I stood shivering at the payphone in front of Pacific Crest High School in mid-December. All morning, through English, through Biology, I had thought of Rebecca, replaying that summer afternoon in Westwood. I let my mind expand and fill with the time I had finally put between us. Two months had turned into three. I challenged myself to stay away. With Christopher’s coaching and my family’s victory in my newly calm presence, I had gained some sort of peace. The anger I felt when Rebecca suggested I experience men had fueled my distance even more.
But on this morning Ingrid and I had seen the fog hanging heavily over the Pacific as we drove to school with the suffocating weight of first loss still riding like a mute passenger between us. The cold air filled me with melancholy and longing and suddenly I could wait no longer. I listened to the phone ring into the glass walls of Rebecca’s sewing room next to Dudley’s office. I imagined her in the next room having coffee with him as the ringing continued. I imagined her on the floor amassed in tissue patterns, frustrated with a ringing phone. Just as I thought it best to hang up, her voice came through the wires sounding tired and dreamy. Perhaps rushed.
“Hello, this is Rebecca.”
Not too much silence. It was now or never. In those seconds, hanging up was still an option.
“Bec?” It came out almost as a whisper.
For a moment she let her own silence pass between us.
“I’ve missed you,” she said finally. I realized I had been holding my breath.
“I’m sorry. I had to stay away.”
“I know.”
“Christopher said I shouldn’t even tell you I was going. That I shouldn’t call. It was so hard…at first.”
“Yeah, Christopher and I talked, too. He’s a good friend. Will you be coming back? Dudley misses you, too.”
“I would like to. I want to see you.” Moments passed filled with nervous breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut tight. Why did I say that so soon? I needed to play it cool.
Finally: “And don’t you want to dance?”
“I haven’t stopped dancing.” I had cleared space in the garage on many late nights and danced until my toes bled into my pointe shoes, loving the pain of ripped skin because it distracted me from the pain in my heart.
“I’ll be at Jade’s 6:15 barre on Thursday,” I said, having no idea how I would accomplish that. Would I be allowed? Relief spread over me anyway. I would be there.
“Guess I’ll see you then,” she said.
* * *
Échappé is French for escape. Now we are competing, Jade and I. She is the teacher and I, almost seventeen, am the dissatisfied student. Locked into a tight fifth position, toe to heel, we are bound and ready to spring. Forcing energy down into the floor, searching for the lightest friction against the wood, smooth velocity peaking just as the tips of our pointe shoes halt and lock in a wide open second. Échappé. We have escaped. Again. And again. I’ve counted 64 and my eyes are locked on hers in the mirror, both of us gazing ahead, watching each other for weakness, each waiting for the other to falter, tire. We refuse. We go on. Sweat dripping.
“For God’s sake, Anneliese, okay, okay,” she finally says. It’s not that she can’t go on. She is just done. “You win.”
The dancers behind me left the barre where they stood witnessing this small war with bemused half-smiles. They gathered damp towels, gym bags, discarded chiffon skirts, and headed through the white wooden barn doors to the dressing room. Tonight, my first night back, we would have our annual studio Christmas party and the dancers would spend the night there in old-fashioned slumber party style. Only this year was different. We were not children anymore.
Jade, slight in her white leotard, blonde hair in the tight French twist, took her half-spent pack of Benson and Hedges from the stereo and wasted no time lighting up. Smoke rose and curled from the cigarette between her long fingers, nails glinting violet. She smiled to herself and lifted a cool gaze to me, leaving a ring of wine lipstick on the white paper of her cigarette.
“Rebecca, Christopher, and I are going to Mugs Away tonight,” she said. “Don’t you kids get into any trouble while we’re gone.”
Her retaliation against my end-of-class bravado went unheeded. I felt her eyes on my back as I walked to the door without responding. I wouldn’t go to that dive bar even if I were old enough, I pitched a loud thought in her direction. I knew she would be watching closely to see if time away had cured my obsession with Rebecca.
“Are you staying tonight?” Hannah asked me. During my banishment she had returned to the studio but something about her had changed. Or was it I who was different?
I hopped over a pile of dancers collapsed on the floor. “I am if you are.” We were past the age when slumber parties held any appeal. But we knew Dudley trusted us and would make himself scarce if he stayed at all. Through the night the studios would be our domain. A thrilling prospect. A bottle of whiskey waited in the trunk of the silver Honda outside.
“Not only am I staying, but Chase is meeting me here,” Hannah grinned. She met Chase at camp over the summer where she worked as a counselor. He was Navajo. Tall and dark. Full lipped. Gorgeous and wild. He was Hannah’s rebellion against a childhood full of etiquette and pleasantries.
“You invited Chase to the studio?” I was skeptical and not comfortable with blending worlds. The studio was sacred.
“He’ll wait ‘til the teachers are all gone.”
“If you say so.”
If not for Hannah rolling her eyes in the elementary school corridor all those years ago, I wouldn’t have stood in that place and time, with the previous ten years wrapped around me like a magician’s cloak, allowing me to live two completely different lives. To be two completely different people.
Now, like Ingrid, Hannah felt me fading to the edges of her life. Chase wasn’t simply a rebellion, I confess. He was the result of a deal I made with her in the spring. Late one Saturday night we sat side by side on twin beds in her room, skimming the pages of last year’s high school yearbook.
“Who, on this page, is still a virgin?” she asked me. This was a game. Talk on campus was tossed about with deliberate carelessness. We were pawns in a competition where the only rule was to lose. In our circle of nerds, we had to fight our way into the crowd and even then, we were likely to remain unseen unless we created a bawdy spectacle.
“There are no virgins on this page,” I laughed.
“Even the boys?”
“The girls had to give it to someone.” Hannah turned to the “S” section where my goofy, self-conscious freshman smile appeared from under disheveled dark hair.
“How about this one?” she pointed to me.
I bit my lip and looked away. Was she ready for this? Was I?
“Come on, you can tell me...”
“Well, I’m not exactly a virgin. Technically.” I wanted her to pounce. She did.
“Oh my god, who have you been with?” The divine excitement of leaving childhood behind at any cost!
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why the hell not?”
I got myself into this. But it didn’t feel right. “Because you might not understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I understand? That’s nuts.” She frowned. This game was losing its attraction. I should not have played. “Is it someone I know?”
“Yes.”
“Wesley?!”
“Not Wesley,” I laughed.
“Christopher and Ricky are out. That leaves, let’s see, Tony, Troy, Dane,... Curtis?”
“Stop. None of them.”
“Why won’t you tell me? I thought we were friends.”
“We are. But I don’t want to scare you.”
“Now you are scaring me.”
“You haven’t been with anyone yet.”
“No.”
“When you have been with a guy, I will tell you.” It wasn’t fair. It was precisely what Rebecca had done to me: The secrets of the universe will be yours if you sleep with a guy. She pondered my challenge.
“There were cute guys at camp last year.”
I smiled conspiratorially. It isn’t that I wanted to hide the truth about Rebecca from Hannah, but the thought that she might recoil from me suddenly became a possibility. Would she question ten years of childhood friendship? Would she wonder if I had ever thought of her that way? I was old enough to fear such leaps of the imagination. I had made them myself. A guy in her life would take away the question of her own tendencies to stray from the norm.
Now in December, under cover of night, we ran to the parking lot and popped the back of my hatchback. Glancing around for cloying adults, Hannah pulled the whiskey bottle out of the tall boot where I had stashed it and slid it under her sweatshirt. Facing the studio windows, I kept my eyes averted from Rebecca’s sewing room. She had been out when I had arrived for Jade’s class earlier in the evening. Now, I supposed, she was at Mugs Away with Jade, Christopher, and Ricky. I did my best to focus on the party and made up my mind not to wait for her.
Inside, half a dozen teenage girls, plus Wesley, tossed off spontaneous choreography before studio mirrors, music loud, crumbling Christmas cookies in their hands. They laughed and traded stage props, parading a mock, gaudy musical. Wesley partnered the dancers, grinning like a mad hatter, halting their spins with dramatic flair.
Hannah and I joined the fray, quickly dropping the bottle behind the trashcan on our way into the room. Dudley waddled after us, chuckling at the antics of his young charges celebrating another long year of study behind them. He gathered a few record albums and his cigarettes from the stereo podium and made for the door again. We traded glances of freedom but he turned back to us as if in second thought. We tensed. “Be good, my loves,” he called from the doorway, “I’ll be back in the morning.”
“Merry Christmas, Dudley!” I yelled after him.
“Merry Christmas!” came his fading reply. We were officially unattended.
After a few minutes, Hannah ran to the parking lot and signaled in the dark. Soon Chase skulked in, his arm draped over her shoulder. Clearly out of place, he sat himself on the floor under the line of barres, taking in the odd spectacle of waiflike girls with energy to spare, contorting their bodies into impossible stretches or bounding and rebounding into the air like a herd of reindeer. Hannah sat beside him. I knew she would not be silly in front of him and I was vaguely sad for her sacrifice. I took my turn pirouetting with Wesley, our token boy for the night, our classical technique deteriorating into vaudeville.
But the reverie was soon broken. “What time is it? Turn that music down, you’ll get Dudley in trouble!” Jade’s face poked around the door from Ricky’s jazz studio. I did not like her tone. At the same time, I knew her arrival back at the studio signaled Rebecca’s as well. I hadn’t dared to wonder if they would be back this way. My heart began to beat double time but I coached myself to coolness. Besides, who was Jade to come in here throwing around commands? We had held this party every Christmas since long before she had set foot among us two years before.
She stomped into our studio and turned the stereo down. Dancers froze and stared at her, smiles fading. Glancing critically around the room, her eyes fell on Chase and Hannah, now lip-locked in the corner and paying her no mind. She turned her glare on me. Wesley’s hands dropped from my waist and he took a step back, eschewing guilt by association.
“I want to speak to you in the next room,” she said to me. I didn’t stop to wonder why Chase was my fault. Everything was, when it came to Jade. I followed her into the dark studio, folded my arms, thrust my weight into one hip and braced myself for the torrent that was Jaybird. Questioning eyebrow raised in defiance, I would not let her get to me. I met her gaze.
“I hope you know he’s not staying here tonight,” she said. I hadn’t really thought about it. I certainly had no investment in the matter. It was Hannah’s business. But I was not one to back down from a challenge.
“Maybe he is,” I shot back.
“I beg to differ with you.”
“Then beg,” I said, and turned to the door just as I felt long nails grab my arm and yank me back.
“What the hell?” I yelled louder than I meant to.
My words brought Christopher lilting to the interior doorway of Rebecca’s dimly lit office where they had all gathered after the bar. He fell into a familiar Jesus Christ Superstar refrain, What’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening, what’s the buzz tell me what’s happening, what’s the buzz tell me what’s happening… he trotted a soft-shoe around the dark studio. I would have loved to reply with the very appropriate, Why should you want to know, why are you obsessed with fighting? But the mood wasn’t right.
“There’s a boy in there with them,” Jade told Christopher, still holding fast to my arm.
“A boy, you say?” Christopher peered into the ballet side, full of curious charm.
“Be serious, Christopher, they have no supervision,” Jade told him. “Dudley just let them stay here alone.” I felt my anger rising. “Tell him to go or I will,” she said to me.
“You go ahead,” I told her, conscious of Rebecca’s failure to jump to my defense. She had to have heard us.
I glanced at Christopher as she called my bluff and presented herself to the party next door.
“Don’t look at me, Sweetie, it’s your drama,” said Christopher, “and yes, Rebecca’s in there.” He left the way he came, to join her.
When I went back to the ballerinas, Hannah was not sulking as I expected. Instead, her wide eyes and stifled laughter were barely held by a dam that broke the instant she met my eyes. Her infectious laugh filled the room.
“Oh my god,” she roared, “did you see that?”
“Where’s Chase?”
“In the parking lot for now.”
“Christ, what a bitch,” I said. But my heart wasn’t in it.
The party settled down. We threw blankets and pillows on the floor, played Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker low on the stereo and passed the bottle of whiskey around the room. From where I lay, my head propped on Wesley’s prone back, I could see Tiffany’s arms dancing the choreography as she stared up at the ceiling, imagining an audience. Wesley, flat out on his belly, drummed the rhythm into the wood floor, his eyes flagging.
Around midnight Hannah leaned in close. “Are they still here?” she whispered. I had been waiting for an excuse to find out. “I’ll check,” I told her and headed to the dark studio separating me from Rebecca.
Lights still shone from her office as I came upon them, Christopher, Jade, Ricky, and Rebecca, draped on the floor, cocaine in neat lines on a mirror in front of them. Jade was the first to notice me.
“Get back where you belong,” she said, her words slurring.
“You guys don’t need to stay here,” I said, not looking at Rebecca, though I could feel her gaze on me.
“Looks to me,” Jade said, “like you girls are in need of supervision.” She sniffed hard and squinted through watery eyes.
“What are six teenage girls gonna do alone in a studio?” I asked the room.
Christopher looked up from the mirror and smiled, “You want me to get a book and show you?” The room erupted. Rebecca’s distinct laughter felt like betrayal. I glanced at her, hurt, and she held my gaze, apologetically drunk.
I shook my head at him in disgust. “This is ridiculous,” I said, “we aren’t children.”
“In your dreams,” said Jade, dismissing me with a scoot-along flip of her long fingers.
Realizing I would get nowhere with my protest, I turned to go. Halfway across the dark studio I felt her behind me.
“Hey,” Rebecca whispered.
I froze. I did not turn around. I could hear Tchaikovsky still spinning fairy tales in the next room. I felt her approach more than heard it. One of Rebecca’s hands slid into mine, and the other encircled my waist. She pulled me towards her in the dark until we were connected, tessellated, my back to her front. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into my hair. My breath caught in my throat and I tipped my head back against her shoulder. She pressed her lips into my neck. I felt tears crease at the corner of my eyes.
“Bec,” I turned around to see the face I loved. Unruly blonde hair curled to her shoulders. In the dark, her blue-grey eyes were mystical, unearthly. Soft, pure of line, Rebecca’s body was not thin and bony, like a dancer. She was carefree. And careless. And I was lost in her.
“I am impossible, I know it,” she said. I bent my forehead against hers, still unable to speak for fear of sobbing. “I love you,” she said, and pressed her lips to mine. “You destructive...” she kissed me again, “messed up, …” and again, “angel…” she backed me to the mirrored wall, letting her hands fall over my shoulders, my hips. “Oh god, I drank too much,” she said. “Sit with me.” I didn’t wonder, then, how I was destructive. Or messed up. But I wanted to be her angel.
“I missed you, Rebecca.” I leaned against her, watching our fingers lace. Sixty days away dissolved into meaningless wasted time.
“I missed you, Liese, but I tried so hard not to. This makes no sense.” She gathered my hair in her hands, wrapping it around her wrist.
“In just a little more than a year I’ll be eighteen.”
“Then you will live with me.” Rebecca’s condo was halfway between Ma’s house and mine. I had been there once. I remembered a large, floppy black Labrador bounding to the gate and a fluffy Siamese sitting serenely in her window.
“Are you asking me or telling me?” I truly didn’t care which but I had my back up against any command. Even from Rebecca.
Her eyes closed tight in frustration. “Everything is not a fight, Liese.”
“I’m just tired of being told where to go and what to do and who to see.”
“You think that’s going to get easier, being with me? You think anyone will just let us be?”
“I don’t know. I’m willing to find out.”
“I was at the bar one night with Christopher when you were gone. There was a guy playing a guitar. He sang a song about you.”
“A song about me? What song?”
“Sad Lisa, you know? By Cat Stevens.”
“That’s my anthem.”
“I thought about you all night. And you called the next day. I heard about your Grandmother. I know you loved her very much. I’m sorry.” She put an arm around my shoulders.
“She knew about you, you know?”
“You told her about me?” Rebecca sobered up quickly.
“No. She just knew.” I wanted to believe it. Ma grew up in the twenties. The time of Gertrude Stein, Radcliffe Hall…. Ma was no blushing violet. She would have accepted Rebecca.
“Come to West Beach with me tomorrow. I have to pick up some tulle near town. It’s a Saturday. Don’t you and Hannah have somewhere to be?” she nudged me in the ribs with her elbow.
“As a matter of fact we do,” I said, and leaned in to press my lips against hers, the gentle pressure leaving me lightheaded and shaking. Our eyes were still closed when a shadow fell across the light in the doorway to Rebecca’s shop.
Christopher’s backlit silhouette appeared. We looked up. His nervously awkward stance sought desperately to communicate something to us.
“What is it?” said Rebecca. Christopher’s frantic whisper replied, “It’s Anneliese’s dad!”
Seconds later my father appeared from behind him, car keys dangling from one hand, pipe in the other, tobacco smoke still wafting in the December cool of the empty studio.
“Come on out of there,” he demanded.
“What are you doing here?” I tried to shift subtly away from Rebecca — to put acceptable space between us.
“I got a call from Jade,” he said. So, Jaybird was every bit the devious raptor I knew she was, privy to my strict upbringing and a shameless flirt whenever my father was about. Around the time she had come to teach at our studio, he had developed a habit of picking me up at night sporting a flask of whiskey with four shot glasses, spreading liquid joy and making Jade, and even Rebecca, feel like the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She knew he would jump at her command. She knew he would believe anything she told him.
“Sounds to me like you got yourself into a mess again,” he said. “Didn’t waste any time, did you? If I’m going to be pulled from my bed in the middle of the night because of my daughter’s behavior, I’m not leaving alone. Let’s go.” He sounded more exhausted than angry. I didn’t need another scene. I got up and followed him, not bothering to alert the others to my sudden departure. It was Hannah’s fault anyway. I realized I was irritated with her for bringing Chase to the party. And furious with Jade’s power-play. Rebecca sat still and did not acknowledge him or speak up for me. How could she? I wondered if she felt the sting of Jade’s actions as much as I did. After all, she put Rebecca at risk, too. Was she jealous? Did she love Rebecca, too? Or did she just hate me?
I got in my father’s car and sat silently awaiting a tirade, a third-degree, an all-out “what-has-gotten-into-you-I-thought-we-were-through-with-this” lecture. He got in on the driver’s side and closed the door.
“What about the Honda?” I asked.
“You can get it tomorrow.” He was silent for a few minutes as we drove out of the industrial complex in the dark.
“I want to know what you were doing in there with Rebecca with the lights off,” he said.
“Talking.”
“In the dark?”
“In the dark.”
“There’s more to it than that. What is so important that you have to talk alone in the dark? Why weren’t you at the Christmas party with your friends?”
My thoughts darted, wove, conceived, defended, as the pause in conversation dilated and stretched beyond acceptability. I decided that he must be fed controversy for his trouble. But not the real controversy. I threw up a smoke screen.
“Hannah brought Chase to the party,” I said.
“And…”
“Jade didn’t think we should have a boy in there with us unchaperoned.”
“I would agree with that. What’s that got to do with you and Rebecca in a dark room?”
“Well, Jade and I got in a fight.”
“So I heard.”
“Why do you flirt with her? She’s a bitch,” I said.
“I don’t flirt with her and this isn’t about me,” he said, then added, “She’s an attractive woman. Don’t change the subject. I want to know what you were doing.”
“I told you, we were talking.”
“What is the subject of this clandestine ‘talk’ you were having?” I decided my best play was to let him believe he had won. Confess to dark deeds I never committed.
“Why do I have to tell you?”
“Because I’m your father.” This would have never worked on me if the truth were at stake. I let the deception play out.
“Okay,” I sighed in mock defeat. “There’s a boy at school. I like him a lot. Rebecca is the person I talk to about guys. She gives good advice. I can’t ask Mother or you.”
He was quiet, mulling this over. A long minute seemed to gain mass and shout in the silence. If he believed me or not, he didn’t let on. Finally, he spoke.
“When I walked in, you were in her lap or she was in yours, and it was too close for my comfort. If your mother had caught you, there would have been hell to pay.”
So. My ruse had likely failed. But he let it drop. Grateful for the quiet on the quick drive home and not at all sorry to leave the party, I went to my room without another word. As I slid into bed in the dark quiet, the panic of the last hour subsided. I returned to the only thing about the night that mattered. She said she loved me.
In the morning, having ridden on that high until daybreak, I wrote in my journal:
There haven’t been many good poems lately.
I’ve been skipping stones
And smiling too much
And I haven’t learned
How to sing happy words in a song.
So there haven’t been any
And I am.