Tiny Pretty Things (23 page)

“You’re too skinny,” my mom says at last. It takes almost the whole meal, eaten in silence, just to
get to that thought. I know she worries, I know she loves me, but she’s never been quite sure of how to show it. “Need to eat more.” She pushes a plate of mandu across the table, juicy and meaty and nearly bursting. They make me want to throw up.

“No,” I say. I find it’s best to say as little as possible to her. The more words I give her, the more ability she has to shift them around and get them to fit her own purposes.

“No point in being so skinny if you’re not going to be a ballerina,” she says, folding her hands in her lap and again raising her eyebrows, commanding me to take another bite.

I eat, knowing it won’t stay in me for long anyway. It chafes all the way down, and the pain brings tears to my eyes.

“I am a ballerina,” I say.

“We had a deal.”

It’s not like I thought she’d forgotten the things we’d talked about at the beginning of the school year. She is not a woman who throws threats around without purpose. But I guess I had pushed the ultimatum she gave me into some dark, cobwebbed part of my brain, hoping I’d never have to actually look at it.

“Hmm?” is all I can muster. I can’t really play dumb. I know she notices me avoiding eye contact, twisting my napkin in my hands, but I can’t think of anything else to say. The waiter drops off the spring flavors of sorbet in the middle of our table. Even though it’s barely even a few days into February.

“Our agreement. If you couldn’t move from being an understudy to something more substantial, you would finally return to a good academic school and be a good student and become something worthwhile. You remember?” She spoons a pink glob into her mouth. I imagine it melting on her tongue, the sugar finding its way into her face and body.

She doesn’t even blink. She clicks her spoon against the glass bowl, her gaze on me, and even the waiters know to stop rushing around us so that she can make me sit in my own shame. Why doesn’t she want me to dance? Why did she even enroll me in the school in the first place?

She takes a folder from her purse and presents it to me. “School papers.” She taps the forms.

“I need to use the bathroom,” I say.

“Principal says you can go during the summer to make sure you are on grade level for math and science,” she adds, like I’ve said nothing at all. “You can take summer class, too. Ballet school doesn’t give you a good education, this I know.”

I don’t say anything, but keep shaking my head. No no no! I will be at a summer intensive just like every other summer. I will have the same room I’ve had now for three years,
my
room. And I will dance all day. I will eliminate all my flaws so that when the fall semester starts, I am perfect.

I glare at the pages my mother has laid down in front of me. Her scrawled handwriting fills in the details. The only line that is blank is the one reserved for information about my father.

“Who is my father?” I ask. “I know he was a dancer.”

She jumps back in her seat like I’ve slapped her. “E-Jun—”

“Maybe he wouldn’t want me going to a public school,” I say, because it sounds like something kids say on TV. “I have a right to know. You don’t get to make all the decisions for me.” I say that just to watch her face shift and fight that familiar, uncomfortable expression as she tries to hold her gaze on me. My mom continues to stare me down. She believes if she glares at me long enough, I’ll stop.

“I could also get emancipated from you,” I say, thinking of the one girl at school who bragged about doing this. “I could even make you tell me who he is by calling the police,” I say, knowing this little bit extra will be enough to unhinge her. And it does.

She makes a loud harrumph and clears her throat. She asks the waiters for the check and shakes her head, as I was just doing. Her shakes are more forceful, and she doesn’t stop. She just keeps shaking and shaking, like if she does it for long enough, the right words will come out.

“Your father . . . ,” she says, trying to imitate my softer, less shrill voice.

“Also,” I continue, gaining momentum, “I’m not just an understudy. I’m one of the willis with a solo. They’re important to the ballet.”

“We both know that’s nothing,” she says.

But her head’s still shaking and she’s still mentally chewing on the idea of me finding out who my dad is. The thoughts spill out all over her face. I haven’t exactly won this round. But then, neither has she.

I can’t match her stare for much longer, so I stand.

“E-Jun,” she shouts after me as I run toward the bathroom. It’s dingy, the floor wet with footprints and who knows what else. But I can’t help myself. The porcelain toilet beckons me. My eyes fill with tears, and my mouth with saliva. I kneel on the floor. My body is trained to want to purge, so it’s not hard to get what’s inside out. I don’t even have to use my finger, just let my tongue swipe the back of my throat. Then I retch.

Everything leaves me. Liquid, anger, food, pressure. Each time my stomach heaves, I feel more of it lift off me—little balloons of sorrow set to float away. Even if it’s just for a minute, I feel free. The tile under my knees cools my hot limbs and my head buoys above the toilet. I prepare for one last purge, the empty one that tells me I have nothing left. I can’t stop vomiting. The liquid keeps coming.

All I hear are my tears, my heartbeat, the buzz of the
Giselle
performance music in my head. I let myself empty one last time, then drag myself off the floor. I open the stall door and freeze. My mom’s standing right outside like a guard. I’m so surprised, I stumble backward. I should’ve known it was too risky to do this here. I should’ve waited until I got back to the dorms.

“Oh, June,” my mom says, looking a little devastated. “Maybe no public school. Maybe you need hospital.”

Two hours later, I’m back at the dorm. My mom and I didn’t say a word to each other the entire ride back. It’s 11 o’clock. I should be in my bed, resting, or rehearsing if I’m going to stay up late. But I can’t. Too much has happened, and I’m so exhausted, I can’t sleep. I head back downstairs to the
front hall. It’s mostly dark and quiet, although a studio or two has lights on, meaning someone’s rehearsing still, striving for perfection, and hasn’t gotten booted to bed by an RA. Usually, that person would be me. But tonight I’m feeling defeated. I need to do something to defuse this situation with my mom, something that won’t let her snatch my dream away from me—not when I’m this close. So I’m going to find my dad.

If what Madame Matvienko said is true, maybe my dad walked these very halls. Maybe my mom met him here, and dancing really is in my blood. Maybe I’m a legacy, too. The thought thrills and infuriates me. I stand in the lobby, the snow swirling outside the picture windows, coating the Upper West Side in a pure, powdery white that will turn dingy and dark tomorrow. But tonight, it’s beautiful. It flutters down in swirls of white, and I have half a mind to go out there, let it envelope me, let the cold seep into my bones. Instead, I stare up at the portraits of all the ABC dancers who’ve come before me through these very halls, marking the school’s history and success. My mother’s right. There are no Asian dancers featured here on the wall, although the school will happily take their money, importing dozens at a time for the golden opportunity of making it to the stage. But what does she know? Things are different now, right? They have to be.

Anyway, it’s not her I’m looking for here. It’s my other half—my father, a reflection of myself. Where does my broad forehead come from, or my caramel-flecked eyes? My too light hair? I look for myself in the bone structure of the white male dancers that grace the walls, mimicking their smiles, trying on their faces, trying to find myself. But it’s no use. In the shadowed hall, I’m invisible once more, even to myself.

When I get back upstairs, the room light is on. Despite my best efforts, my face is still splotchy from crying, but at first, Gigi doesn’t say anything. She knows I like my space. She putters around the room in silence, hovering over her butterflies, pausing to sniff the roses that sit on her desk. She sits briefly, tapping her pencil on the table as she does her math homework, then shuffles through her closet. She’s got this random excitement she keeps trying to contain, but it’s not really working. She sniffs one of the roses again. Probably an early Valentine’s day gift from Alec. They make me think of Jayhe, and our kiss. But even those thoughts don’t erase what happened tonight with my mom.

I know Gigi’s dying to speak, so I sigh loudly, a cue that she can talk if she wants to. She always wants to.

“It’s snowing.” She’s peering out the window, tiny little flakes are still coming down. The sprinkle of white has turned the cityscape into a candy confection.

“I know,” I snap. My stomach grumbles. I used to love the snow when I was little. My mother and I would pile on our heavy winter coats and head out to the park in Queens, which was empty then, a blanket of white covering the former fields of green. Even how the snowflakes seemed to be fatter outside of Manhattan. We’d have snowball fights and make snow angels, and she’d tell me stories about Korea. She never talked about her time at the conservatory, or why she left, but she loved telling stories about her life with her three sisters and how they’d help their mom with the cooking and the sewing. How simple things were then, and how she’d make little
hanbok
dresses to
wear in the plays the girls would put on. I loved the stories about her sisters—the tall one, the cranky one, the baby. She was right in the middle. It made me want a sibling, too, someone to make memories with. Still, back then, I was happy with just the two of us, my mom and me. But as I got more serious about dance, she got more and more quiet, till we hardly talked at all.

“We should go outside,” Gigi says, her eyes twinkling with glee. But then she looks at me again, and ducks her head. “Or maybe not. Lots to do. And it’s late.” She sits back down at her desk, and starts dismantling a math problem.

“Do you miss your family?” I ask her, folding down my covers, crawling into bed, letting it envelop me. I don’t know where the question comes from, or how it escaped my mouth, except that I can’t stop thinking about my mother. All this time, I thought I was a fatherless child, but I’m finally realizing I lost my mom a long time ago. I’m an orphan. “It must be hard.”

She looks up at me, the twinkle fading, a sadness seeping in. “Yeah. There’s so many things here I’d love to share with them,” she says, tapping her pencil again. Always restless. “It’s cool having my aunt here, though. We went to see the
Chocolate Nutcracker
in Harlem over break. The all-black cast. And we have this list of must-hit restaurants around town—we’ve been trying to cross one off each week.” She looks down at the flat expanse of her stomach. “Although I’ve been trying not to overindulge.”

“I’ll take you out for Korean food one day,” I find myself saying, like my mouth has a mind of its own. “There are a few really awesome places in midtown.” And I never go for fun anymore, not since Sei-Jin and I imploded. I do miss wandering with friends around Herald Square and the street nicknamed Korea Way, like it’s been snatched straight from Seoul. “Do you talk to your dad a lot?”

“At least once a week,” Gigi says, looking at the photo on her desk. It’s Gigi and her parents on the beach, wind-tousled hair, glistening skin. They look happy. “I think me leaving was harder on him than my mama. Even though he doesn’t say it.”

I look across the room at my own desk, bare, no mementos, no photos. “I never knew my father,” I say, sitting up in bed. I haven’t talked to anyone—except my mom—about this in ages. If ever. Sei-Jin was the last one I told about it. “I think he was a dancer, too. But I don’t know. My mom never talks about him.”

Gigi is silent, unsure of what to say. So I speak again. “But I want to know about him. I’m going to find out. Even if it kills me.” Or my mom.

“You should,” she says, grinning. “It’s such a big part of you, I’m sure. That’s why you’re such a natural, a born dancer. It runs in your blood.” She smiles to herself, then at me again. “You know, I’ll help if you want. If I can.”

I don’t know why this surprises me. If Gigi’s anything, it’s helpful. Even to someone like me, who’s been less than welcoming. Maybe I should try more. But I shake it off. “Thanks, but I think I’ll be okay.”

I turn around in my bed, my face toward the wall. I will not cry. I will not cry. Especially not in front of her. I don’t know how to let anyone get close to me like that.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TIME GOES BY IN A
blur here, much faster than it does in California. With rehearsals and classes and homework—and Alec—my days are a whir of activity. I usually sneak away to the park in the mornings to find a quiet moment or two—it’s just a few blocks away, looming and majestic, but some of the girls don’t even realize it exists. June never comes when I ask her to go with me.