Tiny Pretty Things (30 page)

I SPEND THE NEXT TWO
weekends at home to avoid any accusations about messing with Gigi. The RAs overheard her breakdown. It only took a little pressure from them before she spilled about the pranks, and that’s all everyone has been talking about for the past week and a half. I still don’t know who gave her those naked pictures of Alec and me that I kept in my keepsake box. Eleanor was out with me. The only other person who knew about them was Will. I know he hates me now, but we were close once—like brother and sister. Would he really do that to me? We’ve had to have individual meetings with the school counselor and the RAs about bullying. I’d rather deal with the biggest bully in my life—my mother—than all of them. And she’s at her worst during family holidays. It’s the Easter weekend.

We have a practice room at home that my mother had installed when I was twelve. An offshoot of the basement, complete with a wall of mirrors, a full barre, a professional sprung floor, and a series of ceiling fans. So weekends away from school aren’t like a break at all. They never are. And there are no fun adventures with Alec to look forward to. No stolen moments in my bedroom or kisses pressed against the mirrored wall.. Those moments with Alec had almost helped me erase all the terrible memories of my time trapped down in the basement practice room, but without him here they’re rushing back at me.

“You showering soon?” Adele calls down, and I assume the sun is setting, but there are no windows down here, no hint of the real world. Not even a clock. Adele is allowed to take the morning off from dancing. My mother lets her help with the Easter holiday cooking and holiday happiness, but I’m expected to stay down here and “make sure I don’t lose my pitiful role, the way I lost Giselle.”

“Soon!” I call back up, but I’d rather break my ankles dancing late into the night than do what we
have on the agenda for this evening. Easter dinner with Nana and Grandpa, and my horrible cousins from New Jersey and Connecticut, and, of course, the Lucas clan. I begged my mother not to invite them, since Alec broke up with me and is apparently in love with someone else.

“Whose fault is that?” she’d said.

“Whose fault is it that Dad left?” I asked in return. Adele squeaked like a crushed mouse the second the words left my mouth, and I gasped at the way the thoughts in my head sometimes get spoken out loud without my actually deciding to say them. I’ve gotten so used to casual cruelty at school that I’d forgotten what kind of impact it has at home.

My mother didn’t slap me, but I know she wanted to. Instead she marched out of the kitchen and into the small breakfast nook connected to the kitchen, which, given the fact that no one eats around here, my mother has turned into a drinking nook. She knows the worst thing she can do is imply that I’m the one making her want to get trashed.

“Nice, Bette,” Adele said. “Chill on the pills, okay? We don’t need you high
and
Mom drunk.”

I disappeared downstairs after that. Mom would have forced me eventually anyway, but it is easier to just to work my muscles until they spasm than to interact with my drunk, angry mother.

My phone buzzes for the eighth time this morning, and I ignore it. Henri’s been texting nonstop, looking for a hookup. But I won’t make that mistake again. I’d rather die from exhaustion here. Plus, I don’t think he’ll actually tell. Just a little taste was enough for me to get him on Team Bette. I hope.

I decide to work on pointe before I have to face my closet full of clothes that aren’t pretty enough to make Alec love me again.

Against Adele’s better judgment, I down a little blue pill before wrapping the ribbons of my pointe shoes around my ankles, pulling leg warmers up over my tender knee. I iced it late last night, but it’s still throbbing from hours in the basement yesterday. Usually I can fight through the soreness, the aches, the little pulls and twists that inevitably happen. But an old injury flares up, and either the physical pain or the memory is distracting me so much that I’m not able to get in the zone.

No one knows about my knee, except Mr. K, who noticed me favoring it once when he was doing a one-on-one session with me last year. He’d touched my kneecap with a finger he’d kissed.

I’d told him it was all better.

But today I can practically feel it swell with pain. It feels like it could burst through my tights, like it could grow so heavy with the weight of the pain it could pull me to the ground. It could be psychosomatic, I think. I look into my reflection for signs of insanity.

I look scared and pained, but not insane. Which means, I suppose, the pain might actually be real.

Pain has weight. Adele’s the one who told me that.

She’d visited me in the hospital, that Christmas after our father left, and showed me the scar I’d never noticed near her hairline, from when she’d hit her head when she was a tiny ballerina child.

I don’t want to think about any of this, but by the time my slippers are on and I have lifted myself to my toes, my old injury is screaming and throbbing, and I can’t possibly dance. So I sit on the floor, trying to stretch, but I remember instead.

My father left without warning, and my mother, who had always loved the ballet and the fact that Adele and I were doing so well at the conservatory, suddenly took her interest to a whole new level. She pushed us
hard
. Adele was ready for it: she was in perfect shape and had been dancing long enough to be able to handle the extra time my mother insisted we put in over the holiday.

I was twelve and just making the transition from girl to woman, from little cherub in
The Nutcracker
to Clara, at long last. At school, my meals and rehearsals and time were monitored carefully. Every stretch, every leap, every newly acquired skill was accounted for by Morkie and the other teachers. My mother didn’t know the rules. She didn’t care about the structure or the care with which a girl transitions through her adolescence.

She spent her evenings crying over my father in the master bedroom while I tried to drown her out by watching old musicals on the computer in my room. She spent her days drinking white wine and torturing me.

Now I lie on my back, bringing my leg toward my face. I coax it gently, and the pull is delicious, satisfying. But I’m holding back a breakdown, thinking through these memories. My fingers shake a little. I did not give my mind permission to go here.

That Christmas, my mother starved me. Emptied the refrigerator of all food except apples and celery. In the mornings she’d allow me an egg and half an English muffin, but the rest of the day she kept me on coffee and celery and sometimes an energy bar for dinner, if she couldn’t get up the energy to sauté a chicken breast.

She starved me, and she made me work. Hard. Harder than I did at school, and with fewer calories to help me along. Like she’s done this Easter holiday, she practically shut me in the makeshift basement studio all day. Sometimes she’d have Adele coach me, sometimes a retired teacher from the conservatory.

Even back then, I knew my body the way I do now. I knew when I needed to stretch more, when I needed a break, when I could push harder. But she didn’t believe me. And I got too scared to speak up. I was so, so little. So I let her push me and push me until my knee ballooned from the stress and I was so weak that a cold turned to pneumonia. I spent the second half of Christmas break that year in bed, with an overnight stay in the hospital.

I remember being grateful for the needle in my arm, the IV filled with glucose pumping into me. I could feel it going through me: a cold, ghostlike strumming in my veins. At last.

I line my legs up next to each other, stretching them out straight in front of me so I can compare the shape of one kneecap to the other. Now the inflammation is small but terrifying. The doctor had heavy warnings about the chronic stress condition, and every few months I notice a new kind of pain taking shape under the skin.

This is the worst it’s been in years. Like muscle memory, my knee knows to swell up the second it enters this home, this studio, and especially on any holiday.

I recognize Adele’s light steps coming down the stairs. My mother’s are unfocused, faltering, hard. Adele’s are soft ballerina steps. She walks on her toes at all times, like she forgets how to be
human and only remembers how to be a dancer. It’s one of the things I’m most afraid of. That I will be exactly like Adele, or that I won’t be enough like Adele. Both thoughts are chilling.

“You’ve gotta get ready, Bette,” she says. But her eyebrows jump when she sees me cradling my leg. “Oh sweetheart, your knee?” She rushes to me, joins me on the floor, and lifts my leg out of my hands like it’s a newborn baby. Adele isn’t kind about my personal life or my mother or my broken heart or my struggles at school. But she cares about my body. When I’m hurt, she’s there, doing everything in her power to make it better. It’s how I know she loves me.

“It’s not a big deal,” I say. But the pain is making me a little dizzy. Either the pain, or the fact that I have to spend the evening with my mother and with Alec.

“Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk.”

“I didn’t know it still acted up,” Adele says. She runs her fingers over the swollen parts. “I’m so sorry. I’m just so, so sorry I let that happen—” Adele has one tiny line on her face, near the top of her forehead. And I know it’s from her guilt over that Christmas. That she didn’t put a stop to it. That she didn’t understand how bad it had gotten.

She lifts me to my feet. “You need help showering?”

“It’s really fine. It’ll go down, I promise,” I say with a smile. I don’t know why I’m acting like I’m fine. I wonder if I milked this if I could get out of facing dinner, and just stay in my room. But it’s too late. Adele’s already seen me walking without much of a limp, and working my way up the stairs with only a little help from the bannister. As soon as we’re back on the main floor she’s distracted by my bumbling mother, who is struggling to open a bottle of wine, but who is at least dressed in her Chanel best and looks appropriately maternal and holiday ready.

“Wear that black dress of yours, Bette,” my mother says, not even noticing my swollen knee, my limp, the way Adele keeps rubbing my back. “And please do your hair. Big curls I think. I’m tired of seeing it all stringy around your face. It’s not attractive. Needs volume.”

Adele makes me an ice pack, and my mother scrunches her nose at that, like it’s a distraction rather than a necessity, and she doesn’t bother asking what I need ice for.

The Lucas family declines my mother’s invitation for Easter dinner at the last minute, and my mother spends the entire time bitching about Mr. Lucas’s new wife. Even though she’s not really that new.

I’m back at the conservatory before seven p.m. Seeing my sister has given me a newfound mission. I change into a leotard and a dance skirt and don’t go to the studios, but to Mr. K’s office, which is nestled between the studios on the first floor, just like the nurse’s office. I don’t know why I’m feeling so reckless. But the thrill of it all makes me feel like I’m my old self again. And I have to risk it.

I knock, even though he can see me in the doorway. “Mr. K, do you have a minute?” I say in a half voice that makes me sound like one of the
petit rats
.

He waves me in, and I squish down in his high-backed chair. His office is just how I remembered
it: wooden bookshelf holding Russian literature, ballet portraits, trophies from his students’ competitions, a photo of himself on the Maryinsky Theater stage, shaded lamps and their low glow, the scent of hand-rolled cigarettes and alcohol. I know where he hides his little office bar, and the vodka. (Another secret Adele shared.)

Nestled into the old, familiar space, I fuss with my hands in my lap.

“Bette, why are you here?” Mr. K says, finally, a hint of irritation marring his smooth baritone. So I look up, making my eyes go wet and shiny and alluring, like they get on the stage. For one glorious moment I lock eyes with his, and my adrenaline surges. It’s a reflex, after all the dangerous attention he unloaded on me over the last two years. Not that his lips a little too close to my neck or his hand on my body during that
pas
rehearsal felt
good,
exactly. But there is nothing quite like Mr. K really seeing you. Even Adele agrees, and she got more attention than she bargained for. I remember snooping through her cell phone and seeing texts from him, little missives calling her his tiny, pretty thing, asking her to meet him at odd hours. Her texts back were very businesslike, but I know that she didn’t mind his attentions. Underneath the scruff and bluster, he’s quite handsome, Mr. K. He must be in his early forties, and he’s maintained himself well, his light, silky blond hair neatly cropped, and plump pink lips framed by his trim beard. In the old photos on the wall, you can see that he oozes charm and charisma on the stage, a commanding presence that no doubt leaves his patrons wondering how he expends all that energy off stage. But whenever I’d ask her, Adele would blush and change the subject, except to offer PG insights, like “Mr. K likes women who look demure but are secretly powerful—especially onstage.” Still, I remember all those nights in the dorm that I’d knock on her door late at night, awoken by a nightmare or growing pains, and her roommate would tell me Adele was off to a “private rehearsal.”

I want to make him remember those times with my sister. I want him to know that I know, and that others can know, too. Even though that’s not something he’d want to get out. That’s not something that would sit well with the board or others in the ballet world or even the cops. I want him to remember how good I am and give me the parts that belong to me.

“I think I am having a hyperextension problem.
Adele
told me you’re good at spotting these things. Better than the nurse,” I lie. “Would you take a look? I’m scared it’s what’s holding me back. Why things have changed so drastically this year.”

He cocks an eyebrow up, and waves me over. “Fifth position.”

I almost like being alone with him in his office, letting him inspect my leg muscles. I obey, and lift up my dance skirt.