“You want to be a ballerina again?” Morkie breaks into my thoughts and grabs my thigh with both hands. “You want to dance, again, yes?” She isn’t as gentle as Yuli as she forces a turnout, making the bones and muscles spread more than is physically possible. Her fingers are tight on my flesh, and I’m aware of the imperfections I’ve developed the last few months: the slight shift in ratio from muscle to fat, the extra few fractions of an inch that the costume mistress will measure in our upcoming fitting, the laziness of my hips not wanting to turn all the way out, the half-second lag in my feet. An almost invisible change, but not to someone like Morkie who has been poking and prodding every inch of my body since I was six. “This is not the way a dancer moves,” Morkie says at last.
My muscles scream with pain. Her hands move to my hips, forcing them open. Then she puts a palm to my shoulder blades, pressing until they touch behind my back. “You work harder.” Everyone can hear her. Their faces all light up, dozens of pairs of eyes twinkling at my humiliation.
“Yes, madame.”
I do not blush. I do not tremble.
“One more time.” The edge in her voice is cutting, but there’s kindness in her eyes. Or if not kindness, then certainly generosity. She wants me to do well.
She claps her hands, the music starts, she calls out what she wants my body to do, and I do it. I watch my body in the mirror like it’s someone else’s, and for a full three minutes, I am a prima ballerina again. I am long limbs and a blond halo and alabaster skin. I am a series of perfect shapes, slipping into each other: a curve to an arrow-straight line to a wide V shape to an impossible slope in my back. Morkie claps again when she has seen enough of this series.
“There she is.” A smirk plays at her lips, and her eyes betray what her touch will not. I know I’m back. And that at least one person is happy about that fact.
It’s way past midnight and Eleanor still hasn’t come to the room. She’s avoiding me again. She’s been mostly missing every night this week since I got back, doing her homework in the hall lounge, dancing late into the night, crawling into bed hours after I’m asleep. She’s pulling the same thing tonight, creeping in now, quietly pulling on her pajamas, not even brushing her teeth for fear of waking me. For fear of having to even speak to me. For fear of confrontation.
But I’m not sleeping. Tonight, she’s going to have to talk.
“What the hell, Eleanor?” I sit up in bed. She startles, stumbling as she gets the nightshirt over her head. “You’ve been avoiding me for days.”
I’m halfway across the room when she rushes to the bathroom, locking herself inside. I just don’t understand it. I didn’t push Gigi, and even Gigi knows that; most of the other girls have been cordial, if not friendly. But here’s my best friend since we were six, avoiding me like I’m the most disgusting person on earth.
I bang on the bathroom door. “Open up. We have to talk.”
“Why wouldn’t I avoid you, Bette?” Her snappy voice is one I’ve never heard before. It radiates through the door. “You come back here—with your big surprise—and think everything’s going to be the same again.”
“Why can’t it be?”
She comes slamming through the door, and I can see she’s shaking. But I’m right in her path, and I’m not letting her walk away. Not this time.
“I’m not your friend anymore. I’m not that person you can boss around again.”
“I tried to fix it all. I tried to tell you what was happening. You wouldn’t answer my calls.” I’m balling my fists. “Even the lawyers—”
“I don’t want to hear about you and your innocence and your lawyers. You knew you’d be fine. You’re Bette. You’re always fine. Before you’re even back, you land Odile. I’ve worked for years and do everything I can, you don’t even know—”
“I know.” I let the words stand and take on a life of their own.
“You don’t know. You don’t know anything—”
“No, listen, I’m telling you. I know.” She’s staring at me hard, desperate, trying to erase what I’ve just said, its implications. “I know everything.”
I hold her gaze. “I know about Mr. K.”
A thousand emotions wash over her face: anger, sadness, confusion, disbelief. And finally embarrassment. “You can’t. How could you? Did you—”
“I saw you with him. On Halloween. And then again at the hospital.”
“Did he see you?”
“No, he didn’t. I didn’t let him. Eleanor, you’ve got to—”
“It’s nothing. It was just . . . You don’t know anything. He’s like a father to me, he worries, ever since—it’s nothing at all.” She turns her back to me, her shoulders shaking with sobs.
“I don’t believe you, Eleanor.” I’m just inches away from her, and I want to hug her, but I can sense that it would be the wrong thing to do right now.
I step closer to her. My hand touches her shoulder. Her panic rises again. She’s shoving me away, then lunging at me. She’s full of rage, her nails clawing the flesh of my wrists, digging deep enough to draw blood. I back up all the way near our beds, until there’s no place left to go.
“Listen to me.” I grab her hands, her shoulders, making her stop, trying to get her to focus. She shoves me all the way to our room door. My head bangs against it. The pain shoots through me. “I know. It’s okay. I told you, I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m not going to say anything.” She’s crumbling to the floor, so I go down with her. “It’s okay, Eleanor,” I whisper into her hair. “It’s over, right? It’s done with? So no one has to know.”
As much as it might thrill me to finally get back at Mr. K for all the years of torture he’s put me through—and everything he still has planned for me—this time, I mean it. I’ll keep Eleanor’s secret as if it were my own. I need her to need me. I need her to want to be my friend again. “It’s me, Eleanor. It’s Bette. You know I wouldn’t—”
“Oh, but you would. You will.” She’s still shaking, snot running down her tear-streaked face. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to work this hard, to have to give all of yourself over to get just a tiny fraction of what you want. You’ve never known that, and you never will.”
She stands, her fury fueling her as she storms past me, bumping against the chair and the desk as she throws her body toward the bathroom again, slamming the door behind her. I can hear the cries on the other side of the door, the shattering sound of tears no one can stop, and all the power I felt the last few days, weeks, years, drains out of me. All this time, I’m realizing now, I was so focused on me. Even today, even just now, as Eleanor devolved into an ocean right there in front of me. I was worried about what this meant for me: my hold on Mr. K, the safety net of my friendship with her. I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I never do. And that, I realize, could just cost me my best friend.
27.
June
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, I WRAP myself up in my warmest scarf, hat, and gloves, and take the 1 train downtown, switching to the N at Times Square. Even now, I’m startled by the grime and the crowds. I haven’t ridden the subway in forever, even though we’re in the heart of Manhattan. My life is set in a four-block radius around campus.