Wallflower In Bloom (20 page)

“Do you get paid the same amount no matter how well we do?” I asked.

He waited a beat, then shook his head.

“So how does it work?”

I watched him try to decide whether to answer. “A hundred and fifty K for the first two weeks.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? I mean, if they can’t vote us off until the end of the second week. Or is it the first week? Never mind, don’t tell me. What else?”

“Twenty thousand for each week we stay in it, then fifty K for making it into the finals.”

“What do the winners get?”

He grinned. “The mirror ball trophy.”

“That’s it?”

He nodded.

“Who gets to keep it?”

He shook his head. “The celebrity dancer keeps it. The professionals all have entire rooms full of trophies.”

I took a deep breath. “I want that mirror ball trophy. And I want you to know I’ll do anything I can do to help you win this thing.”

It was my dance partner’s turn to close his eyes. When he opened them, he cat-walked the distance between us and grabbed my hands.

“Repeat after me,” he said.

I nodded. I threw my shoulders back and pulled my stomach in. I dug down to reach the strength that was deep within me. I steadied myself for the fight of my life.

“We cannot win,” my dance partner said.

“What?” I said. “But—”

“Uh-uh-uh.” He squeezed my hands between his. Hard.

“I really think if I focus—”

He squeezed my hands harder.

“Ouch.”

“We cannot win. Say it.”

“Fine.” I let out a puff of air. “We. Cannot. Win.”

“Say it again.”

“We cannot win.”

“Louder.”

“We cannot win!” I yelled. My voice echoed in our big empty practice studio.

Ilya was still holding my hands. “Now we have faced reality.”

“I guess I’m not a huge fan of reality,” I said.

“It’s the first and most important step,” he said, as if it might lead to a chassé or a kick ball change. I tried to slide my hands out from under his, but he held on tight.

I had an itch right in the center of my forehead that I was dying to scratch. I blew some air at it instead. “But I mean, if we can’t win, what’s the point?”

“The point is that we start where we are. We play to our strengths and keep improving. Americans love to cheer the underdog, so we accept that as our rightful place in this competition and enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’re so mature. Okay, so what do we do now?”

“Now we buckle down and get to work. We find our discipline and we see how far it can take us.”

I sighed. “I have to tell you, I’ve never been all that great at discipline.”

Ilya’s steely gray eyes held mine. “When I was growing up, my father had a saying: ‘Whether or not you are good at discipline, discipline she is always good for you.’”

“Your father would fit right in at my house,” I said. “Okay, I’m in. What do I have to do?”

“First of all, you can’t dance like a grandma.”

“What?”

“You can’t. Dance like. A grandma.”

“Sorry,” I said. It was as if my self-esteem were a balloon and Ilya had just popped it with a pin. I mean, I knew I wasn’t Kelly Genelavive, but a
grandma
?

He didn’t seem to notice. “You’ve watched the show?”

I nodded.

“Did you ever see anyone dance like a grandma?”

I bit my lower lip and shook my head.

“Right. Even the real grandmas don’t dance like grandmas.”

I didn’t mean to, but somehow I started to cry.

“Shhh,” my dance partner said.

I kept crying. I bent forward and covered my face with my hands.

Ilya started patting my back as if he were burping me. “Let it out. Just let it out.”

I let it out. I cried and cried and cried. I cried about dancing like a grandma. Then I worked my way backward from there. I cried about the fact that the only thing people really liked about me was my brother. I cried about Mitchell not caring enough to commit to a life with me, even if I hadn’t been sure I wanted to commit to a life with him either. I cried about wasting such a big chunk of my life not having a life. I cried about always feeling second fiddle, or even fourth fiddle, in my family, and then hitching my wagon to the family star anyway. I cried about not having the guts to make it on my own after college, about drifting through high school, about the parties I hadn’t been invited to, the friends who’d dumped me, about being such a wimp that I just sat back and let Joanie Baloney take away the things I should have fought for.

I cried because I was sad. I cried because I was embarrassed. And lonely. And scared. I cried because I wanted with all my heart to be a different kind of person, the kind of person who knew who she was, the kind of person who didn’t
dance like a grandma
. But I simply didn’t know how to get there.

When I ran out of tears, Ilya handed me a tissue.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a lot, that’s all.”

“I know,” he said.

“If only I’d started dieting and working out about six months ago. Or even six weeks. If only—”

“Shhh.” Ilya reached for my hand. I started to tuck my damp tissue in the waistband of my yoga pants, then stopped when I realized it was a totally grandmotherly thing to do. Ilya pointed and I lobbed it into a little plastic wastebasket in the corner. With my luck I probably threw like a grandma, too.

“Let’s go talk to wardrobe,” he said. “I think it might help you get into character if you’re wearing a costume.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just let me run out to my car first. I can’t remember if I locked it.”

I focused on not walking like a grandma as I blinked my tear-ravaged eyes against the hot Southern California sun. My legs and shoulders screamed as I climbed into the Land Rover. I turned on the engine and cranked up the air-conditioning as high as it would go. I dabbed my eyes with a tissue and blew my nose.

I fired up my cell phone. I had no idea who I thought I was going to call. A massage therapist? A therapist therapist? 911? My mother?

My phone came to life. According to the phone log, my parents had called twice, Joanie had called a million times, and Tag was apparently just sitting there hitting redial over and over again.

Mitchell had called, too. Three times.

I knew better, but I tapped his name on the screen anyway.

He answered on the first ring. Instead of hello, he said, “She lost it.”

For a minute I thought he meant his pregnant bride-to-be had lost it the way I had, maybe tried to run him over with a golf cart or even an SUV.

“What?” I said.

“She lost the baby.”

I felt an awful jumble of relief and guilt for feeling relief.

“Why are you telling me this?” I finally said.

Mitchell let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. I guess I needed someone to talk to. . .”

I leaned forward and propped my forehead on the steering wheel.

“It’s just. . .” Mitchell said. “I mean, you’re a girl. Do you think she’ll still want to get married?”

My neck muscles were so tight I had to use my hands to help me lift my head back up.

“I’m going to hang up now,” I said. “I have a lot going on, and none of it has anything to do with you.”

Mitchell laughed a sad little laugh. “That’s right, I almost forgot about the dance thing. You’re all over the Internet, by the way. Are you out there now?”

“Yup.”

“What’s it like?”

“Scary.”

“I bet. You’ll do great, though. You always could do anything you set your mind to.”

“When did I ever set my mind to anything?”

“Seriously? I mean, holy crap, you run your brother’s entire
empire
. He wouldn’t have any of that without you. You’re smart. You’re organized. You can charm the pants off of anyone.”

“Yeah, right.” I was a little bit surprised by Mitchell’s supportive words, and maybe even a tiny bit bolstered by them—at least enough to head back into the studio. “Listen, I have to go. Take care of yourself.”

When I got to the wardrobe room, Anthony was pinning up the hem for a former famous gymnast. Or maybe she was a former famous ice-skater. In any case, I’d definitely seen her before. She had long strawberry blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, and the body of an eight-year-old boy.

She turned a dazzling white smile on me. I wondered if her cosmetic dentist knew Tag’s cosmetic dentist.

“Hi,” I said. Hopefully she’d leave before I had to take off any clothes.

“Hi,” she said. “I am so excited to finally meet you.”

I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder.

She stuck out her hand. “Who are you again?”

Dying to dance is the only diet you need
.

T
hat’s what I’m talking about,” Ilya said when I walked out of the dressing room. Actually, I was pretty sure my top half walked out a full minute before my bottom half did.

“Are you sure?” I said. I was wearing a black push-up bra that had lifted my breasts so high they were practically in my line of vision. Anthony was still working on my costume, but he’d given me a black strapless sheath to wear. It was short, really short, and seemed to consist mostly of fringe and sequins. And two little flesh-colored spaghetti straps to keep me from losing it entirely, for which I was thankful beyond words.

“Now that’s a lot of sexy,” Anthony said.

That’s what I was afraid of. “Does it make me look, you know. . .”

Anthony flung his arms wide. “No, it does not make you look
fat
. This is what a woman should look like. Trust me, if we took you out of la-la land and dropped you and that balance beam who just walked out of here off on a street corner, every red-blooded straight male in Middle America would jump right over her and make a beeline for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

“You’re not fat,” Ilya said. “You’re curvilicious.”

“You’re a bombshell, dumplin’,” Anthony said. “It’s all about the Spanx. It’s a beautiful thing.”

The truth was I was wearing two undergarments, one that started just under my push-up bra and then turned into panty hose and another that wrapped around me and hooked in the front, like a corset. Actually, it probably
was
a corset.

But the best part so far was that Anthony had given me a shopping bag full of underwear samples to keep. There wasn’t a pair of cotton grandma panties in the bunch. I’d buried my own graying underwear in the bottom of the bag since I was too embarrassed to leave it in the wastebasket for some hip cleaning service person to find. Or worse, maybe the paparazzi went through the trash looking for intimate details about the celebrity dancers. I could imagine turning on my laptop again only to see my pitiful underpants splashed all over the virtual front page of the
Hollywood Reporter
.

A pretty platinum-haired woman holding a round brush came out from behind a screen that divided the huge room in half.

“Gina,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Deirdre.”

She lifted a section of my hair with the brush. “You’ll need highlights and lowlights. And a good cut. Maybe an uplift for the first dance, to give you more height.”

Another pretty woman, this one with pitch-black hair with a white streak in the front, came out from behind the same screen. “Lila,” she said. As soon as she glanced at my toes, I wished I’d put my dance shoes back on before I came out of the little dressing area. “Yikes, we’re talking a major panicure here.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Lila brushed away my apology and reached for one of my hands. Her fingernails were painted black with white polka dots. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

“Not good,” she said. “We’ll go with long fake nails, give you a
French manicure, and cover it with lots of clear sparkle. And presto, those short, stubby fingers of yours will be long and elegant, a dancer’s dream.”