Authors: Stasia Ward Kehoe

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Stories in Verse, #Love & Romance, #Performing Arts, #Dance

Audition (36 page)

BOOK: Audition

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In the back of the bus on the way home,

Remington sits beside me.
A grin hovers on his lips.
He laces his fingers playfully through mine,
Tilts his head.

I blush remembering my half-taken step
Toward Professor O’Malley,
Feeling the uncertain power
Of my words on the page.
I force the guilty image from my mind and, instead, accept
Remington’s familiar invitation,

Endure his kisses, always too slippery,
Too wet.
His huge, wrapping embrace
Presses my shoulders.

Is he as changed
As I
By the storming applause
For the “Country Duet”?

The bus swerves around a sharp corner.
Brakes screech.
I slide across the green leather seat
Away from him.

Before he pulls me back,
I wipe the wetness from my lips,
Straighten my top.

“Remington?”

“Huh?” He’s lighthearted,
Curling my legs across his lap.

The road straightens.
I see clearly as if they were typed
Onto the page of a book,
Two lines,
A question:

“Do you want a ballerina
Or a woman?”

I feel his body stop
His hand drops onto my leg.
He gives a little laugh,

The kind he used against Paul’s questioning glares
At our first embrace months ago,
Across the table at Denardio’s.

“What do you mean, Sara?”

My name coming from his lips
Makes me shudder
But I will not let him
See me cry.
“That’s your answer?”

Rem rubs his hand against
The five-o’clock stubble forming
Along his jaw.
Looks past my shoulder out the window.

“Did you hear that applause today?”

My head is as cloudy as the night I never went to the movies
With Madison and Bonnie, but instead
Raced up the stairs to Remington’s place.

I feel reckless, drunk, insane.
I want to grab his face,
Point his eyes at me,
Make him look.

“Why did you give my dance to Lisette?”

Now he turns away from the window,
Back to me, his endless lashes doing nothing
To soften the hardness in his brown eyes.

“It’s not your dance.”

In the months that she’s been driving me

Along the avenues of Jersey,
Ruby Rappaport has had a dozen fights
With Adnan but

I don’t think they have been anything like what happened
Between Rem and me
On the bus last night.

He is late to dance class on Monday,

Slipping in when the rest of us are already
Circling our legs in ronds de jambe.

I watch Remington’s slow pliés
From the corner of my eye
Until Yevgeny’s sharp critique of my timing
Jolts me back to my own dance.

After barre, we move to center, where
Yevgeny sets a brisk series of jumps across the floor.
Tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, assemblé.
Chassé, chassé, chassé, tour jeté.

The dancers prepare, stepping through the combination
In bits and pieces, in silence.
I stand still, listen to the soft shushes and dull thuds
Of dancing before the music.
It’s rhythmless and disjointed,
Full of false starts, abrupt stops,
Like Remington, alone in the small studio,
Or dancing round the corners of his dark apartment
With me.

I know I did not, could not have woven
The complex tapestry of hands over hands, and lifts to turns,
Or matched the steps and counts
That made the duet
Lisette and Fernando performed,
Yet

I know I am some part of that fabric—
There was some reason Rem wanted
To tangle his fingers with mine
And draw my legs across his lap
In the back of the bus last night.

After Variations class,
Fernando passes a group of us in the hall,
Suggests Denardio’s.

Rem glances my way for one quick beat, turns to Fernando,
Nods.
Paul and Don and Galina
Agree.

I say I have too much homework
To spare the time.

Julio is putting his guitar away

When Señor and I get home.

“Cards?” he asks.

The question feels so normal, so mundane,
I can only shake my head, refuse,
In silence so the tears won’t escape
Before I reach the safety, solitude, home
Of musty carpet, slippery quilt.

I leave my blazer in my room on Tuesday,

Parade through the halls of Upton
Bereft of burgundy adornment,
Hoping someone will catch me, stop me,
Tell me what to do.
But the headmaster is not in his office when I walk by.

In math tutorial, I try
But the numbers blur
Too much in my heart to add
Together.

I put away my pencil.
Take out a pen.
Write on a fresh piece of paper:

“I will never go back
To Remington’s bed.”

In clear, blue ink.
Words
To make it
Real.

Rem and Jane are talking in the doorway

Of her office
Before class in the afternoon.
They seem to freeze as I pass.

I can’t resist turning back to them
Before I go into the dressing room.

A few minutes later, Jane comes through the door.
“He wants to talk to you.”

Her eyes look half victorious yet half sorry
So I can’t sort out what Remington could have told her
About our country duet—whether he had any interest
In discussing it with me or if Jane,
With her health-care-professional practicality,
Just told him that he should.

“He wants a lot of things,” I say.

Jane laughs
The kind of laugh
You’re supposed to join in with
If your heart isn’t an open blister,
Raw and bleeding inside a new pointe shoe.

In Variations class, Yevgeny partners me

With Remington.
I lose my balance
At the first touch of his hand,
Our duet an impossible attempt
At an impossible conversation.

It’s a slow, languorous dance
From Balanchine’s
Four Temperaments,
With its strange, discordant music
That captures some part of what used to be
Between Remington and me
But maybe never truly was
Or slowly faded, a drawing curtain, a song
Dwindling to silence—

Sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholy.

Like the moods, the fateful journey
Of Milton’s Adam and Eve
Traveling from paradise
To another kind of dance for two.