Up to This Pointe (3 page)

The house is warm and smells of cinnamon and yeast and cream cheese in the oven—Dad up late baking. HarperCollins published his first cookbook a month before I was born, providing baby-naming inspiration for him, a lifetime of explaining “No, not
To Kill a Mockingbird
” for me.

I shuffle to the kitchen, drop my bag and myself on a stool at the counter, and wince, shifting off my painful hip.

“What are you doing?” I yawn. The guy gets up at four every morning. He can't be awake at eleven.

He shakes his head. “What are
you
doing? It's a million o'clock.”

I rest my head on my arms. “Rehearsal. ‘Snow.' ”

“Ooh, really? How was it?”

I shrug.

“You were so excited! Didn't it work?”

“Yeah.”

I untie my shoes and let them drop, pull my left foot into my lap and start working at the tape wound tight around the callused ball. My middle toes are black-nailed and fused together by dried blood and a weeping blister. Looks worse than it feels and totally worth it for the eight perfect rond de jambe turns I executed this afternoon before my fall in the snow rendered them meaningless. I pry the scabbed skin apart and watch Dad ease a sheet pan from the oven and set it gingerly on the counter. “If these things collapse one more time…” The sink is full of hardened dough disks.

“What is
up
?” I ask.

“I don't know,” he whispers. “Yeast is being stupid tonight.” The rolls on his tray are as big as my face, sodden with cream cheese frosting, and they stand tall and pillowy. He sighs. “I wish your mother would get up and taste these for me. I can't tell anymore.”

Poor man. His own bakery, three cookbooks, and he gets stuck with my brother, Luke, who's allergic to gluten and nuts and dairy and just about everything else in life, and me, who won't eat anything, ever. It's pretty hilarious when people ask if, as a ballerina, I eat like a horse night and day. I have no idea who started this asinine urban legend, but I have personally been on a diet since I was, like, twelve. Thirty hours a week dancing, and still I cannot remember the last time I tasted a real cinnamon roll. I slide off the stool, lean in close to the frosting, and inhale.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “Pretty sure you're good.”

He will not give up until the rolls are perfect—I know. He is not a Scott by birth but took the name when he and Mom married. Because Scotts are badasses.

He plucks a big hunk from the center of the biggest roll and chews thoughtfully.

“Huh. All right.”

It's actually not too scandalous he's still up, given that Thanksgiving, four or so weeks away, is the busiest time of the year for the bakery. You'd think it'd be Christmas, but Thanksgiving is really out of control. He wraps the rolls in a shiny blanket of aluminum foil and tucks them in for the night.

I make my painful way upstairs to get in the shower and soak my injured ass. And my pride.

“Hey,” he calls. “You okay?”

“Yep.”

“Because you're walking like you're a hundred years old.”

“That's because I am. Good night.”

“ 'Night, Benjamin Button.”

I wave from the top of the steps and hobble off.

Oh my God, a hot shower is the greatest thing ever invented. I let the nearly scalding water run over my head and aching body, rehearsing the “Snow” choreography in my mind again and again. I'm perfect every time. Crap, it is going to be hard to wake up to teach in six hours—no, five because I still have geometry homework I have to do tonight. With rehearsals all weekend, it's sort of now or not at all. But I will, because Kate is right; we're so close. We're graduating in December, one of the main action items of The Plan.

The Plan has been in place since sixth grade. We've followed it religiously, and one fall isn't going to screw it up. We've been in ballet class together since we were three years old, devoted to it and to each other. Twelve years old is the magic hour for ballet—by then you either understand this is what you want for your life or you realize it isn't.

Our parents insisted that we must graduate from high school—real graduate, not GED graduate—which is ridiculous because there are girls who leave home to be apprentice company members all the time in their freshmen or sophomore years. They have tutors or are homeschooled and use their extra time to take private lessons. They have stretching coaches, and it makes me jealous. Even Kate's private school schedule is flexible enough to allow for some of that. But none of Simone's dancers have auditioned for San Francisco. And none of them, not one, has ever been as good at Kate. Everyone knows this.

So now Kate and I are Simone's oldest students, which makes us panic. A ballerina has only a precious few years to put her body through what it must do. We already feel old. Simone's students either fall away from ballet in middle school, when the lure of soccer or swimming or boys becomes inescapable, or they audition and leave for companies in other states. But never New York, never San Francisco, and always before most of them have even started their periods. While Kate and I slog through high school and dance with Simone. Year after year.

Our urgency, at this point, is palpable.

In the face of this unfair “diploma madness,” Kate and I, after school one day in our sixth-grade year, made a pact. We used sewing needles for a blood oath and drafted our Magna Carta. The Commandments.

We don't bother including details such as how there is no such thing as a loft in San Francisco cheap enough to afford on a dancer's fifteen-dollars-per-hour salary, or the part about the second jobs we'll have to take just to have enough money to live, loft or no loft. We don't want to rain on our own parade. Aim for the moon and all that.

Kate and I are a rare breed—native San Franciscans. No one is
from
here; people like Dad abandoned their East Coast lives to move here because it is the most beautiful city in the world. And the San Francisco Ballet is the best ballet company in the world. It was the first professional dance company in America, and it gave the first American performance of
The Nutcracker.

This is our home. This is our company.

Aut moriere percipietis conantur.

Auditions for new students, apprentices, and company members are on January 3. We'll have our high school diplomas mailed to us and our bags packed, ready to accept our company positions and start our ballerina lives in the loft on Market Street. Or Fillmore. Or Grant. Or at home with our parents until we're eighteen and can sign a lease. Details.

The hot water is gone. I step out of the shower and wipe fog off the mirror.

Fantastic. Already, a blue-green shadow covers a palm-sized area of my left hip. Hurts to even wrap a towel around me. But I do. And I floss and brush my teeth and comb the tangles from my hair, which falls, straight and dark, way past the bruise, almost to my knees.

I get in bed, and my heroes look down on me from posters tacked to the ceiling, San Francisco Ballet soloists and principals midleap, midturn, dying as Giselle, as
Swan Lake
's Odette. And in the center, my own black-and-white portrait of Robert Falcon Scott in a fur-lined coat beside a supply sled at the geographic South Pole.

Mom has regaled us all our lives with the stories of the three main explorers, men who wanted so desperately to be the first in the world to reach the South Pole. Amundsen, Shackleton, and our Robert Falcon Scott.

Shackleton tried, failed, tried again, and was trapped in the shifting ice. It crushed his ship, the aptly christened
Endurance,
and he and his crew wound up in tiny wooden lifeboats, hiking mountains, and eating penguins for a year to survive and return home. He rescued his entire crew, but he did not cross the continent, the entire point of his expedition. Antarctica won. Mom speaks the least of Shackleton.

Our Scott was the heartbreaker. He and his crew struggled against ferocious windstorms, suffered snow blindness, and reached the South Pole at last—to find Amundsen's Norwegian flag already planted.

“The worst has happened,”
Scott wrote in his journal.
“All the day dreams must go….Great God! This is an awful place.”

I think he was wrong; Antarctica is not awful. Antarctica is Antarctica. Scott knew that going in.

Scott and his crew began the freezing, hungry walk hundreds of miles back to their base camp, dying one by one, until, at last, in a canvas tent, the remaining few men gave in. Scott wrote one last entry:
“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

So how did Amundsen march in, plant his flag, and escape with glory and his entire crew's lives intact? How did Shackleton and Scott make such faithful efforts and still fail?

Why do some people train all their lives to be professional dancers and end up performing interpretive “creative movement” at Renaissance Faires?

Mom worships Scott because he gave his life in his attempt and because he was, to the end, first and foremost a scientist. His insistence, in fact, that experiments and data collection continue as the team struggled to the pole slowed their pace and is possibly one of the reasons why they all died. Nobility.

Succeed, or die in the attempt.

I secretly love Amundsen. He knew how many dogs he needed to pull the sleds carrying food for the men—the dogs themselves dined on fresh penguin. He did not bring a huge, heavy supply of people food, because as supplies were consumed and the sled loads lightened, fewer dogs were needed to pull, so the surplus dogs were killed and eaten.

Precision.

Studying Amundsen's and Scott's nearly tandem journeys reveals what Amundsen would claim the rest of his life is the only truth of his success:
“I may say that this is the greatest factor…the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it.”

He had a Plan.

For me and Kate, the Plan is all we have ever worked toward since before preschool. Luck is bullshit. What people refer to as “luck” is actually opportunity meeting preparation. Opportunity will come if you invite it. If you are prepared. If you work your ass off and don't go to parties or screw around with classmates at the beach on weekends. If you babysit and teach Simone's beginning ballet students so you can afford your tuition. If you take extra high school classes each semester to graduate early, never eat cinnamon rolls, dedicate your entire life to what you truly love and put all you have into it, then there is no way it will not happen. It is, in fact, impossible that it will not happen.

It's nearly midnight, but I pull out my geometry notes. The Plan will not be derailed by something as stupid as a failed math test. Amundsen in my will, Scott in my blood, I will plant my flag.

The odds of being the first person to reach the South Pole? One in one billion seven hundred thousand.

The odds of becoming a professional ballerina? One in 0.00532 percent of the world's seven billion population.

I like those odds. Those odds are not luck. To become a ballerina, it is understood you are taking on Antarctica. You've got to prepare accordingly.

And you must be willing to eat your dogs.

I sleep through my alarm, hitting snooze three times before it makes me so mad I toss my phone onto the empty bed, and then I have to get up to turn it off, and my feet are freezing even in both pairs of socks I've got on. The blue cinder block walls even
look
cold. I remember where I am.

It's nearly six. Beard said six for dinner? Right? I never asked him where the dining hall is. I'm not hungry. But I pull on a few more layers and take my room key. Because I am here. So I should
be
here. Act like it.

Down the stairwell and through the empty lobby, I follow sounds of voices and find the dining hall, which looks a lot like SF State's campus cafeteria: round tables and people holding plates before a buffet of metal food trays. Dreadlocked white guys are in the kitchen, pulling pans from ovens, opening giant cans of fruit. I pick up a plate and put some lettuce on it. Cottage cheese, carrots. Hard-boiled egg. I pour a cup of hot water for tea.

“Scott!” Beard is at a crowded table. He waves me over and makes room beside him. “Charlotte,” he calls across the table to a really beautiful woman talking to another shaggy guy. “This is your assistant, Scott!”

Charlotte rises from her chair to smile and reach her hand out to mine. She's maybe in her late twenties. Her hair falls in ringlets around her face, held back with a clip. She's the only woman at the table. The only black person in the room. “Harper, right? Ooh, like
To Kill a
—”

“No.”

“Harper
Scott,
” Beard Ben says, nodding.

“Yeah, Ben,” she says. “We get it. Harper, I'm so glad you made it! How was the trip? Is your mom okay?”

I nod. “She will be.”

“Have you called her?” I shake my head. “Come to my office after dinner. Call her so she doesn't worry or she'll never forgive me.”

“You know her
mom
?” Ben asks.

“Harper, this is everyone….” Charlotte railroads Ben as she introduces me to the five other guys at our table, mostly scientists, some support staff, all of whom Charlotte says I'll only see at meals because “I'm going to keep you busy every minute—you okay with that?”

I nod.

“So, Harper, your mom is…?”

“Ben, I swear to God,” Charlotte huffs. “
Ellen!
Ellen Scott, San Francisco, my thesis advisor?”

“Okay, but
Ellen's
never been here?”

Charlotte rolls her eyes.
“No.”

“So you're studying marine biology?” Ben asks through a maw of ice he's chewing like a handful of peanuts.

“No, I'm just…” I look to Charlotte.

“Oh,” he says. “Micro, not marine?”

I stir my tea. I'm here now. The plane's gone—they can't make me leave for faking science credentials. I don't think.

Charlotte squeezes a lemon wedge into a bowl of yogurt. “Harper is the third high school student. She's my research grant assistant.”

“You already have an assistant.”

“Yes. And now I have two.” She gives him an it's-none-of-your-business look.

I like Charlotte.

She leans toward me. “Vivian arrived on last week's flight and immediately caught a wretched cold. You'll meet her once she's out of quarantine. She's really smart. You'll like her. Not sure who's got the third—we'll have to investigate so the three of you can commit all your rascally teen antics!”

“Okay.” Ben leans back. Eyeballs me. “So what was it, Scott? Someone die? Guy break up with you?”

“Ben.”

“What?”

Charlotte full-on glares at him.

“Whatever.” He shrugs. “You want to spend all winter babysitting, that's your deal. Have fun.”

Charlotte hucks her lemon rind and clocks the side of Ben's head.

“What the
hell
!” he chokes.

Charlotte turns to me. “Harper, you'll need to learn to ignore Ben, and the other jealous members of his ilk.”

“My
ilk
? Listen, there is no
jealousy,
” Ben drawls. “I'm simply stating the
fact
that if a
Scott,
a
kid
not even studying science, is here in the capacity of a ‘research assistant' when, like, hundreds of
actual
science students would kill for the opportunity, it is one hundred percent because you snuck in, and (a) you had some life-altering tragedy you think coming here will fix, or (b) some dude dumped you and you're on an
Eat, Pray, Love
journey or some shit.”

The table is silent. There is a very strong whirlpool in my teacup. Charlotte reaches over and stops my stirring.

“Harper,” she says, “if you've had enough of people referring to you in the pronoun sense and projecting their own life failures onto you, would you like to finish up and come with me to call your mom?”

Charlotte stands. I do, too, and we push in our chairs.

“Gentlemen,” she says.
“Ben.”
I follow her to the tray drop and out of the dining hall.

“Sorry about that,” she sighs. She unlocks a door and holds it open for me. “Your plane was the last one. No more on or off The Ice until September. As of today, we're completely cut off from the rest of the world, which Ben should be used to by now—this is his third winter.” She moves some papers off an office chair, sits me in it, switches a desk lamp on, and leans against her desk, which is piled with papers and files and a million ballpoint pens and highlighters. “Things close in; guys especially get territorial. It's a sausage fest.”

I nod. “You really already have an assistant?”

“Harper. You're a Scott. They're going to be jealous, and they can screw off. You've got just as much right to be here as anyone. What I need your help with isn't dependent on some intense science-based education. I'm writing grants, too. I need data entry, organizing, nuts and bolts. Without the grants, I can't
do
the research. Okay?”

“You don't feel stuck babysitting?”

“Seriously, don't listen to a word that guy says.”

“But it's true. I lied! I'm not into science—or research or anything!”

“People beg, borrow, and steal to get here; add lying to the pile. There were two legit science spots. You took nothing from anyone, and I need
your
help. Your stipend is less than theirs if that makes you feel any better.”

“Really?”

“Yes! By fifty cents an hour, so cheer up! I love your mom so much. I can't believe she let you come.”

“She wasn't thrilled.”

Charlotte nods. “Winter isn't easy. Doesn't matter. You'll be brilliant. Might be just what you need.”

My heart jacks up. “What did she tell you? Because I'm fine!”

“No one said anything to anyone, I swear. It was last-minute and not about science, so a person may naturally be curious—especially a scientist.” She smiles. “But I'm telling you: all that matters is you're here and I need your help. That's all I want to know. This is the very last part of my thesis before I submit. I
need
you.”

I nod. “Thank you. So much.”

She's got aqua-blue crystals dangling from her ears, delicate birds tattooed on her small, bare shoulders. She is San Francisco incarnate: batik blouse, jeans, silver rings on nearly every finger; the clip in her curls is beaded, one a person could find for sale on a serape-covered folding table on Market Street.

“Where in San Francisco are you from?” I'm going to get wild and guess the Mission. Or the Haight. The cool neighborhoods.

“Outer Sunset. Forty-Fifth and Judah.”

I smile, but my heart twists. I can see Forty-Fifth Avenue, the Sunset's wide streets, rolling gentle hills leading straight into the ocean, so beautiful it inspires poetry.

At the end of our streets is sunset; At the end of our streets the stars.

“Your mom let me build my own degree. It's taken me forever, but I'm nearly done—I'll be the first master of science in eco-marine biology the school's ever matriculated.”

“Wow.”

“Will you go to State? What do you think you'll major in?”

“I have no idea.” Understatement of the century.

“Plenty of time for that. You're in the perfect place to think about it.” She stands. “How do you feel about snowmobiles?”

“Um. Pretty neutral? I guess?”

“Because Vivian's not going to be well enough yet, and I've got to get some data I'm missing before the ice shifts. We can reach the rookery in forty-five minutes, and it may be your last chance to see it, so I say we go. You in?”

“Rookery?”

“Penguins! Weather's supposed to be gorgeous tomorrow, low thirties at least. Jet lag hates fresh air and sunshine, right? After your safety training, we'll get your gear and be back before noon.”

She moves a phone to the center of her desk, writes the number for an outside international call on a Post-it, and moves to leave me alone in her tiny office.

“Charlotte?”

“Yeah?”

“It's good I came here. Right?”

She smiles from the door. “You'll know when winter's over. But I can tell you right now
yes.
You'll see.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell your mom I said hi. And try to stay up late-ish to get on a regular schedule….Ooh, wait, perfect! It's movie night—did they tell you?”

I shake my head.

“Movie, in bed by ten, you'll be raring to go tomorrow.” She glances at her watch. “Starts in half an hour. First floor, second room right after the kitchen. Follow the popcorn. It's special, to celebrate Last Plane Out. We used to watch
The Thing,
except last winter one of the guys found a hundred thousand microbial fossils in the ice, which is basically the plot of that one, so…”

“So what are we watching instead?”

She closes the door nearly all the way and sticks her head through to whisper, “
The Shining,
” then shuts it quietly behind her.

I'm pretty sure she's not kidding.

She wasn't. The freaking
Shining.
These people are insane; they laughed all through it. So then I dreamed of creepy elevator twins and didn't sleep. Jet lag is winning.

But I'm up at six, my bags are at my door (pajamas!), and I take a shower. The bathrooms are also dorm-like, rows of sinks and showers. I take my shampoo and loofah in a plastic caddy, and the first lesson I'm learning from The Ice is what a horrible water-waster I am. Antarctica is a geographic desert. McMurdo is a self-sustaining town alone in the world, so any water we've got is
all
we've got. My dearly beloved twenty-minute shower (Yes, shameful. Especially in drought-plagued California. Lesson #1: Learned. Antarctica is making me a better person already) has been reduced to five of bliss, which isn't long enough to rinse the shampoo from my heavy hair, let alone shave my legs.

But who cares because I'm not wearing tights today. Anymore.

“Harper!” Charlotte's cheerful voice and shave-and-a-haircut knock come through my dorm door.

She's in her red parka, tall boots, ski pants. “Ready for an adventure?”

The small McMurdo winter population also means there's no line for food. We just walk up and grab some toast and juice, and we're headed to Ben, the glorified hall monitor.

“Hey,” Charlotte says to him. “Can you call fire and tell them we need a radio after safety?”

Ben is watching CNN on a tiny TV in his office by the building's entry door. “Uh, I don't know. Can you call them yourself?”

“Stop showing off for Harper. Tell them we'll be there before lunch.” She turns to me. “Ready?”

Ben lazily dials some numbers. “And where am I to tell them you
ladies
will be off to?”

Charlotte pulls a ski mask over her head and helps me do the same. “Cape Royds.”