Rules for 50/50 Chances (27 page)

They don't make another cut that afternoon, just let us go after the second combo, with a promise to “be in touch soon.” In the dressing room, I turn my back to the room and slip my bra and T-shirt on as quickly as I can. While I throw my stuff in my dance bag, I eavesdrop on the girls next to me, both willowy brunettes, five or six inches taller than me apiece.

“I heard Galina is retiring this year. Or they're pushing her out, who knows,” one of the girls says, clipped and low. Galina Kadirova is one of the BPC's star principal dancers.

“Well, she's been injured, like, three times this year,” the other replies.

The tone is familiar—the almost hopeful speculation of someone else's downfall. It's like Georgia, sometimes, looking down her nose as another girl rolls an ankle in rehearsal or puts on a few pounds. It makes my stomach turn.

I slip out of the dressing room without making eye contact with anyone, and retrace my steps back toward the lobby. The UVPA rehearsal center is all floor-to-ceiling windows and long corridors with shiny marble floors that even my flats click loudly against. Huge black-and-white prints of BPC dancers punctuate the walls, pressed between panes of thick glass. Students float by, invariably dressed in rehearsal clothes—beat-up leotards, warm-up shorts over their tights, leg warmers. They all have the ballet walk, even the guys: feet turned out, posture like they have wires running through their spines.

I should want to be one of them. I should feel like these are my people. That's what I expected to feel. But I don't. Instead, the black box at Cunningham College comes rushing back to me, full of that feeling of shared love for dance that somehow managed to be coupled with … fun, abandon. There was an energy there, a sense of boundless passion, that I can't grasp here.

Outside in the cool, bright sun, I dig my phone out of my bag and find a text from Caleb, full of question marks. I can only tell him what my gut says about the audition: nailed it.

What I don't tell him is the other piece of my gut reaction. That nailing it, the rush of flying above the crowd and dancing my best when it really mattered, might be enough. The rest of this might not be for me. Not anymore.

Twenty-four

Just a few hours after the audition finishes, I'm on my way home, by air this time, on a red-eye. From the window of the 767, I watch the jagged topography of the West stretch out beneath us as we pass through the setting sun. I have the sense that now, having crossed from east to west on the ground like a pioneer—minus the covered wagon—it's all my land. I feel like I know it well, this big old country. That children's song “This Land Is Your Land” floats through my brain and gets lodged there.

Somewhere down there, probably in the midst of some cornfields, the Zephyr is tracing its way back toward Chicago. I feel a pang of something, almost homesickness, for the long, narrow corridors with their shiny silver doors on both sides. I thought I'd get to UVPA and feel like I'd found a new home. I certainly did not expect to feel like that about a
train
. But now I miss dinners with strangers. I miss my roomette. I don't know how you can be homesick for a place where you lived for two days—but that's what it is.

Already, my memories of the hilly streets of San Francisco, the echoey halls of UVPA and even the audition itself are fading. It's like when you wake up from a dream and at first it's vivid in your mind but then by the afternoon, it's gone. But the Zephyr is real. If I close my eyes, I can practically feel the movement of the train. I wish I could keep riding, back and forth through the flatlands and the mountains, and let everything else fade.

We're halfway home, the plane still and dark except for the occasional reading light marking the other sleepless passengers, when I remember that “This Land Is Your Land” isn't actually a children's song—it's a folk song. By Woody Guthrie, the world's most famous Huntington's patient.

 

 

Dad seems exhausted when he picks me up at the airport early in the morning. I pile my stuff into the trunk and settle myself in the car next to him. There are dark circles under his eyes and I swear he's even balder than he was four days ago. He leans across the gearshift to give me a kiss on the top of my head.

“So, child, tell me everything. We missed you around here.”

“Okay, Dad,” I say. “I was only really gone four days, you know.”

“Sure, sure. That's what they all say when they grow up and leave their pitiful fathers behind.” He's acting normal, cueing up his usual mix of self-deprecating Dad jokes, but there's something about him that seems off. Like he's trying too hard.

“So you had a good time?” Dad says after a few minutes of silent driving.

I think about the Zephyr, the whole country passing by us outside, and all those people with their lives and their stuff, and the audition that might be the final moment of my dance career. “Good time” hardly seems to cover it.

“Yeah. It was good. The audition was … It went well.”

“Of course it did. And if they don't let you in, you know what I say to that.” I do know what he's going to say, but I let him say it anyway because it's his favorite line. “Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.”

Hearing Dad drop an F-bomb makes me well up with affection for him. I actually get a little bit teary for a minute.

“What's up with Mom?” I ask.

It's started raining, almost-ice crystals forming in the raw, April morning air and racing along the windshield. Dad clears his throat. He hesitates. “What? Did something happen?” I say.

He shakes his head, like maybe he's pushing back some tears. “Nothing in particular. Just, you know. It never really sinks in that it's not as bad yet as it's going to be.”

I focus on a single ice crystal and watch it trace its way across my window until it disappears where the glass meets the door. It's an old habit, watching the raindrops rush along the car window. I used to pretend they were racing each other, each with someplace really important to be. Now I see they're just following a path they can't deviate from. The winners and the losers are predetermined by the angle of the window and the rain and the wind; nothing those raindrops can do will change their fate.

 

 

My bedroom is cleaner than I left it—Gram must've vacuumed and picked up. It smells like fresh sheets, and there's a pile of laundry, folded and sitting on my armchair. I have a strange feeling, like I'm somehow different than I was the last time I stood in this room. I climb into bed without even bothering to close the blinds against the morning light.

Who knows how long later, my phone buzzes with a text, waking me. It's almost one already.

Caleb:
Home yet?

I write him back quickly: Affirmative. Just woke up.

Caleb:
Can I swing by?

Me:
Yes please.

Twenty minutes later, I hear a knock at the front door, then Dad's voice. “Caleb! You didn't waste much time, did you?”

Caleb laughs. “Hey, four days without Rose is a long time.”

“I'll give you that,” Dad says. “Good to see you, come on in. The child is upstairs, of course. I think she might be sleeping.”

The stairs creak and then Caleb's in my room, and then my arms. I almost forgot how solid his chest feels against my face when I press my cheek up against it, breathing him in. His shirt smells like Tide, the ocean-fresh kind. Usually when we kiss, he starts and I follow. This time, I lean up toward his face and find his mouth with mine.

 

 

“Young people!” Dad yells upstairs, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later. I really have no idea how much time has passed. Caleb does that to me. “Chinese okay for lunch? We've got a ton of leftovers.”

“Great,” I whisper. “Because it went so well the last time we all had Chinese leftovers together.”

Caleb kisses the tip of my nose. “I think it went well. I got you to kiss me, didn't I? Pretty sure your mom and I were in cahoots about that.”

“In cahoots, huh? Okay.” I kiss him back, this time on his eyebrow, which has one crazy strand twisting away from the rest. “Sounds good, Dad!” I call toward the door.

I give them the full play-by-play of the trip over lunch. Mom can't seem to completely hold on to the memory of where I was, but every time someone reminds her, she acts excited all over again. At least she's forgotten the conversation we had before I left for San Francisco—if you can call it a conversation. Maybe one-sided irrational disease-induced rampage is a more accurate descriptor. Forgetting fights is one mercy of memory loss, I guess.

When I get to the audition itself, I struggle to find the right words to describe what happened. “I don't know,” I say. “I can't explain it.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?” Caleb asks.

“Good. It felt really good.”

“All right!” Dad says. “That's my girl. I'm sure they were all blown away.”

“Everyone was really good, Dad. It's a different league than NEYB. Don't get your hopes up.”

But I saw the way the judges looked at me, and every fiber of me felt how well it went. Even though the competition is stiff, I know I'll be right in the mix. So maybe I'm really warning Dad about something else.

 

 

After lunch, I force Caleb into an intense Scrabble match on my bedroom floor. We kneel opposite each other on the floor with the board between us. I'm crushing him. He's a visual person, as he always reminds me whenever he's losing at Scrabble.

“Prepare to be impressed,” I say, adding an
I
and an
S
to the
Q
in “quietly.”

“God. You are freakishly good at this.” He leans over to survey the board. “Wait. ‘Qis' is not a word. No way.”

“I swear it is.”

“You swear wrong.”

“Are you really going to make me go to the dictionary for this?” I ask, sitting up on my knees.

“We're so going to the dictionary.”

I'm dead certain that “qis” is Scrabble-eligible—only because I've spent some time perusing all the legit Q-words in the online Scrabble Word Finder—but I let him pull his phone out and check anyway. “You're going to be embarrassed…” I say.

“I am rubber and you are glue,” he says, waiting for the Internet to give him an answer. “Your words bounce off me and stick to you.”

“What are you, ten now?” I toss a tile at him.

“Evil twins' influence,” he mutters. “Qis…”

His face falls and he puts his phone back in his pocket. “So, never mind, then. What were we saying?”

“Oh come on!” I say. “What'd you find, my friend? Do tell.”

“Fine,” he grumbles, pulling his phone back out. “But this is truly ridiculous. It says: ‘No definition of “Qis” found—it's still good as a Scrabble word, though!'” He looks up at my grinning face. “What does that even mean?”

“It means I'm right and you're wrong,” I tease. “Obviously.”

“Who knew you could use words that don't even have
definitions
in Scrabble?”

“Um, well, I did.” I lean across the tiles and put my face so close to his that our noses practically touch. “So there.”

Caleb leans a few centimeters closer. “Well,” he says, barely audible, “you are a nerd who studies obscure, definition-less vocabulary for the express purpose of winning Scrabble.” His lips brush against mine with every word.

When we pull apart, just by an inch, he holds my face gently in his hands. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

And suddenly, I can tell where this is going. It's like the Zephyr pulling out of the station, slow and steady but unstoppable.

“I love you, HD.”

There it is. Those three words stop everything. They stop the white noise from the street outside and the sound of our hearts beating. Maybe if I don't breathe, if I don't move, I won't have to respond. I want to say it back. I want to be a person who can love back the person who loves me, especially when he is so good.

I can't. This is why I have a rule about this in the first place. It's one thing—one extraordinary thing, apparently, judging from the way it makes my chest want to explode—to be loved by someone else. But to let yourself love them back, to
tell
them that, that's like … setting yourself up for loss, right? What if I let myself love him and then he lets me down? What if he changes his mind? I don't think I can love another person who's going to disappear. It's too much.

Instead, I kiss him again. He kisses me back, but even without words I can feel his disappointment.

“I should go,” he says, getting up and zipping up his sweatshirt.

I walk him downstairs and stand in the foyer in my socks, the welcome mat prickly under my feet, wanting to get rid of this terrible awkwardness that seems to have materialized out of nowhere.

“Sickle Cell…” I say, tugging at his sleeve. “See you tomorrow?”

“I have some stuff to do for my dad, but maybe. Give me a call.” He kisses me one more time, just lightly on the cheek. Then he goes, leaving me with the moments before tying themselves in knots in my stomach.

 

 

Trying to shrug it off, I import all 386 new photos from my phone to my laptop and find Mom. She's more than happy to sit at the dining room table and watch as I scroll through them, giving the best explanation I can of each one (all the various rock formations start to blur together—I wish I'd taken notes).

Midway through the pictures of what I think is Utah and the salt flats, she closes her eyes, breathing in sharply through her nose.

“You all right?”

She holds up one hand to stop me from saying anything more. Then after a moment, she opens her eyes again. “Wish I c-c-could see it … myself.” She reaches out and tries to smooth my hair with an unsteady hand. “Okay. M-m-more.”