It sounded crazy at the time, but when Gracie set her alarm for 6:30 Saturday morning to see her off, Scarlett suspected her mother might be right.
“Oh my gooshness!” Gracie said, fingering a red sequin leotard. She had this really irritating habit of combining words into her own “Gracie language” whenever she felt like it: like “Oh my goodness” and “Oh my gosh!” equaled “Oh my gooshness!”
“Careful!” Scarlett snapped, snatching the costume out of her hands. “You might tear it.”
“I won’t!” Gracie continued rummaging through the suitcases, undoing all the packing Scarlett and her mom had done the night before.
“What’s this one for?” she asked, pulling out a light-blue chiffon dress. The skirt tiers looked like flower petals.
“My solo. It’s called ‘In the Clouds.’”
Gracie nodded. “It looks like the sky—or Cinderella’s dress. Can I wear it sometime?”
Scarlett thought for a moment. Miss Toni never wanted them to wear a costume in competition more than once. “Sure, after City Lights, you can have it.”
“Really?” Gracie leaped off the bed and did a cartwheel.
“Wow! That’s pretty impressive. You’re getting good at gymnastics!” Scarlett laughed. “Miss Toni would probably love a couple of those acro moves in our dances.”
Gracie raised an eyebrow. “She would? You think? Maybe I could be in Dance Divas, too?”
Scarlett had never considered that her little sister might be a dancer as well. Gracie loved gymnastics and tae kwon do classes. But ballet? Jazz? Lyrical? And she was never serious. Her mom insisted it was because she was only seven, but Scarlett knew their difference in attitude ran deeper than that.
They sort of looked like sisters: Scarlett had her mom’s unkempt curly red hair and freckles, and Gracie had stick-straight, strawberry-blond hair that she got from her dad. But Scarlett loved watching any talent competition show—Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, The X Factor—whereas Gracie could sit staring at shows on Animal Planet for hours. And if Scarlett felt like sushi (her fave) for dinner, Gracie insisted on peanut butter and ketchup on a hot dog bun. She was the only seven-year-old Scarlett knew who ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a hot dog bun.
Scarlett’s mom let Gracie get away with it—even if it was incredibly gross—because of the divorce.
“I think Gracie misses your dad,” she confided in Scarlett. “Hot dogs remind her of the backyard barbecues we always had on Sundays.”
Scarlett missed her dad, too. But there was no way she was going to eat scrambled eggs or ham and cheese on a hot dog bun. If she tried to talk about it with Gracie, her little sis quickly changed the subject.
“You doing okay, Grace Face?” Scarlett asked her one day when they were setting the table for dinner.
“What do you mean?” Gracie asked.
“I just mean, how are you feeling?”
Gracie scratched her head. “Michaela in my class got strep throat and Randy in gymnastics has broccoli-itis.”
“You mean bronchitis,” Scarlett said, and chuckled.
“Whatever,” Gracie said, putting out the silverware.
“I didn’t mean how is your health. I meant how are you doing with the whole divorce thing.”
Gracie winced every time anyone mentioned the “D” word. Maybe she thought that if no one talked about it, it never really happened.
“You know you can talk to me, right?” Scarlett offered, trying to sound very big sisterly. “If you have any questions or stuff?”
Gracie grinned. “What’s the world’s record for the most hot dogs eaten in ten minutes?”
Scarlett frowned. “Not those kinds of questions.”
“You just don’t know the answer,” Gracie taunted her. “I do! It’s one hundred ten!”
Scarlett’s mom put her in charge of Gracie whenever she had to work late.
“Just let her stay at the dance studio with you,” her mom pleaded. “Just for a few hours. She can sit outside and watch.”
Scarlett knew what that meant. Gracie would press her nose against the studio windows, cross her eyes, stick out her tongue, and do whatever else she could think of to distract Scarlett. Luckily, Miss Toni was always too focused on correcting the dancers’ technique to notice the little girl using her princess lip gloss to write “SCOOT!” on the window backward.
Gracie was an expert at driving her crazy, but occasionally Scarlett liked a challenge.
“Betcha can’t do this!” Gracie teased, holding her leg in a heel stretch and hopping around in a circle.
Scarlett lifted her left leg perfectly vertical to her body. Her move was fluid and graceful. “Miss Toni calls this ‘développé to the side,’” she explained.
“No hopping?” Gracie asked.
“No. No hopping.”
“Well, that’s not fun,” she said. “Maybe I don’t want to be part of your Dumb Divas team.”
But once again, Scarlett thought that maybe she did. Maybe her mom was right and Gracie did want to be like her. She looked at her sister, oohing and ahhing over the costumes, and felt momentarily bad for constantly complaining and calling her “Grace Face.”
Then Gracie stuck out her tongue and grabbed a pair of pink panties from the suitcase. She put them on her head and twirled around the room like a whirling top, wrecking everything in her path.
“Mom!” screamed Scarlett. “Gracie is being crazy again!”
Her mother came into the room wearing the same clothes she’d had on last night. She looked exhausted. A few red sequins were stuck in her auburn curls. “Girls, please, keep it down to a dull roar. I went to bed at three a.m. I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Did you finish the costume for the trio?” Scarlett asked hopefully.
“Yes, I finished. I think I must have hot-glued about a million sequins on that thing. Did we really need the entire bodice blinged out?”
Scarlett nodded. “You know what Toni says: ‘Bling’s the thing.’”
“You’re supposed to be a girls’ dance team, not the Rockettes,” her mother said, and sighed. Then she noticed Gracie was wearing underpants on her head.
“New hat, munchkin?” she teased, pulling them off and tossing them back into Scarlett’s bag.
“I don’t wanna stay home with Grams and Poppy,” Gracie whined. “Why can’t I go, too?”
“Because Miss Toni has rules,” Scarlett reminded her. “No siblings on the bus or backstage. But you’re going to come to the show with Dad, Grams, and Poppy to cheer for us, right?”
Gracie shrugged. “Yes. But you’re gonna have all the fun.”