Nancy Holder
Excuse me for interrupting you while you’re hard at work. In the picture I’m looking at, in the moment I’m thinking of, you’re choreographing a piece to “Lady Jane,” by the Rolling Stones. You’ve organized your dancers into three groups, weaving them in and out of the intricate threads of guitar and harpsichord and dulcimer. Every time you work on the piece you can’t catch your breath. You’re nervous and exhilarated and you wonder if you’re crazy because getting this right means so much to you; you feel every note so deeply. The song sounds plaintive, sinister, and sexy all at the same time. You keep seeing Mick Jagger sneering as he gazes at some poor Tudor girl sobbing because he’s dumping her. In your imagination, he looks like David Bowie as the Demon King in Labyrinth. Different rocker, same edge.
You are firmly convinced you have no edge. Though it’s hard to believe here in the future, you’re still very shy right now. You don’t tell anyone how deeply that song moves you, especially since you’re not totally sure what it’s all about. But when you listen to it, you feel as if there’s a world living and breathing inside the music. It seems like, in a way, the Stones live there, and that if you get the dancers to feel as much as you’re feeling through the movements you give them, the Jaggerverse will shimmer into existence, and you’ll suddenly find yourself living a Bohemian existence downtown.
Grossmont is your third high school. No one there knows that less than a year ago, you dropped out of your second high school and moved to Europe to become a classical ballet dancer—and that you came home six weeks later because your father died of a heart attack. When it happened your stepmother got you a ticket home—for the funeral, you thought. You fully expected to return to Europe to keep dancing, but your stepmother talked you into staying in California and finishing high school. Which seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time. But later on you find out that Mrs. Newman, your stateside ballet teacher, didn’t think it was such a good idea. She felt like you’d lose your chance to become really good. But she never got the chance to speak to you before you got on the plane.
So after your dad died you stayed in America, but like Mrs. Newman, you worried that you had just killed your dancing career—because dancers start young, and they also stop young. Most dancing careers end by the time the dancers reach their mid-thirties.
Your stepmother moved your family to La Mesa, where you went to Grossmont, and that’s where you are when this picture is taken. You’ve found a great studio, where you take every class you can, starting with the baby class and ending at nine at night. You come home from hours of practice so exhausted that you step into the shower in your leotard and tights, lean against the tile, and fall asleep. You stretch your legs over your head and hook your toes under the lip of your headboard and lie like that for hours.
And you keep listening, endlessly, to “Lady Jane,” choreographing it in your head. And one day, your stepmother sees tears streaming down your face, and asks you why you’re crying.
“It’s the music. It’s so beautiful,” you say.
She gives you a classic what the hell? stare. What you have said is not computing in her mind.
“If it makes you cry,” she asks, “why do you listen to it?”
She’s genuinely bewildered, and you wonder if it’s weird to cry when listening to beautiful music. You try to remember if anyone in ballet school in Germany cried like that. But in Germany, you guys were completely focused on your training, and afterward, those crazy kids spoke to each other in a language that was not English. You, being a Californian, opted for Spanish as your World Language (that is, before you dropped out of school). So as far as you know, no one in your Balletthochschule ever sobbed along to Brian Jones’s dulcimer track.
In this time of uncertainty, your stepmother adds that dancers never make any money and they get injured all the time. She says that when the injuries are bad enough they end up teaching classes at the YMCA.
And so, in this picture of you at the gym, you are, frankly, falling apart. You’re worried about getting injured and winding up at the YMCA (where you already have a job for the summer). You’re stressing that you and your dancers won’t be able to dance the Jaggerverse into reality, and you’re worried that worrying about it means you’re psycho. Because that is weird, right?
Then the coolest thing happens: a big, tall, muscular guy starts taking classes at your studio. He’s a dance major in college and even though he’s a modern dancer (not a ballet dancer, which you think is clearly superior), you two hook up. Yeah, he’s a little older. But he gives you books to read and music to listen to and your stepmother is about to lose her mind because he’s the closest thing around to Mick Jagger. That is to say, he’s got a real edge. He tells you about this “project” he did where he danced around for a while wearing a raincoat, then climbed into a barrel while another dancer poured gallons of milk over his head and then added several boxes of cornflakes. You think this is a little bit random (okay, a lot), but the fact that he could even come up with something like this and, moreover, get the school to let him do it sends you soaring.
Plus, he partners you in classical ballet at the studio. You’ve never gotten to dance with a guy before, and it turns out that you totally light up the room when you leap into his arms and do a fish dive (sorry, that’s the technical term) and then, after class, you two drive to Balboa Park and make out in the Organ Pavilion. (The unfortunate double entendre doesn’t register at the time.) And your ballet teacher (Russian, strict, and, apparently, very romantic) tells you that you should marry this boy.
Which would be another way of dropping out of high school; but your man-dancer is not asking and, in fact, he leaves after a while because he’s transferring to a new college.
So now you’re losing the Cornflake King of the dance world, the only person you’ve ever told about your attempt to conjure the Jaggerverse into reality with smokin’ choreography. And your heart aches when he makes his dramatic exit like someone in The Black Swan. You’ve always known in the back of your mind that he’s older and that because you’re so angsty and conflicted, you feel like you can’t hold your own against a mature dancer like him. (Even if he is just a modern dancer.)
So here you are in the picture, your blood practically curdling with anxiety, and whatever I say to you right now will probably sound like a lecture. Except this: dance your dang fool heart out, girl. Because as of this writing, Mick Jagger is still alive, and so are you. Beautiful music makes you cry, and you know some great people who totally get that. And between this picture’s now and the now of the future, you’re going to conjure a lot of cool universes.
And, just for the record, I listened to “Lady Jane” thirty-two times in a row while writing you this letter. And it was amazing.
Nancy Holder is a multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning, New York Times best-selling author. The Wicked saga, one of her young adult dark fantasy series, was optioned by DreamWorks, and she has two other YA series: Crusade, and The Wolf Springs Chronicles. Vanquished and Hot Blooded will both be released in fall of 2012. She has also written lots of tie-in material for Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and many other “universes.” She received a Best Novel award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers for Saving Grace: Tough Love (2010), based on the TV show starring Holly Hunter.