Rules for 50/50 Chances (12 page)

Valerie chuckles. “We may have heard a few things. Only good ones, of course. So, you're a ballerina? Our girls love ballet, too.”

“Yes, the
evil
twins take all kinds of dance,” Caleb says through his teeth.

“Um, well, I wouldn't exactly call myself a ‘ballerina,'” I say. I can't quite reconcile myself in the dance studio—sweating, decked out in my faded black leotard with my feet bleeding into the inside of my pointe shoes—with the frilly word “ballerina.”

“Come on, you dance practically every hour you're not in school. If you're not a ballerina by now, you should probably consider throwing in the towel and pursuing something else. You'd make a good librarian.” Caleb's got the sarcasm down to a science, but there's something in his tone like maybe he's still a little nervous around me, too.

“A librarian?” I say, raising an eyebrow at him.

“It suits you.”

“So, where do you dance?” his mother asks, interrupting our little flirtation, or whatever it is. “I work in Cambridge, so I'm familiar with some of the schools around there.”

“New England Youth Ballet. It's downtown, actually, near Boylston Street.”

“That's wonderful. What are your plans for next year? Are you looking for a school with a strong dance program?”

Ugh, next year. The question every high school senior dreads, and me probably more than average.

“Ma, maybe you could lay off the college interrogation until the
second
time you meet Rose?” Caleb says. “You think?”

“No pressure, Rose! I'm just curious! It's the mom-slash-college-professor in me.”

“No, I don't mind,” I say, stammering. “I just—I'm not sure yet. We'll see.”

“Mom, we're learning about the Pullman strike in school, and Caleb says we should go on strike from our chores to practice!” one of the twins interrupts. Caleb tosses a balled-up napkin at her, which she bats away with barely a glance.

“I told you to keep your mouth shut about that, narc,” Caleb hisses.

Valerie rolls her eyes at her children and asks me to pass her the breadbasket.

“Ladies, you know, strikes are usually about low wages or poor working conditions or things like that,” Caleb's dad says.

“Yeah, and we work for free!” says the other twin.

“We don't pay you for your chores because you do them as a part of the family. We all contribute. And your working conditions are excellent, I might add,” Charles says as he piles some chicken breast on his plate. “The Pullman workers did not have a Wii to return to when they finished working on the rails.”

The buzz around the table continues all through dinner. There are three conversations taking place at any given moment, side chatter, giggling, platters being passed back and forth and forks crossing from one plate to another, grabbing the things one person likes and someone else hates—“Lemme get your avocado,” “You can have my tomatoes.” I sit in a sort of stunned silence for most of the time, smiling every time I catch one of them looking at me inquisitively. It really is nice, all the chaos. Dinners at my house are never like this. And you'd never know, really, that three of the five people in this family are—and will always be—sick.

After dinner, Caleb's sisters give me a grand tour of the house—which in this case actually merits the expression “grand tour.” They show me the bedroom they share (apparently by choice, not for lack of space) and various bathrooms, the room where they practice the piano (“The parentals gave up on me. No rhythm,” Caleb confesses when I ask him why he isn't required to play an instrument like his sisters), their parents' offices, and the finished attic space that holds two faded leather sectionals and a huge flat-screen.

Finally, Caleb manages to free us from their admittedly very cute clutches, and takes me out to the back porch with his sketchbook and two thick pencils. I'd almost forgotten that I was originally brought here under the pretense of his art assignment. Outside, the air is brisk and smells like someone has their fireplace up and running nearby. I breathe it in deeply.

“Your family is cool,” I tell him.

“By which you mean, these people are nuts and I'm never coming back here?”

“No, seriously. I've always wanted a sister. Someone to take the edge off with the parents.”

Caleb laughs. “Yeah, they do serve that purpose, that's for sure. No time to over-focus on me.”

On the back porch, we sit on a big, wooden bench with a faded canvas seat cushion. The porch light makes a low buzzing noise, and I watch bugs hover around the bulb. The air is cool now, and I'm glad I wore a scarf with my jean jacket, even though Gram commented that it was “too thin to be much use” before I left the house.

“You want me to just sit here?” I ask.

“Do whatever,” says Caleb, picking up his sketchbook. “Just try to pick one thing and stick with it, if you don't mind.”

I settle on a position that seems like it might be comfortable for a while, shifting my body toward Caleb, my back against the bench's armrest and my knees pulled up to my chest. I wrap my arms around my knees and rest my chin on them. Hopefully it looks reasonably non-awkward.

“I feel like the nice thing about siblings is that they're other people in the world who just get it, right?” I say after a minute. “They get where you come from, what your parents' issues are, that stuff.”

He nods, shifting his gaze quickly between me and the sketchbook as he draws continuously. “That is true, indeed.”

“Not that your parents seem like they have issues. They seem very … normal.”

“Try living with them!” he snorts. “‘Normal' isn't exactly the word I would choose. They are truly bizarre individuals.”

“I saw zero evidence of bizarreness,” I say.

“They were on good behavior. Get to know them a little better. They've been known to sing show tunes while cooking.”

“That's nothing.”

“In pig latin.”

“All right, so they're a little quirky. That's where you get it from, huh?” I flash him a smile.

“Yes, I won that particular genetic lottery.”

“I'd say you won a few genetic lotteries, frankly,” I say.

“True that,” he says, laughing. “True that.”

“So, your mom can work full-time, even with sickle cell?” I say, after a few minutes of silence except for the sound of his pencil scratching the paper.

He stops drawing. “Yeah. She's pretty hard-core. She hardly ever misses class, unless she's having a really bad crisis.”

“How often is that?” I ask.

Even speaking of his mother's pain looks like it pains Caleb a little bit. “Often enough.”

I wonder what it's like to have a mother whose illness you can't see. She could be suffering and covering it up, and he wouldn't know. At least my mother can't hide her pain.

Caleb frowns at his sketchbook, twisting his head first to the left and then the right, looking at the picture from different angles, I guess.

“What?” I nudge his leg with my foot.

“Nothing. I just can't get this line quite right.”

He works at it for another minute or two, while I sit there in silence.

“So what's it like?” I ask finally, jump-starting the conversation. “Knowing you're never going to get what they've got?”

He taps his pencil against the notebook. “Don't know, really. I guess I'm used to it. I mean, they got me tested as a baby. I never didn't know, know what I mean?”

What would that be like, just being used to this big ugly thing in your family, having all the information about it right from the start. Never knowing anything different, or better.

“What about you? Do you want to know?” he asks.

“I want to know, and I don't want to know … you know? Sometimes I feel like I already know I'm going to get it.”

“Yeah, but you don't. That's just you being pessimistic. You've got a fifty-fifty shot of being totally healthy.”

“Yeah, and dying some normal way like cancer or a heart attack.”

“Exactly. Or a car accident!”

“Death by polka dot–itis!”

We laugh for all of a split second and then return to silence.

“Let's face it,” I say finally. “There are more ways to die in this world than to not die. There are exactly zero ways to do that.”

“You are a very odd person, HD. One in a million, I'd say.”

“So you're saying there are like seven thousand people on earth exactly like me?”

Caleb throws his head back and scoffs. “Oh, man. I cannot get one past you, can I, HD? Correction. You are one in
seven billion
, to be exact.”

“Thank you. It's true, though. There are zero ways to avoid death.”

“It is true,” Caleb concedes. “You're going to kick the bucket at some point. So the question is, if you had a choice of knowing how you were going to die, or having it be a surprise, which would you choose?”

He phrases it like a rhetorical question, but it isn't rhetorical, not for me, not really. Sure, I could have the gene for Huntington's and still get hit by a bus before I get sick. But assuming that one freakish stroke of bad luck is enough, I'll probably go the HD way: slowly and painfully, and as a huge burden on my loved ones. Everyone likes to say the people they love aren't burdens when they get sick, but that's bullshit.

“I don't know what I choose. Is ignorance really bliss?”

“Maybe if you have complete ignorance. But you don't. You have uncertainty. It's different.”

“True that,” I say, breathing in the smell of burning wood again and smiling at him. “True that.” The sound of his pencil against the sketchbook gets louder in my ears for a minute, competing only with the buzzing of the porch light and the bugs around it.

“HD,” Caleb says, “you're giving yourself a wrinkle between your eyes.”

I relax my forehead, which had burrowed itself into a little knot. He's right, I'll have a permanent wrinkle by the time I'm twenty-five if I'm not careful.

“Let me see.”

Caleb turns the sketchbook toward me. On the heavy paper, scrawled in strokes of pencil, is a girl with dark hair falling over her eyes, a scarf tucked around her chin and wrapped almost up to her ears. Her features are narrow, angled; her brow is gently furrowed.

She doesn't look much like me, but she's beautiful.

WINTER

Rule #2: Falling in love confuses everything (so don't do it).

Ten

I think every ballet dancer in the world would tell you that they dread the
Nutcracker
. It's not the
Nutcracker
's fault, per se—it's a beautiful ballet. It's just that we all do the
Nutcracker
, every year, just the same as the year before. I loved it as a little kid. It's always the first real show you get to do, the first time you get to dance on the big stage with the big kids, in front of a real audience, and there's something magical about it. There's the snow falling onstage, and the giant Christmas tree, and of course there's the glamour of watching the senior girls do their own makeup and break in their fresh pointe shoes in the dressing room. But by the time you've done it for ten years running, that stuff has more or less lost its luster. Now it's just the annual holiday slog.

At least I'm not dancing the Arabian Coffee again this year—I did that part three years in a row; it was my first part once I graduated out of the ranks of Snowflake #6, Party Girl #3, Polichinelle #10. I never did dance Clara; Georgia always managed to snag that role. Now that we're the big girls, Georgia is dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy, of course, and I'm dancing Dewdrop.

My phone vibrates in my bag as I'm returning to the dressing room after running my solo for the fifth time. I slump into a chair by the mirror and put my feet up on the counter, stretching out over my legs for a few counts before I check the message.

“WHEN. CAN. I. SEE. YOU?”

No one's around, but it still makes me blush. I do feel a little guilty for having disappeared into
Nutcracker
craziness without adequately warning Caleb. It's been two weeks since I had dinner at his house, and we haven't hung out again—I've just been on auto-pilot from school to rehearsal to bed. If Lena weren't in half my classes, I'd never see her, either. This is why none of my ballet friends have boyfriends. Just when you think you're getting a little taste of normality, you remember that ballet comes first.

“The Land of Sweets,” I write back. In response, he sends three question marks.

“Nutcracker. When in doubt about where I am between late November and January…”

“I see,” he replies. “So when am I coming to see it?”

A lump catches in my throat. Somehow, dinner at Caleb's house—with his entire family—didn't seem like as big a deal as letting him watch me dance.

I write back: “Um, I don't know. Never?”

“Come on. Let me see what's taking up all your damn time.”

So this teenage male actually wants to sit through the entire
Nutcracker
, for me? Seriously? I could try explaining that my Dewdrop solo is only about five minutes long, and the rest of the time I doubt he'll even be able to spot me in the crowd. But I don't.

Instead I say, “Well, if you insist.”

“I insist. I also insist on hanging out with you at your next available time slot.”

Eloise pops her head into the dressing room. “We're breaking for notes in five.”

“Thanks,” I say, tucking my phone quickly into my bag, but not quick enough to evade Eloise's eagle eye.

“Ooh,” she says. “Are you keeping secrets?”

“Um, no.”

She wrinkles her nose at me. “You're a bad liar, you know. And if you're lying about it, it must be someone interesting. Like a boy.” Her freckled face lights up. “Am I right?”