Complete Nothing (26 page)

I felt a pang, thinking about Claudia’s family. Like I missed them. I wondered if they missed me.

“You in there, dude?” Gavin asked.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I had to focus on the now and forget the past. Claudia and I had been together for a year and a half. That was a lot of time to get to know each other. Maybe if Josie and I logged a couple of hours behind the counter at the soup kitchen together doling out the food, I could find out a few more things about her. She couldn’t exactly come on to me in that setting.

“I’ll ask Josie tonight,” I said, feeling slightly more positive about the whole thing.

Gavin looked up at me and smiled. But it was a weird smile. Too wide, too satisfied, for what we were talking about. For a second I wondered if maybe
he’d
gotten a concussion.

“Perfect,” he said. “This is gonna be perfect.”

Ballet shoes shooshed and scraped across the gleaming wood floor of the Studio as the eighth-grade pointe class gathered their things and greeted their parents at the door, their chattering voices filling the airy space. I sat down on the corner chair to lace up my shoes, relishing the slip of the silky ribbon between my fingers. For the next two hours I didn’t have to think. All I had to do was dance.

“Hey there.” Lance dropped down on the chair next to mine and stretched his arms over his head. “So, I’m driving you to the auditions on Saturday.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“Actually, I hadn’t thought about it,” I told him.

He put his hand on his chest. “You hadn’t thought about it? I’m deeply offended.”

I laughed. “I guess I’ve just been more focused on the actual audition. The piece I’m going to perform . . . the terror of the whole thing . . .”

“Understood,” he said. “But we are carpooling, yes?”

“Sure,” I said, realizing that if I drove down there alone I’d probably psych myself out, and if I drove down there with my parents,
they’d
probably psych me out. Lance and I would just sing and laugh and try not to think about where we were headed. “That’d be fun.”

“You know it will be,” he said with a smile. Then he got up, executed a mean brisé, and sank to the floor to stretch.

My cell phone beeped, and my heart did a brisé of its own. Somehow, whenever I got a text, I still pictured Peter’s face. But I supposed that was only natural. It had been less than a week since we’d uncoupled. I concentrated on shoving the thought of him aside. Once his smile had vanished, I pulled out my phone. The text was from Keegan.

JUST GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER. WHERE ARE U?

If it’s possible to blush from head to toe, I did it. Was Keegan
sexting
me? Was I supposed to, like, text back what I was wearing? I couldn’t participate in that. Not only was the very idea already making my throat close over, but I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. Best to ignore it. Pretend it wasn’t happening.

BALLET REHEARSAL ABOUT TO START. GOTTA GO.

I hit send and shut off my phone, but I was shaking so hard I couldn’t finish my laces. I sat back and took deep breaths instead. And unintentionally pictured Keegan’s naked, wet body.

“What’s with you?” Lauren asked, peeling a banana as she took Lance’s vacated chair. “You look like you just swallowed your tongue.”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” I bent down to make another attempt at my right shoe, now shoving Keegan from my mind. It wasn’t lost on me that there was a lot of mental boy-shoving going on lately,
and I wondered what it said about who I was. Was I a slut? Boy obsessed? Or plain old confused? Whatever the case, now was not the time to figure it out. “What’s up with you?”

“Nada mucho.” Lauren slumped in her chair, in the way that drove Madame Helene completely insane, and chewed on her banana. “How’re things with the magnificent Keegan?”

There was his naked body again. I choked on my own breath. Why was she using the term “magnificent”?

“Fine. Good. Normal. Why?”

She took another bite. “Just curious.”

I managed to knot the ribbon behind my calf and sat up, posture perfectly straight. “You don’t like him, do you?”

“What?” Her eyes were wide as she swallowed. “No! Of course I like him. If you like him, I like him.”

“Really?” I asked, dubious. Lauren had never been one to not form her own opinion before. “I mean, you did try to warn me off him in the beginning.”

“Oh, that.” She waved a hand. “So he broke Felicity’s heart. Doesn’t everyone break a heart or two at some point?”

“Um . . . I guess.”

“Just because he didn’t like her, doesn’t mean he can’t like you.” She slung her arm heavily around my shoulder as Mia and her friend Alicia traipsed in the door, followed quickly by Lance’s one male compatriot in our class, Craig Churgin. The room began to fill with conversation as everyone chose stretching spots and got down to work. “In fact, I think you should invite him to the recital.”

I felt a shock of nervousness at the mere suggestion of this.

“Isn’t that a little . . . soon?” I asked as I rolled one ankle, then the other. “I mean, he’s not even my boyfriend. Not technically.”

“It’s not like you’re asking him to marry you,” Lauren said,
finishing off her banana. She released me, folded up the peel, and shoved it in the side pocket of her bag. “You’re asking him to sit on his butt for two hours and watch some pretty spectacular dancing, if I do say so myself.”

For some guys, that’s actually worse than a marriage proposal,
I thought.

“If he’s into you, he’s going to want to be there,” she said, standing. “Ballet is your first love. Any guy you’re with should respect that, right?”

I looked up at her, cool trepidation filling my chest. “I guess.”

She paused, lifting one heel and then the other, loosening up her feet. “Unless . . . you think he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t support you. Do you think he’s that kind of guy?”

“No.” I stood up and reached back for my right ankle to stretch my quad. “No. He’s definitely not. He thinks it’s cool that I’m into ballet. He said it the first day we met.”

“Then ask him,” Lauren said, walking to the center of the floor and dropping down into a split. Her brown eyes were clear when she looked up at me and seemed huge as they reflected the track lighting overhead, pink and yellow and white. “What’ve you got to lose?”

“Nothing,” I said, even as my stomach clenched. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

I sank down next to her and mimicked her pose, reaching for one toe and then the other, trying to figure out why I suddenly felt so uncertain. Was it that I didn’t think Keegan wanted to come, or was it that I didn’t think I wanted him to come? Part of me felt like dance recitals were for families, friends, boyfriends. People who truly mattered. People who would appreciate my hard work and sweat and tears. Did Keegan fit that bill?

“Good evening, class!” Madame Helene called out, emerging
from her office. She walked over to her iPod and switched it on. The opening strains of her usual warm-up music flowed from the speakers. The class scrambled to its feet. “To the barre, please?”

We scurried noiselessly to the barres along two adjacent sides of the room and began our drills. I breathed in and out as I lowered into plié after plié, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Keegan. About how I would ask him. About what he would say. But every once in a while, Peter’s face would creep into my thoughts. His voice would sound in my ear, asking . . .

You’re really going to ask that tool over me? You really want him there and not me?

I remembered the expression of pride on Peter’s face after
The Nutcracker
last year, the one show he’d been able to attend. How he’d kissed me on the forehead and handed me a single red rose. How he’d pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “I told everyone in my row that you were my girl. I couldn’t stop smiling.”

I felt sick, suddenly. Sick and hot and tearful. How could he have said that to me then, but not want to be with me now? What had changed? What had I done wrong?

What I wouldn’t give to hear him say that to me again.

But it didn’t matter. Because he was never going to come to another of my recitals. I was with Keegan now. And I liked Keegan. He was laid-back. He was chill. He was so easy to laugh and let everything roll off his shoulders. There was so much about Keegan that I liked. Not the potential sexting, but everything else.

Lauren was right. I should ask him to our recital. I just hoped
he
liked
me
enough to say yes.

I walked into the house after an insane shift at Goddess Cupcakes that night, tense from spending the entire walk home looking over my shoulder, waiting for Artemis and Apollo to jump out from behind a car or a potted plant or a Dumpster and slay me. I locked both locks behind me and let out a massive breath. The house was quiet. I glanced down the hallway toward Hephaestus’s room, and the crack under the door was dark. My mother would just be leaving the mall now, having been on the closing shift at Perfumania. I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do.

Heart pounding from side to side and back to front, I raced upstairs and into my room, closing the door silently behind me. At my desk, I placed Wallace’s hand-me-down computer next to the sand timer, which was getting ominously low. So ominously low, I felt as if I could hear every last grain of sand hitting the growing pile at the bottom of the hourglass, sliding down the hill and hitting the thick sides. I pulled my sweater off and tossed it over the thing. Right now, I needed to concentrate.

“Please work, please work, please work.”

I opened the computer and turned it on, sitting down and
kicking my shoes off as it booted up. Then I opened the camera program like Wallace had taught me to do back at the library and clicked open the screen marked “Recorded Footage.” There was seven hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-two seconds of it.

“Yes,” I said under my breath.

Salivating, I moved my finger over the touch pad—I now knew it was called a touch pad—and clicked the triangle that, I’d also learned today, meant “play.”

The footage began. Hephaestus’s room was empty and still. And it continued to be empty and still for a good fifteen minutes until I finally remembered that he’d worked a shift at the garage right after school today, and I hit the double triangle button, which meant “fast-forward.”

I sat back and watched the unchanging screen. The only evidence of the passage of time were the minute movements of the leaves on the trees outside his window, fluttering now and then in the breeze. Finally, once I’d scrolled through three hours plus of the same thing, the door opened, and Hephaestus entered. I sat forward like a shot and hit play again.

Hephaestus hoisted his book bag onto his bed, then wheeled over to the window. He used a metal hook to reach up and lower the shade. My heart skipped in excitement. This was it. This had to be it.

Then he started undressing. I gulped. Hephaestus tugged off his jacket and hung it in the closet, then pulled his T-shirt off over his head. That was when I started to sweat.

Hephaestus had the single most perfect torso I had ever seen on a human being. There were muscles everywhere. Big, defined ones. And his arms were sinewy and strong, bulging whenever he moved. I could see a tattoo on his left pectoral muscle, just above
his heart, and I leaned in for a better look, but then he turned and pushed his chair into the bathroom.

Five minutes later, the shower came on, and it was more fast-forwarding until, finally, he emerged in a clean T-shirt and jeans, looking refreshed. He pulled his books from his bag and brought them over to his desk.

Great. Now I was going to watch the guy do his homework? I was just about to hit fast-forward again, when his head popped up and he looked at the mirror. My eyes darted to it as well. The frame was glowing.

I leaned forward in my seat, my fingers itching, my heart in my throat. Hephaestus quickly shoved his computer and books aside. I waited for a face to appear in the glass, wondering if that was even how it worked and wondering if that face would be my sister’s or someone else’s. Then Hephaestus gripped the handles on his wheelchair with both hands and pushed himself up until his legs hovered inches above the seat. With one mighty grunt of effort, he flung one arm out to touch the mirror.

There was a flash of light, and the screen in front of me went black. Not the entire computer, just the small window opening that had been showing his room.

“No!” I shouted. “No! No! No!”

I clicked the play button a thousand times. Clicked fast-forward. Clicked everything. The timer was still running, which meant the camera still thought it was recording, but there was nothing. Nothing but an infuriating black screen.

The power of the mirror, once activated, must have fried the transmission. It took some serious self-control not to rip the computer in half at its hinge. Instead I got up, tore the pillows from my bed, flung the bedspread to the floor, and pounded on the mattress
as hard as I could with both fists. I picked up the biggest pillow and whipped it over and over and over into the wooden footboard, sweat popping out along my brow, tears squeezing from the corners of my eyes. I wanted to see my sister. I wanted to know if it was she who Hephaestus was talking to, or some unknown enemy. I needed to know where Apollo and Artemis were. What they were plotting. I couldn’t take the not knowing anymore, having no news from home, no contact with those I loved, no clue as to whether I was going to be suddenly attacked and mortally wounded at any second.

It wasn’t fair that I didn’t get to know. It wasn’t fair.

Finally, after a few minutes of this humiliating fit-having, I ran out of steam. I sank to the floor of my room atop a pile of folded and crushed pillows and breathed. A few tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t sob. I was angry and frustrated more than anything. I felt weak. I felt impotent. I felt out of control.

These feelings didn’t sit well with me. I was a goddess. I was supreme. I was not this sniveling, desperate wuss.