It’s the first thing that pops to mind. I hadn’t been thinking about it. Not really. But it’s next Friday, and people are making plans and I want to know his.
“I don’t want to. I mean, I wouldn’t, but Ellie—she really wants to go since it’s our last year.” He sighs. “So I told her I would.”
“Oh.” God. Of course he’s going with her. “Right.”
“Look, I hate these things,” he says. My eyes fixate on the piece of hair hanging in his face, next to his ear. The same ear that I’ve kissed. “I wish I didn’t have to go . . . I wish I could be with you instead.”
“You could,” I say. With so much hopefulness it makes me sick.
He pushes his boot against a pile of hard, grimy snow. “You know I can’t cancel on her now. She . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence and when I don’t say anything, he says, “I should get going.”
Sort of distractedly.
Sort of in a way that squeezes my heart.
And it must be all over my face, because there’s a rueful note to his tone as he says, “I have to meet Ellie. I’d give you a ride to your car, but—”
“I don’t need a ride.” I dig my gloves from my pockets so I’ll have something to do besides think about how I just sounded too proud.
“Theo.”
I’m not fooling either one of us, so I stop fiddling with my gloves and look at him.
“This doesn’t change anything, okay?” His gray eyes are tender as they meet my gaze. “I want to see you as much as possible, but she can’t know about us.”
Right. I told him I could handle this. I promised I could share. So when he says, “We’re still cool?” I nod and let him hug me and I squeeze my eyes closed very, very tight as my nose presses into his chest.
And it’s a good thing I manage to keep it together as I walk back around the building after we’ve said our goodbyes, because I forgot my dance bag. I’ll have to go back in the studio and I can’t let anyone there see me cry. I’ve always prided myself on not crying so they won’t see me as weak. Especially Marisa. And it’s hard to keep it in sometimes, but I’m not about to break my fourteen-year streak now.
I run into Ruthie at the door. My dance bag is saddled over her right arm, on top of her own, and her face lights up when she sees me. “Oh, good. I was just about to call you. I wasn’t sure if you’d already left . . .”
She looks around vaguely, but she’s obviously looking for Hosea. I don’t take the bait. Instead, I take my bag from her and I say, “Thanks, Ruthie,” and when she offers me a ride I say yes right away.
Ruthie lives in River Forest, the next town over from Ashland Hills, so I’m not that far out of her way. Besides, the walk to the station would be brutal—I’ve only been outside for a few minutes and my toes are already going numb.
Ruthie and I start walking across the lot and down the street toward her car. I expect the first question out of her mouth to be about Hosea, but she surprises me when she says, “Do you ever think about giving up on this? All of it?”
I stare at her in stunned silence for a second. “Ballet?”
“Well, I don’t mean soccer.” Ruthie retrieves a pair of red wool gloves from her coat. “Yes, ballet. The summer intensives, the hours in the studio . . . What would you do if you didn’t dance?”
I give her a funny look. “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Me either.” Ruthie clicks the remote on her car and we get in after it beeps at us. Then she turns on the heater and buckles her seat belt. “Is that weird? That we don’t know how to do anything else?”
I shrug, reach behind me to pull my own seat belt across my chest. “I don’t think so.”
“It just seems like everyone else has been involved in, like, a million things since we were kids,” she says, waving her hands in front of the vents as she waits for the car to warm up. “Sports and music and clubs.”
“Yeah, but they always end up dropping them to focus on something,” I say. “We just knew what we wanted to do a long time ago.”
“But what if we were meant to do something else? We’ll never know.” She pauses, runs a hand through her golden curls as she looks at me. “Don’t you ever wonder if you should have been . . . I don’t know, a gymnast or a volleyball player or something?”
“Is this about summer intensives?” I look at the key chain dangling from Ruthie’s rearview mirror. A single, miniature satin pointe shoe, as perfectly sculpted as the ones we wear in class.
Ruthie checks her mirrors, turns on her lights, and pulls out of the metered space on the street. “No. I don’t know. I want it. I really do. But what if I fail? Or what if I make it and I’m the worst one in my program? Everyone will think it’s a pity spot and no one will ever take me seriously.”
“Ruthie.” I roll my eyes. “You’d never be a pity spot. I don’t even think they give out pity spots. Tons of people audition every year. They don’t have the room.”
“I’m not sure how much that means, coming from the teacher’s pet.”
I say nothing and she’s silent for a while. Pulling her curls out in a straight line and letting them spring back to her head. Flipping through songs on the radio for so long I want to slap her hand away from the dial. I’ve started to think she’s forgotten I’m in the car at all when she says, “At least ballet will get me out of this place. I don’t care if I have to dance for a company in the fucking Appalachian Mountains. I’m leaving.”
“What happened now?”
“Nothing new,” she sighs. “I’m just tired of always being on everyone’s bad side. I need a fresh start.”
“Just one more year of high school,” I say. “Unless you make it into preprofessional and then you can leave even sooner.”
“But what if I don’t?” Ruthie’s eyes are on the road ahead, but I can see the fear behind them and the thought of Ruthie being scared scares me. I didn’t think she was afraid of anyone or anything in the world. “What if I don’t get in anywhere? Not even a summer program? Then what? I stick around here and go to DePaul and meet even more people I hate? I can’t do that, Cartwright. I can’t.”
“I’m scared, too.” I flick my index finger against the pointe shoe hanging from the mirror, watch it bob back and forth as we travel along the dark expressway. “Really scared.”
I catch a glimpse of her narrowed blue eyes as she glances at me. “Of what?”
“Everything you just said. And . . . making the wrong decisions. Fucking everything up.”
I pinch myself. Above the elbow this time. Hard. My mouth is moving faster than my brain.
“Making the wrong decisions. Hello, vague city. Aren’t we all afraid of that?”
I ignore her smirk and ask, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
I slide my hand up my throat to make sure I’m the one talking. Tiny vibrations pulse beneath my fingertips, so I guess it is me. Ruthie is saying something back, so it had to be me.
“If this is a blackmail scheme, Cartwright, you’re being pretty transparent right now.” She moves to turn down the heat and I wish she could also turn back this conversation so I never asked that question.
“I wouldn’t do that.” I look at a champagne-colored mini-
van in the lane next to me on the expressway. The interior is lit up by a rectangle hanging between the front and back seats. A DVD player, but I can’t tell what it’s playing or who’s watching. “I just want to know. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Ruthie tilts her head to the side, sucks in her bottom lip, and pushes it back out. “If you tell anyone this, I will murder you. That’s not a figure of speech. I will track you down wherever you’re dancing and pretend to care how you’re doing, but I’ll really be there to poison you.”