How It Feels to Fly (3 page)

“Thanks, Dominic,” Dr. Lancaster says. “Anyone else?”

With a little nudging, Omar talks about playing George Gibbs in a regional theater company's production of
Our Town
last year. “It was my first dramatic role,” he says. He moves as lot as he talks, shifting in his seat and pulling at the neck of his shirt. “Before that, I was just the scrawny, dorky kid who used to be in those cereal commercials. But after
Our Town
, I guess people knew what I could do onstage.”

Then Jenna remembers the first time she landed her triple-loop, triple-toe-loop combination in competition. “I worked on it for months,” she tells us, smoothing back a strand of black hair that's come loose from her slick ponytail. “It was exciting to stick it.”

Zoe talks about playing tennis with her older brother when they were both kids. It's kind of sweet until she says, “And then my parents basically made tennis my job. Flash-forward to me getting stuck here with you crazies. Which is
awesome
.” She gives us a sarcastic thumbs-up.

I'm the only one left to speak. My mouth is dry. I can feel tension creeping up from my lower back, wrapping around my shoulder blades, gripping my neck. But I push all that aside. This isn't the time to use my “pass.” Not yet. Not
when we're talking about
good
memories. I say, “
Nutcracker
last December. I was alternating Dewdrop Fairy with one of the other girls. A senior.”

“I'm sure you were exquisite,” Dr. Lancaster says.

Exquisite—the last word anyone would use to describe you—

“Thanks.”

“What made this performance so special?” Dr. Lancaster asks.

It wasn't special. You're nothing special.

“It was the best I've ever danced. Everyone said so. My mom was so proud. It was like I wasn't
playing
the Dewdrop Fairy, I
was
a fairy. Light and sparkling and—”

“Light and sparkling?” Zoe's eyes are rolled up so far into her head, they're about to fall out the back of her skull. “You can't be serious.”

“Zoe.” Dr. Lancaster points at the rules on the wall again but keeps her focus on me. I think that's supposed to be comforting, but it makes me want to become invisible. “What were you thinking about and feeling before that show?” she asks me.

“I—I was excited. I was thinking about how lucky I was to have the part. How much I wanted to dance it well. Do the choreography justice. And I felt . . .” I fade out. I've gone one step further than I wanted to go.

“You felt . . . ?” Dr. Lancaster prompts.

I spit it out all in one breath: “I felt really pretty in my costume.”

Maybe you felt pretty. But you weren't. You aren't. You never will be.

“Thank you, Sam,” Dr. Lancaster says. She turns away from me. I close my eyes and try to get my equilibrium back.

And then Andrew puts his hand on my shoulder. A jolt runs through me, like he's pinned me to my chair. I'm one of those butterflies in a frame. Caught and put on display. I don't look at him, but I feel him lean closer. “Thanks for sharing that, Sam,” he says in a low voice. He leaves his hand there a second longer, and then drops it to his lap.

“So. When you did your best—” Dr. Lancaster starts ticking things off on her fingers. “You felt prepared to compete or perform. You were thinking about entertaining your audience or your fans. You had fun. You were in a no-pressure scenario. Or less pressure than usual. You felt grateful for the chance to be doing what you love. And your self-image was good. Right?”

Heads nod around the room.

“Over the next three weeks, we'll be working to help you get those feelings back. Whatever you're going through now, there's no reason you can't experience those happy moments again.” Dr. Lancaster nods to Yasmin, who stands and leaves the room. “But before we dive in any further, we'll do another trust exercise. Here, you can say anything you feel. No matter how embarrassing. Or painful. Our job is to listen, not to judge you. And we're certainly not here
to tattle on you to your parents or coaches. Confidentiality is important.”

Yasmin comes back holding a bunch of bandannas and starts handing them out.

“Turn to the person next to you—it doesn't matter whether it's a camper or a peer adviser. You'll be doing this next trust exercise in pairs.”

I look to Katie, but she's already talking to Dominic. Which means Andrew is my partner.

Dr. Lancaster goes on, “In order to trust one another with your emotions and your anxieties, it can help to trust each other with your physical safety.”

“Seriously?” Zoe groans. “Trust falls? How cliché is this place?”

“We're not doing trust falls,” Dr. Lancaster says. “You and your partner will take turns being blindfolded. Your partner will guide you in exploring the grounds. It's a gorgeous morning out there, and the property we're on is gorgeous as well. I want you to be each other's eyes. Share what you're seeing, to help the other person see it. Use your words, rather than just pulling the person along. Keep each other safe. And be back here in the Dogwood Room by ten thirty. Okay?”

“What if we just . . . don't do it?” Zoe asks loudly. Next to her, Jenna lets out an exasperated sigh.

“I suppose you could say that I'm choosing to trust that you want to learn something from this experience.” Dr. Lancaster
walks over and kneels right in front of Zoe, which makes Zoe squirm in her seat. “Just try it, okay?”

After a moment, Zoe nods. But her frown deepens.

“Ready?” Andrew's standing. Waiting for me. He holds out his hand.

WE GO OUT THE FRONT
DOOR AND DOWN THE STEPS from the porch. The gravel driveway stretches out ahead of us, disappearing behind a grove of trees before it reaches the main road. We're at the edge of a small college campus—the school where Dr. Lancaster heads up the psychology department. The house we're staying in has bedrooms, meeting rooms, a kitchen, a front
and
a back porch—the works—so the school rents it out for events and retreats. And, apparently, summer camps for teenagers who are stressing themselves into the loony bin.

“Which way do you want to—” I begin, just as Andrew says, “Can we talk for a second, before we get started?”

I nod, holding back a sigh. “Go ahead.” I know what he's going to say, now that it's just the two of us. He's going to apologize for last night. Which is nice of him but doesn't mean a whole lot. Whether or not he intended to say what
he did about me never becoming a professional dancer—the words are out there. I know what he thinks of me. There's a lot of truth in the things people wish they could take back.

Sure enough: “I wanted to tell you I'm sorry, again.”

“It's okay,” I say, waiting for this moment to be over. For us to move on.

“I'm gonna make it up to you. Getting off on the wrong foot like that.”

“You don't have to—”

“Yeah. I do. I want to. I will. So . . . friends?”

I say, brightly, “Friends! Great.” My smile is on full wattage. And it does its job. Andrew looks relieved.

“So do you want to be blindfolded first? Or do you want me to start?”

“Um. You go.” I want—I need—to see what he looks like, so I'll know what to expect when it's my turn. So I can glimpse what he'll see of me. I wish I could go a step further. See what my body looks like through outside eyes. Without the filter of my own head, and without the inner voice that mocks and shouts and hisses.

Andrew ties the blindfold around his head. In the sunlight, his wavy hair is the color of wet sand. It falls over the blue blindfold like one of those sand-in-a-bottle sculptures you can make at a kiosk in the mall. But not ugly.

Frankly, nothing about Andrew is ugly. He's not my usual type—if one serious boyfriend counts as a type—but I like what I see. He's taller than me, and while he's not made of muscle, he looks like he takes care of himself. Last
night he was working the farm-boy thing in a T-shirt and faded jeans, but today he's a little more dressed up—I guess because he's in “peer adviser” mode. He's wearing a deep-green polo shirt tucked into a pair of khaki pants. And he—

“Uh, Sam? You have to say something.”

I feel my face flush.

Nice. You're checking him out, and he just wants to get on with it
.

“Sorry!” I say, with a little laugh that rings wrong in my ears. But thinking about how Andrew is cute in a different way than Marcus is cute has me doing exactly what I don't want to be doing—thinking about Marcus—and now I'm feeling wobbly. Wobbli
er
. It's like I'm walking a tightrope, and on one side is outer me and on the other is inner me, and if I fall, the whole circus tent is going to collapse.

Everything's already collapsed. You're delusional if you think otherwise.

“Sorry,” I say again fast, almost to myself. I look in all directions and then choose the sidewalk that cuts around the side of the house, past the row of pine trees, heading toward the campus woods. “Turn to your right.”

Andrew swings right and almost walks into the lamppost at the foot of the stairs.

“Whoa, stop!” I run to his side, grabbing his arm. His bicep tightens under my grip like he's surprised I touched him. I let go and step back, feeling even more flustered. “Um. Turn back to the left.” Andrew inches left. “A little more. A little more. Now walk straight.”

He takes a step, arms extended in front of him. Another
step. And another. Like each time, he's not sure whether the ground will rise up to meet him. When we get into a rhythm, he starts making conversation. “So, where are you from?”

“Outside Chattanooga,” I say. “You?”

“North Georgia. Small town. You won't know it. Trust me.”

We turn the corner and I start describing what's in front of us, like Dr. Lancaster instructed. “We're going around the side of the house. By the woods. There's a big grassy field, and then a bunch of redbrick campus buildings. You can see the mountains in the distance.”

Perform at Your Peak is in North Carolina, which means my home is on the other side of those mountains. So is the ballet intensive I'll start three weeks from today.

If they don't kick you out the moment they see you.

“There's a greenhouse to our right,” I continue, trying not to let my inner voice derail me. “With a vegetable garden. And there's a gazebo in front of us. Set back in the woods a little. Looks like no one's gone over there yet.”

“Oh yeah, the gazebo. Let's go check it out.”

His words make me pause. He's been here before. I'd forgotten. “This is weird,” I tell him.

“What's weird?”

“I'm describing stuff to you that you've already seen.”

“It was three years ago,” he jokes. “I barely remember.”

“Still.”

“It's not really about the landscape, Sam,” he says, his
voice growing earnest. “It's about learning to trust each other.”

“Right. Okay.” I guide him off the path and across the lawn. Andrew keeps his arms held stiffly out in front of him. That, plus his polo and khakis and his slow progress forward, makes him look like a preppy zombie.

“So, what year are you?” he asks.

“I'll be a junior. What year are you?”

“I'll be a junior too. But in college, obviously.”

“Oh. Right.” The age difference between us: another thing that separates Andrew from Marcus.

Stop thinking about Marcus. He dumped you. Get over it.

“So, do you like college?” I ask Andrew, wincing right away at how young the question makes me sound. “I mean, do you like the University of Georgia?”

“Yeah, it's great.”

“Even after you quit football?”

“Yeah. It has a lot more to offer than that. Though it's a great football school, for sure. You a football fan?”

The question is so absurd that I actually laugh out loud. “Um, no.”

“Your loss.” Andrew flashes his warm smile in my direction. But since he's blindfolded, it looks like he's smiling at the trees over my left shoulder. “Anyway, I still like watching football. I go to all the home games. I just didn't want to play anymore.”

“How come?” I ask. “I heard what you said in there, but . . .”

“I spent way too long letting my dad run the show. With him, I never had a choice. He put me in peewee when I was nine—that was the earliest my mom would let me play—and we never looked back. Playing in high school and college was a given. But when I got to UGA, it was like a lightning bolt: I
did
have a choice. Dr. Lancaster said something similar to me when I was here, but I didn't really
get
it until I wasn't living at home anymore, you know?”

“So you were just . . . done? Just like that?”

“You make it sound so easy. But believe me, there was time between deciding and quitting. Took me all of fall semester to get up the nerve.”

As he's been talking, I've been studying his features, framed by that sandy hair. The furrow in his brow above the blindfold. A small, white scar on his chin, just off center. Thin lips, which he presses together tightly before going on:

“You said last night your mom was a dancer?”

“She was in the corps de ballet at a small company in Virginia. But not long after she met my dad, she broke her ankle.”

“It ended her career?”

“Yeah. It didn't heal properly.”

“Too bad.”

“It's scary, how one wrong move can screw everything up.” I shudder a little. “But then my parents got married and my mom got pregnant. As soon as I was old enough, she put me in ballet classes, and I turned out to love it as much as she did.”

“It's good she's supportive of your dancing.”

“She totally is.”

“As long as she supports you in whatever you want to do. When I quit football, my dad about had a heart attack. Threatened to stop paying my tuition. My mom changed his mind on that one real fast.”

I can't imagine what my mom would do if I decided to quit ballet. Luckily, I plan to never find out. “So why did you decide to come back and be a peer adviser here?”

“Fall of sophomore year, I took Intro to Psychology as a gen-ed. It made me remember being here, working with Dr. Lancaster, so I thought, why not major in psych? And then this past spring, Dr. Lancaster emailed and mentioned that she was looking for a guy and a girl to work here this summer, so I signed up. I'm actually getting college credit. I have to write a paper about this place.” He turns his head in my direction. “Everything I talk about with y'all is confidential, obviously. My essay is more about Dr. Lancaster's methods.”

We keep walking and chatting until we reach the gazebo. Then I get back to describing what he can't see. The white paint, peeling, with the natural wood showing through. The three stairs leading up to the center platform. The rail around the platform that looks like a picket fence. The high ceiling with abandoned birds' nests in the eaves.

He listens, and he walks, running his hand along the side of the structure. Just as I'm describing how there's a path that goes back into the woods, he reaches up and pulls off the blindfold.

“Hey! No cheating.” I say it like a joke, but the truth is, the instant he can see me again, I'm nervous. It was so much easier to talk to him with his eyes covered.

“I'm not cheating. It's your turn.” He waves the bandanna at me, grinning.

I grin back, even as my anxiety bubbles up. I take the bandanna from Andrew and lift it to my face. The world goes dark. I have trouble tying the knot at the back of my head. My fingers fumble with the fabric.

“Here. I got it.” Andrew's hands brush mine as he takes the blindfold. I drop my arms and stand totally still as he ties the ends together. He's right behind me. It's a little unnerving, and a little . . . something else. I feel his breath at the back of my neck—or was it the wind?

I wonder what I look like to him right now. How he's looking at me when I can't look back. What he thinks when he sees my body up close.

Your enormous thighs. That muffin top you think you're hiding. The way your bra pinches in, giving you back fat. Fat fat fat fat—

I want to curl inward, to shrink. But I force myself to stand tall.

“Okay!” I say, and again my voice rings out like a sour note. “I'm ready!”

He's staring at you. He's disgusted by you.

I make fists, digging my nails into my palms.

“Turn around halfway,” Andrew says.

“Halfway? Like, a hundred and eighty degrees?”

“What is this—math class? Yeah, a hundred and eighty degrees. Give or take.”

I rotate my right leg out at the hip until my feet are in a perfect first position: heels together, toes pointed in opposite directions. Planting my right foot, I rotate to face it.

Andrew lets out a snort of laughter.

He's laughing at you he's laughing at you he's laughing at you he's laughing—

“Why didn't I think of that?” he says. “Note to self: ballet feet. Nice.” I hear him move away, the crunch of weight on twigs getting softer. “Okay, ten steps toward my voice, straight ahead. We're going around the other side of the gazebo. It, uh, looks the same as the part you showed me earlier.”

We move like that, a few feet at a time, his deep voice pulling me toward him. The dirt and twigs of the woods give way to mown lawn. A breeze brushes my face and a blade of grass tickles my ankle. I feel the sunlight on my shoulders.

Just as I start to think this isn't so bad, I take a step forward and my foot doesn't meet the ground—not right away. I land, hard, a few inches down. I feel the jolt in my knee, in my hip, in my teeth.

At first, I'm stunned. Then—the flip of a switch—I'm freaking out.

I hear Andrew's voice: “Whoa, are you okay?”

I rip off the blindfold. “What was that?”

“A step down I should've warned you about?” He squats
to look at the dip where I'm standing. “Sorry, I totally missed it. Looks like a groundhog hole or something.”

“Do you know what could've happened?” Now I'm panic-breathing, in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out, thinking about the possibilities: a sprained ankle, a stress fracture, a broken toe, a torn ACL, a pulled hamstring. “I just told you that an injury ended my mom's dance career. And then you drop me into a huge hole and say ‘sorry'?”

“Are you hurt?” He stands, reaching toward me.

I step back. “I'm not. But I could've been! And it would've been your fault!”

I know I'm overreacting. But once the panic breath starts, it's all downhill. My mind is racing. I can't control it.

It doesn't matter if you get injured. Your dance career is a fantasy. It's a joke.

I need to go somewhere quiet. Somewhere no one will see if I lose it completely.

Your dreams are a joke. Your body is a joke. You are a joke.

There's no time to get away. No time to hide. I crouch, wrap my arms around my body, and squeeze everything. My forearms across my chest. My knees together. My eyes closed.

You're a joke. A disappointment. You should be so ashamed of yourself—

“Sam! Sam!”

That snaps me out of it.

I look up. Andrew's eyes are wide.

“I'm going to get Dr. Lancaster,” he says. “Stay here.
No, wait—come with me. Can you walk? Never mind, you should probably stay here. Or—”