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“I'm thinking mainly I'm going to use this Brentwood audition as a free trip to New York. And once I'm there . . . I'm going to be there to look at ballet schools.”

He smiles at me. “Yeah?”

“You know my whole life this was what I wanted. Prima ballerina.”

“And you gave it up for Rachel.”

I shake my head. “It's not that simple. I gave it up because I . . . didn't fit.”

“Don't tell me you're talking about starving yourself again, because I'm kind of up to my ears in that.” He kisses my cheek.

“No, I just . . . I can be chubby and still be poised, you know? I was stupid for thinking it's one or the other.” I can rein my Etta-ness in while I'm onstage. I can do that. If ballet wants that, I'll give it that.

It's my best friend. If it wants me to give something up, I will.

That's how this works with me.

Something Bianca told me once is clawing at the back of my brain, though, but I can't remember what it was, so calm down, brain. Everything's fine.

I say, “So that's it, I guess. I'll see if there's somewhere I can abscond to next year, somewhere my mom might sign off on, or I'll talk to people at colleges if that's all she'll let me do.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“You'll really be okay here?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I like Nebraska.” He smiles out at Bianca. “I like the weather.”

•  •  •

I meet Mason and Ian when they get off the motorcycle. Mason watches me while he fiddles with the strap of his helmet. He can't figure out if he's keeping it on or taking it off.

I don't know what to say to him, just because I feel like everything has already been said. I didn't answer his calls. He stopped calling. There isn't anything complicated about this. There never was.

The only thing that maybe makes it harder is that I really, truly liked him, and I hope he liked me too.

I really think he did.

Does.

He stops playing with the strap on his helmet. He keeps it on. “This was fun,” he said.

I'm smiling. “Yeah. It was really fun.”

He holds out the other helmet. “Want to go for a ride?”

Yeah. I do.

•  •  •

“Are you gonna buy me something?” Bianca asks. She's balancing, toe-heel, toe-heel on the dirty ridge that separates the road from the cornfield. The corn is green now, starting to grow.

“Like what?”

“Like when my aunt went to France she brought me an Eiffel Tower snow globe.”

“I don't think they'll have any of those.”

She shoves me and loses her balance, wavers a little.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.” She keeps going. We haven't talked about what happened at the club, and I keep thinking we're going to, and then I realize there really isn't anything to say. We did all these things and felt all these things and those things exist and we are still okay. It was like cutting open a blister, and the thing is that this happened and we're still okay.

It's so weird, to really be friends with someone.

“C'mere.” I pull her up onto my back and we walk a little ways like this. This is such a stupid thing to think, and there's no way I'm saying it out loud, but she's a little heavier than I would have expected. Maybe this is the first time I've thought of her as an actual person with the weight of bones and organs and blood. When I carried her out of Cupcake she didn't weigh anything.

“Do you think you'll get in?” she says.

“Nah.” I don't tell her about ballet schools right now. I don't need to.

“What if you do? Will you go?”

“Do you think I should?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don't want me around anymore?”

She kicks at my hands with the toes of her shoes. “You'll still come home. Your family lives here.”

“I'd visit you.”

“Who says I'll be here?”

I'm cold, suddenly. I put her down. Gently.

“What does that mean?” I say.

She looks at the sky all fake-casual, like there's something up there she's more interested in than me. She squints some. I almost believe it.

She says, “I've been talking about inpatient?” like it's a question. (Like this should have ever been a question.)

“Yeah?” I try not to sound too eager. “Talking with who?”

She laughs. “Guess.”

“James?”

“No. He'd try to talk me out of it.”

It's sick that I believe that. Not sick. Just sad. That I know that however messed up Bianca is, James still thinks that just loving her enough will fix it, that there's no way they could be better apart, just for a little, than they would be together. I don't think he's wrong not to try for the audition. The chances he'd get in are tiny, anyway. He's not as good as she is. And he doesn't want her to think that there's even the smallest chance he would leave.

I say, “Okay, then who.”

“Angela.”

“Shut up, really?”

“You stopped coming to group, what else was I going to do!”

For some reason I'm really baffled that she kept going to group even when I didn't. I think a part of me still thinks that Bianca is a windup toy someone needs to crank. Maybe she is, more than she should be. But we've all got our faults, so I should stop trying to make a poem or a statement or a damn thesis out of hers.

“She thinks it would be a good idea,” Bianca says. “Everyone at the hospital was saying it too. I didn't think I'd really reached . . . that point. Any point.”

“You okay?”

She shrugs. “I want to keep going.”

“I know, baby.”

“I didn't get there.”

“To where?”

She shrugs again. “Seventy. Sixty. I don't know. Ten.”

“Hit ninety before I'm back from the audition and I'll give you a snow globe.” When weight gain happens in eating disorders, it happens fast.

“Two snow globes.”

“Brat.”

She smiles, just for a second, then says, “I don't know, Etta.”

“Where's our miracle cure, right?”

“I want to get better!” she shouts, up at the sky, and then she looks at me and says, “Why doesn't that just
work
?”

“I love you, Bee.”

“Love you.”

“If I figure it out, I'll tell you.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

We link pinkies back to the car.

The funny thing is that the Dykes would approve of this.

The funnier thing is that I don't give a shit.

I just like her.

MY MOM DRIVES ME TO
the airport. My brain has stopped going
NewYorkNewYorkNewYork
for long enough for me to remember to be scared out of my mind. I know I'm meeting up with a group when I get there, but I have no idea if any of them are on the same plane as me or how many of us there are. Five got through from my region. Four now, without James. I really wish he had gone through with this and just thrown the audition or something, just so I wouldn't be alone. Codependent pot calling the codependent kettle codependent, yeah, I know.

My mom gives me a hundred dollars “for emergencies” and hugs me before security and says, “Ugh, sweetie. Kick ass.”

She looks tired. She's keeping her sunglasses on now that we're outside so that people won't see her dark circles because
she cares what all these people will think of her. But she didn't hide them from me in the car.

I think about Bianca's parents in their pajamas and my mom here in her sharp business suit, her straight edges, and she overflows for me, you know?

She tries so hard.

She loves me so much.

I hug her tight.

•  •  •

I take Benadryl and sleep on the plane, which is lovely except for the part where I'm still kind of stupid when I get off. It takes me a while of wandering around with my bag before I find my group, and once I do I don't know how I missed them. There are these three geeky-looking adults with signs that say
BRENTWOOD AUDITIONS
and some teenagers crowded around them. Here's the part I can't believe: there's like fifty of them. At most.

Either the other regions sucked or mine encompassed more area than I thought. But . . . holy shit. I actually have a shot at this.

I could be going to a
musical theater
school.

And I'm trying to keep my focus,
I'm here for ballet, these guys are suckers for bringing me here because I'm here for ballet ballet ballet
but I blink and see myself and
Into the Woods
and
Cabaret
and
Guys and Dolls
and
A Chorus Line
, the show that maybe I'll never see.

And then a few more people show up and we walk outside and get into a bus and New York hits me like a pile of dirty beautiful bricks.

•  •  •

I'm not saying it's original or exciting. But I'm also not going to pretend like the past few months and my kinds of startling ties to a handful of these damn Nebraskans have changed how I feel. I don't know how I ever expected to fall in love with Mason, with anybody, when here was this city waiting for me.

I could go on forever. I could talk about Chelsea that changes personalities at every street or the Midtown that everyone pictures and how hushed you feel going over the Brooklyn Bridge. I could write these long emails home about
no, Mom, the Statue of Liberty is on an island but look at this pizza place, look at this restaurant of just peanut butter, look at the parts of the city that really do sleep.

But then they take us through those doors and I see that
BRENTWOOD
marquee and there are people, these normal-looking people, laughing and wearing not-uniforms and yelling across the halls of the dorms, and I hear
The Phantom of the Opera
playing from somewhere in here, and oh my God I'm not in New York, not anymore.

I'm at the damn Brentwood School.

And something in me just changed.

I think most people in our group are trying to pretend this isn't cool, or maybe they're just genuinely not freaking out as
much as I am, but I make friends with these two kids, Skyler and Stephanie, and we stand in the back of the group during our tour and dig our nails into each other's hands because holy shit did you see the size of that rehearsal room and oh my God is that a bell tower and how does everyone look so
happy
?

And then we see the girl crying in the bathroom that they try to usher us past and I'm thinking,
aha, seeing through the cracks, these people are secretly miserable, this is a manufactured tour,
and then another girl goes into the bathroom and holds her and three more come in a minute later and join them and oh God I want to be here, I want to curl up in that bathroom and go to sleep.

“We'll be calling you in alphabetically to meet with the board starting at ten tomorrow,” the geekiest clipboarder says, passing out schedules. “Please don't be late. In the meantime your room assignments are here, and you're expected to be in your room by—”

Yeah, who cares—we're
staying in the dorms
. I take all these pictures on my phone of every damn corner of the room and of Stephanie and Skyler geeking the hell out, even though I have no idea who I'm going to send them to. I don't want to make Bianca jealous when she's been so amazing. Kristina wouldn't understand. Rachel would . . . I don't know. I guess I need to deal with her at some point, but Nebraska seems far away, and that isn't because I'm in New York, because right now I really couldn't give less of a shit about the (yeah, crappy)
view outside my dorm window, because right now I'm sitting on my bed talking to a boy who says he's bisexual and “Oh, yeah, everyone here is great about it, the queer groups make sure to be so inclusive,” and I am trying not to cry.

I need this.

God, I forgot for a minute that I'm here to look at ballet schools.

And then I remember something else.

I'm not good enough for Brentwood.

I'm here to look at ballet schools.

•  •  •

Stephanie's my roommate and we stay up late. She's singing “For Good” from
Wicked
and her voice reminds me of Bianca's, deep, alto, but she's . . . in all honesty, she's better than Bianca. Maybe in a few years Bianca will be there. Stephanie's seventeen like me, after all. And she's got broad shoulders, a chest, something to support that voice.

She wants me to sing for her but I'm so scared of waking people up, of waking people up with my goddamn mediocre voice, that I just end up sitting on the floor against my bed with my iPod listening to “At the Ballet” over and over again.

Maggie hits that high note and I push my face into my knees.

THE AUDITION SCHEDULE IS POSTED
and mine isn't until the afternoon, so I look up the addresses—hooray, so many years of fantasy-walking the streets of New York, I know exactly where they are—for a bunch of ballet schools and I do a few jumping jacks to amp myself up because it is go-time, Etta “Kick It in the Ass” Sinclair, let's do this. Ballet or bust.

I choose one sort of because it's nearby but mostly because it's near what sounds like a really good Indian restaurant in the village and I guess that's the place I'm in with food right now and hell if I'm going to question it. I call and they say someone can give me an unofficial tour, and then I eat first, because I'm afraid two hundred ballerinas will scare me right out of that good place I'm in, and where I sit outside I can see some girls walking down the sidewalk with duffels and leg warmers,
some leaning against the front of the building and smoking cigarettes, some laughing and hanging out in the courtyard behind the building. They're tiny and white, big surprise, and they all have that flat stiff-necked way of walking, but they're talking to each other, laughing, gesturing in that effortlessly beautiful way only dancers can and I never know if I do too, with those wrists and those fingers like you don't care, like everything's rehearsed and learned and memorized.