W. H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF W. H. AUDEN. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Visit us on the Web!
randomhouseteens.com

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Longo, Jennifer.

Up to this pointe / Jennifer Longo. — First edition.

pages cm

Summary: Devastated when her dream of becoming a professional ballerina falls through, seventeen-year-old Harper Scott takes a job as a research assistant, wintering over at McMurdo, a U.S. science station at the tip of Antarctica where, for the first time, she considers other possible futures.

ISBN 978-0-553-53767-3 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-553-53768-0 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-553-53769-7 (ebook)

[1. Ballet dancing—Fiction. 2. Research—Fiction. 3. Scientists—Fiction. 4. McMurdo Station (Antarctica)—Fiction. 5. Antarctica—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L8634Up 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015000808

eBook ISBN 9780553537697

Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v4.1

ep

For Melissa and Chelsea, North Stars in a southern sky

The thing about Antarctica that surprises me most? The condoms. They're absolutely
everywhere.

I've been in Antarctica a total of eighty-three minutes, so I'm positive more exciting surprises will probably (hopefully) reveal themselves, but for now, the most intriguing thing about McMurdo, the American science station, is all the condoms.

They're on all the tables, shelves, and bathroom sinks. Their abundance, combined with McMurdo's abandoned mining-town/ski-lodge ambience, is giving the place a real frat-house-during-spring-break kind of feel instead of the for-the-betterment-of-the-world vibe the scientists might be aiming for.

I have come here to understand how I got here. Retrace my steps. Sort of metaphorically but, then again, no—actual steps. Every step I've taken since I was three years old and first walked onto a dance floor. Since the day I tied my first pair of pointe shoes on my soon-to-be-thrashed feet.

Apparently I've been walking all my life on shifting ice, falling snow covering any trace of the path I've made, so now I look back and I'm panicked because I've left no trail. I'm frozen, paralyzed, no clue behind me to find the way back. How did I get so horribly lost? How, when I was never alone? All this time, people have been beside me, helping me walk straight into this blizzard.

How did I get here?

I told a lie and got on a plane. Four planes. Ninety minutes from San Francisco to LAX. Fifteen hours from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia. The National Science Foundation sprang for Virgin Atlantic, so I had
Seinfeld
episodes on the tiny seat-back screen the whole way. Then three more hours to Christchurch, New Zealand.
No…sleep…till Christchurch.
Overnight in a nice hotel, and the next morning, they handed out sack lunches of cheese sticks and granola bars for the five-hour cargo plane flight to The Ice.

We landed inland, far from the water, on the solid polar ice cap. (Less solid every day. Thanks, Global Warming.) Five hours of roaring engines whined to a stop, and our ears rang. We breathed a future-familiar jet-fuel smell and stepped out onto The Ice. And it was quiet.

Deep, heavy,
loud
silence in a world of white and blue and black and red. White-blue sky, white snow and ice, black mountains, and our huge shocking-red National Science Foundation parkas.

We slipped and slid all over the ice. Treacherous grooves carved into the ice as texture for the landing strip were so wide I tripped in one and nearly broke my ankle. Weeks ago that would have been a tragedy, but now it wouldn't matter at all. Now I can sprain all the joints and break all the bones I want. Bring it, Ice.

An hour-long ride in a giant red Terra Bus to McMurdo and we stepped onto The Ice once more, and a precise spot of pain, otherworldly cold, flared in my forehead. Oh my God, it's like being stabbed with an icicle. Yes, I know—
Antarctica,
so what did I expect?—but I'm telling you, this is not regular cold. This is…it is unreal.

McMurdo is a town. Buildings, muddy roads, tractors, snowplows, trucks, and metal sheds. A winter population of two hundred. The scientists (
Beakers,
they're called here) go their way, and I am ushered into bright royal-blue Building 155 with the other support staff. We are janitors, line cooks, research assistants, and flight schedulers. We support the important people. We are mostly Americans and New Zealanders. Kiwis? All this slang I'm picking up already from eavesdropping, and I am the lowest of us all. I am a fingy. (
Fucking New Guy.
Charming.)

We're here together for six months. Soon we will watch the sun disappear into the gray cold of the Ross Sea. No planes in or out. No way on or off The Ice until winter ends in September. Which is why we have all undergone stringent medical and dental exams before arriving, and explains all the condoms; conditions like this surely encourage certain warmth-inducing indoor activities, and getting knocked up here in winter would be a dicey, life-threatening thing to do.

Two hundred people at the frozen, dark bottom of Earth: scientists, researchers, support staff.

Me.

I am one of three pioneers: high school students, seventeen and barely allowed on The Ice but for a coveted National Science Foundation grant for high school seniors looking to enrich our scientific education. (The aforementioned airplane lie.) We are Wintering Over. We are the Winter Overers. On purpose. We have willingly given our two hundred lives to The Ice and the dark for two hundred reasons.
Ninety-nine problems, what?!

See, I'm already delirious.

The huge mittens encasing my hands make it a chore to pull out my earbuds blasting hits from the London Symphony Orchestra, the music of My People, but I do when a McMurdo staff member walks forward to shake our hands. Everyone but me seems to know each other, and no one else looks seventeen. They're hugging and laughing and talking, and I suddenly really want to lie down.

“Scott!” the guy in charge calls through a humongous beard. “Harper Scott.
Scott.
” The party is quiet as I raise my huge down-encased arm.

“Scott?”

I nod.

“
Scott
Scott?” someone calls from the assembled mass. All dudes. Bunch of dudes and me. The three women we flew in with must be scientists, already off to their science dorm building. Beard nods, and I think he smiles, but I can't tell, because
giant beard.

Now everyone turns and looks at me.

So much for not being known.

“All righty then,
Scott.
Let's find your room….” He flips through the stack of papers on his clipboard and hands me a key stamped
1123
. “Right here, main building, second floor. All yours. Bathrooms near the stairs in each hallway. They'll bring your stuff up later. Welcome Dinner's at six, so you've got a couple of hours. You'll meet your supervisor then. You're with…” He searches the pages again.

“Charlotte,” I say. She is a marine biology grad student who was once Mom's research assistant, a favor called in to get me here. Bunch of lying liars who lie. For me.

“Charlotte, right. So I'm Ben, Building One Fifty-Five gatekeeper, personal point person, security. Check in with me when you're in or out. Here if you need anything whenever. Whatever. Want me to take you up?”

All the dudes are just standing here, listening.

I shake my head. “Thank you.”

I walk to the door marked
STAIRS
, and some of the guys take no care to whisper, “Amundsen's straight-up grandkids were here last year” and “Never heard of her.”

Yes, being a Scott helped the lie along; I applied late. Not the strongest science résumé. Okay, no science résumé. But I'm here now, so screw off!

Delirious
and
cranky.

I follow Beard's directions to the concrete stairwell lit with fluorescent bulbs to another long, dingy hall to the door marked
1123
. Home. For six months. Tiny dorm room with a three-drawer dresser and a small desk with a CD player on it that someone probably left behind, because who even has CDs? There is a rack to hang my giant, wet parka on and two single beds, one against each long wall of the rectangular room. During Winter Over there are so few people that we each get our own room. I drop my small backpack and the rest of the cargo plane bagged lunch on one bed and peel off four layers of clothes: hiking pants, yoga pants, leg warmers, wool long underwear. I pull two ski beanies off my head, unwind my long braid of brown hair. I'm numb. That can't be good.

There is a mirror above the dresser. My clavicles are sharp. No boobs at all and a shadow beneath every single rib. My fingernails are blue. But then again, they often are. Which is its own special issue. Jesus. Me and all my
issues.

I kneel on the other bed, beneath the only window in the cinder block walls. The view is mostly of the sides of other buildings, but those black mountains are closer. I can see the tops in the blue-gray-white sky.

I pull my T-shirt and yoga pants back on, and two of the four pairs of socks I'd worked into my giant NSF-issued boots, and crawl beneath the bed's wool blankets. My teeth chatter. My pajamas are somewhere in my two big duffel bags still being unloaded from the cargo plane. When I get my hands on those pajamas, I'm never taking them off.

There's a letter somewhere in those bags, too. Unopened. From a person—a guy—I've only just met, but who I might miss more than anyone else. Maybe it will stay unread.

There's a hum in the walls from the central heat. In the phone book–sized employee handbook the NSF gave us, I learned that waste heat from the generators in McMurdo's power plant heats glycol, which is pumped into the various buildings, and all that means to me is that Beard was wearing a T-shirt and no coat. So once I warm up, I bet it'll feel pretty nice in here.

Out of the blue, the noise of the warmth running through the pipes makes my heart hurt, because it sounds like the dishwasher at home. One of us always starts it as we're all heading to bed. At last, days of noise and cold and travel done, alone and quiet, I feel how far away home is. Mom and Dad are thousands of miles—oceans and continents and a hundred degrees of warmth—away. I roll over and face the empty bed across the room.

I may have made a terrible mistake.