Not Otherwise Specified (14 page)

“Yeah, because you're so concerned with what I do.”

“We just saw you on the bus and then did a little investigating,” she says, with this voice like “investigating” is the most disgusting thing she could say, when it's about me. You'd think she was saying “blow jobs” by the way she says each syllable like she can't stand to have it in her mouth any longer.

“Well, mission accomplished, then.” I root around my locker for my books. It still smells like dead chickens in here.

“So we have that figured out,” she says. “Now we're just wondering about that girl you were with.”

I close the door and spin my lock. “What girl?”

“Come on, you fucking know what girl.”

“Why do you care?”

“Are you fucking her?”

“Like I would tell you if I was.”

“It would be in your best interests to.”

“Oh yeah? And why's that?”

“Because,” she says. “Because Rachel's the one who wanted to know.”

I stick my tongue into my cheek. “So you're Rachel's little errand girl, huh?
Ouch.
”

It happens before I have time to react, because I wasn't expecting it, Natasha's arm coming down hard on my collarbone and slamming me back into the lockers. She holds me
there, forearm right under my neck, her nails digging into my shoulder.

Ouch.

“That's better than what you are,” Natasha says. “She doesn't even love you anymore.”

“That's not true,” I say, before I realize that I should have said
I don't care
.

Natasha rolls her eyes and lets me go. “She probably just wanted you to find some new girl so she could stop worrying that you'd die alone. Not like you can keep a boy, right?”

“How's that virginity treating you, Tasha?” It's a low blow, and it's not like I actually think being a virgin is a problem. I just think being Tasha is a problem, and her virginity happens to be topical.

Plus it never, ever fails to rile her up. “Bite me,” she says.

“You'd love if I did.”

She spits in my hair—stay classy, Tasha—and saunters away. Yeah, whatever, because it's hard to get that nonchalant thing back when everyone here just saw you shove the pariah into a locker.

I rub my collarbone a little and check my watch. It's one thirty. Rachel has study period next, and she always spends the first five minutes of it in the third-floor bathroom brushing her hair and doing her insulin shot. I don't even know for sure if she's here today, though.

Can't hurt to check.

•  •  •

“Did you send Natasha to interrogate me?”

Rachel barely looks up. She pushes the plunger down on the needle, pulls the needle out, rubs the spot on her stomach. When I was ten I learned how to give her shots just in case, but I've never had to. For some reason I'm right now obsessed with the idea that maybe Natasha has at some point. I'm so
weird
.

“I didn't send her to interrogate you,” she says eventually. “I sent her because I was worried about you.”

“You don't have to be worried about me. I'm fine. I got a second audition.”

She looks away from the mirror, where she was examining her teeth. “That's great, Etta.”

She still does it to me. “Thanks.”

“Did that girl you were with get one too?”

Here we go. “Her name's Bianca. And yeah.”

“Are you guys . . .”

“Why do you care, Ray?”

And why don't I just say
no
? Is it because I wish that I were? Is it because I think on some level we
are
?

No, I think it's because if Rachel knew I wasn't, she wouldn't have any interest in talking to me. I think it's because standing in a bathroom arguing with her is the closest I've felt to her in months.

“She looked . . . young.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“And she looked sick.”

“Sick” is coded here. I'm not an idiot.

Rachel says, “Listen, obviously it's your life or whatever and you know what you're doing, and if she makes you happy, that's all that matters.”

Pause to consider the fact that me dating a fourteen-year-old anorexic is okay but me dating a guy is not.

Rachel. What are you even
doing
? You can't really care this much about this shit. You just can't. I don't think the Dykes are even thinking about it anymore as much as they're just following through with what they started. Isabel insulting my shoes is not really topical to me sleeping with a guy.

“You've just been doing really well, and I just want you to think about if this is healthy for you,” Rachel says, and like, how the hell would she know if I'm doing well? Is she just judging by the fact that I haven't lost any weight? But I can't be too mad about it because the truth is, yeah, I am doing really well. It's screwed up and horrible sometimes and some days it's a million times harder than just starving would be but I'm doing it, and the most ridiculous part of this entire intervention is that one of the biggest reasons I'm being so good about recovery is for Bianca. I mean, Jesus,
fourteen
. She needs a good influence. And I've already messed up pretty bad with Kristina—
hey, little sis, cover for me while I puke in our childhood bathroom
—so yeah, maybe this is my second chance.

Rachel climbs up onto the sinks and sits there. We're ten
years old again, all of a sudden. “I don't want you slipping again,” she says. “I think it's important that you keep your eye on what's important, you know? But if she makes you happy, that's really good, Etta. You should be with a girl who makes you happy.”

You should be with a
girl
who makes you happy.

“We're not ten,” I say.

“What?”

“You and me. We're not ten.
I'm
not ten. I could fall back in love with Sherrie whatever her last name was—”

“Sher.”

“Her name was not Sherrie Sher.”

“It really was.”

“Well all right, being Mrs. Sherrie Sher wouldn't bring me back to who I was. I could date all the girls in the world and it's still not going to change the fact that when you look at me you see a guy on top of me.”

It's still about that to Rachel.

I know her.

She really cares about this shit.

“Etta . . .”

“So why are we even pretending like this redemption thing is possible? You guys dumped me. I'm dealing with it. Are you?”

I don't know what I was expecting, but it was not for Rachel to be off the counter, to be on the floor with me, to have her
hands in my hair and her forehead bent down to mine—what is with these girls with their hands on me today? Except this is so not Natasha. This is so, so different from Natasha.

She kisses me, for a long time. It's not a deep kiss, not a sexy kiss. That would be a lot easier.

“Shut up,” she says. “Okay? Just shut up.”

I do, for a while, just listen to her breathing and feel her touching me.

Eventually I say, “I'm taking care of her. Bianca. And she's getting better. She's in group with me.”

Rachel nods. My face moves with hers. “That's good. That's really good.”

“
She's
good.” I don't know why I say this next part. “You'd really like her.”

The thing is, I think that she would.

The thing is that Rachel has good taste and her kissing me makes me feel beautiful again.

And it would be one of the last things she'd ever want to inspire, but feeling like that is enough to make me go home after school and dig my toe shoes out of the backyard.

I PUT MY SHOES ON
and practice just standing up, flexing my ankles around, taking small steps around the room. I'm in my carpeted bedroom, so it's pretty stupid, but at least this gives me an excuse to do a shitty job, which I kind of do.

I feel so stupid about doing this. The goal right now should be to ace this next audition, and there's absolutely no way ballet is going to help me there. The dancing, if there even is any at this stage—Bianca says last time she got to second round, it was just singing—is just going to be another step combination. The next time I'd really use ballet would be if I got into the school—a school that, I've always known, has a pretty mediocre dance program—and if I can't sing, I can't get into the school. I should really be applying to dance schools.

Oh.

I should be applying to dance schools.

I've been putting it off because I really don't think I could take being surrounded by ballerinas all the time. Even when I was pre-professional, I kind of hated it. I don't think I can look at them and know how much prettier they are than me and how much an audience would rather watch them move around, these tall lean girls that form straight lines and swoop through the air, than watch all however-many-pounds-of-me jiggle her way through tours chaînés déboulés. You're not supposed to look at a girl's body when she dances, not in that way. She's supposed to be unobtrusive. She's supposed to just be part of the music, and here I come in all attention-grabbing and ETTAETTAETTA and you can make that sound as awesome and special-snowflakey as you want but at the end of the day that's not what people want ballerinas to be. Rachel knew that, saw that pressure getting to me. That's why I quit.

Except I keep dancing and then I go over to my computer and look up ballet schools in New York City (I haven't done this in years, seriously, but it takes me right back to being that little twelve-year-old drinking her strawberry milk and staring at these same damn web pages, flexing her feet under the desk) and I think, okay, I'm going to table that. That's a thing. Waiting until college to get out, after these past few weeks, is beginning to seem almost as nonviable as staying here indefinitely.

I turn on “At the Ballet” as I close the tabs about schools, a
nice segue between fantasy (ballet) and reality (practicing for the audition—yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, how is that less fantasy, shut up). Mom and Kristina are home, so I stuff pillows under the door so they won't hear me because I don't want their comments right now about how I “sounded really nice today!” because I can never tell whether or not they're telling the truth or if they just feel sorry for me, and I sing through Sheila's part like always but then I'm too busy twirling around on the floor again to go back to the beginning of the song like I usually do, and for the first time I hear the entire thing.

I don't remember the name of the girl who sings second. She doesn't say it, and I think Bianca mentioned it at some point but I only hung on to Sheila because Bianca said she was the important one. “She's the personality of the song,” Bianca said. “She has this whole monologue before it starts where she hits on the director and everything. She's awesome and untouchable and damaged. You can totally act her.”

The second girl is nice, and then there's someone else singing with her, harmonizing through a bit about everyone being beautiful at the ballet. Which is a nice sentiment and everything, except, you know, the ballet was where I wasn't pretty at all.

But when I was a kid, spinning around in my room like I am now, ballet was my entire, beautiful world.

And then all of a sudden someone's speaking. She's talking about when she was a little kid, and she had this shitty broken home but she got through it by dancing around her
living room with her arms held like she had someone to dance with, even when she didn't. She's got this New York accent and this small, honest little voice, and she doesn't sound bitter or sarcastic about her fantastic fantasy life. She's just this girl who's feeling all this shit and who still gets this big kick out of holding her arms out and was never ashamed about doing it.

There's some harmonies here, some doo doo doos, and I dance around like I'm waltzing instead of like I'm a ballerina because I'm ridiculous.

And then all of a sudden she's singing, all by herself. Maggie, she says.

Everything was beautiful at the ballet

Raise your arms, and someone's always there

She doesn't slide up to a higher note at the end of the refrain like I was expecting, like the other two girls did.

At the ballet

That one hits harder, higher.

At the ballet!

Jesus. It's a really, really,
really
high note, and she's singing it strong and solid, like a yell, like she does not give a shit about
being pretty, she just has to shoot this note out right now because she is singing about the ballet and it is wringing her out.

I try the high note, but I can't do it, not unless I do it breathy and muted and not at all how it's supposed to be. I can't do it. Which is fine, because this singing part is shorter than Sheila's and not nearly as easy to act through.

But it's not Sheila's part that I listen to over and over again as I lie flat on my bed, pointing and repointing my feet in my shoes, listening to Maggie through my headphones shouting about the ballet. Maggie. I love you, you imaginary little fantasy girl.

•  •  •

I call Bianca later to tell her about digging my shoes up and about how long it took me to listen to the whole song and is there any way she thinks I could maybe learn to hit that note before the audition next week and oh who am I kidding, I've already practiced Sheila a hundred times and this is the plan, but Bianca doesn't pick up her cell phone. I call her house instead, and this scary-proper man tells me that Bianca isn't available right now, but would I like to talk to James?

“Hey,” James says.

“Hey. Where's Bee?”

“She's here, Dad's just not letting her use the phone because apparently she disrespected him or something, I don't know.”