I am Yoda. No more self-pity. The stages of grief can screw off. Kate and I are dancers.
Thanksgiving’s passed, finals are nearly done, and high school is close to being a distant memory. We rehearse night and day. I babysit and teach and am polite and matter-of-fact with Simone, who has at last abandoned her campaign of voice mail pleading for me to Talk to me, darling. Tell me what you are thinking! She simply smiles, corrects me in class, compliments my turns; she’s given in. Surrendered to the fact that The Plan lets no one in the way.
We are racing downhill toward auditions, to our futures. Our lives. Things are the way they’re supposed to be.
Especially tonight, like every first Saturday in December since we were five. Kate and I with Mom and Dad, three back from front row, our seats on the aisle at the War Memorial Opera House for the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker.
Kate’s in her traditional sparkly snow-white chiffon sheath, which ends at her knees and makes her legs look about nine feet long, and every guy in the lobby turns to stare. I am wearing eyeliner and one of Mom’s skirts, though Kate does not approve of the leotard I’ve got on in lieu of a blouse.
“I’m a dancer. Get off my back,” I say as we make our way to the resplendent lobby—sparkling trees lit and star-topped, spilling light up into the domed ceiling, and voices echoing, volleyed from the marble floor and walls. Perfume and hot apple cider and cookies…I’m so hopeful and happy. I squeeze Kate’s arm and sigh.
“You know I love you,” she whispers. “You know that, right?”
“Yes!” I whisper back. She’s been so shmoopy tonight. We pose, smiling, for Mom’s and Dad’s camera phones before the tallest lobby tree, a million lights and gold ornaments on every branch.
“You girls are gorgeous!” Mom says.
“This may be your last year watching, so enjoy it!” Dad says.
Chimes ring. The show is starting.
We move with the crowd to our seats, worn velvet beneath the ornate blue and carved gold opera house ceiling. The curtain hangs in rich red folds. I turn around to see the people in the risers and the balconies. Our audience soon. Not long now.
The lights go down. We applaud the set, the music, the orchestra pit so close to our feet; no music could ever be more beautiful. I turn to Kate.
She takes my hand.
Here we go.
Act one is not my favorite—exposition must play out, so aside from the little kids from the SF Ballet School, there’s not much company dancing, although the costumes are amazing; the story is set in pre-1906 earthquake San Francisco, so the party ladies are in Jane Austen–type dresses, empire-waist gowns that flow and swing around their legs. Clara finally goes to sleep, the rats come, the nutcracker’s soldiers deal with the situation, and finally, at last—the moment Kate and I wait all year for. The light changes. The music turns. It is winter.
Snow.
Kate holds my hand even tighter.
They glide from the wings, pointe shoes silent, shimmering white tulle and satin, perfect strong arms and legs. The music fills my chest; my heart pounds. Violins, cellos, and flutes come in; the song swells.
The snow falls.
I turn to Kate.
Light reflects in the tears on her face.
I squeeze her hand back, lean close.
“There we are,” I whisper.
Her face crumbles and falls into her hands.
Mom leans forward. “What is it?”
I shake my head. Someone nearby shushes us.
“Hey,” I whisper, “are you okay?”
She shakes her head and stands. Walks up the aisle.
Dad and Mom crane their necks. “I’ll go,” I whisper to them, and follow Kate up the aisle, turning back to steal glimpses of the dance we’ve waited all year to watch.
There’s a knot in my stomach, in my throat—Is she ill? Then wildly—Does she know Owen asked me out? How could she? And also who cares, because I said no anyway; I would never do that to her—she knows—but ugh, my hands are sweaty anyway.
The usher at the doors is stern. “Quietly, ladies,” he growls, and pushes us into the lobby.
Kate sinks to the top step just outside the door, beside a towering golden nutcracker statue.
“Kitty,” I say. “Talk to me. Are you sick?”
She shakes her head, mascara all over her eyes, face back in her hands.
“Should I call your mom?”
“I can’t audition for San Francisco.”
I sit beside her. “Yes, you can! What’s wrong? Come on, breathe….”
I rub her back and she cries.
“I can’t. I’m so sorry. Harp, I love you. I’m sorry.”
My stomach tightens.
“I don’t want to ruin everything. I have to say it now, but I love you. I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me….”
“Hey,” I say. “Listen to me. Nothing could ever, ever make me hate you, not ever. Please just tell me. We’ll figure it out. Tell me.”
She closes her eyes tight. Breathes in that caught, hiccupy way of really hard crying.
“I won’t be here,” she says. “In January. I’ll be in New York.”
My hands go cold.
“New York?”
“I have to go to the finals. For the Grand Prix.”
“I don’t understand?”
“I went to YAGP. Last weekend.”
Through the doors, the muted “Snow” music soars. Act one is nearly over.
I unbuckle the silver sandals I’ve borrowed from Mom. Tighten them one notch. And then another. Anything to not look at Kate.
“Simone took me. She said it was my last chance to be seen by so many companies. They were all there—Boston. Chicago. New York. Harp, I won. First place.”
I hear my voice, “Simone hates YAGP.”
“She does. But she says I’ve been stupid to stay so long. She’s been on me about it for a long time. I’ve put her off, I swear. I told her no way, we’ve got The Plan, but…I’m too old, she says. To pick and choose. It’s too hard to fly everywhere, audition all over the country. Video auditions don’t ever read well, she said—”
“But you want San Francisco.”
“They were there.”
Applause. The music ends. Beautiful, soaring “Snow” music. The doors open.
“Did you use my dance?”
“Harp.”
“Did you?”
She won’t look at me. “Your choreography got the highest score.”
The crowd streams from the doors, flows around me and Kate sitting on the steps before them, we are rocks in a people river.
You must be willing to eat your dogs.
I stand. Kate stands, her face pink, makeup destroyed.
I let the crowd carry me forward, through the lobby and away from Kate’s voice calling me back, out the grand front opera doors to the wet sidewalk. I’ve left my coat in the coat check. Just my leotard. But I’m not cold. I hail a taxi.
I let myself cry for exactly thirty-two minutes, the amount of time it took to ride home in the cab from The Nutcracker (wasted two nights’ worth of babysitting money on that one) and text Mom and Dad: Got sick, sorry, I’m home, take Kate home pls.
Once home I combed Bay Area audition listings for every ballet company, professional or amateur, in a thirty-mile radius, anything happening this month, now, which turned up four: Berkeley, Concord, Palo Alto, Oakland.
I say nothing to Mom and Dad or Luke or anyone, nothing about anything. I fly unnoticed beneath the radar of Mom’s semester finals, Dad’s holiday bakery orders, and Luke’s moving-out prep. My last day of school comes and goes unceremoniously. Teachers say goodbye; I fill out paperwork and walk home, not turning to look back. I babysit Willa; I teach and go to ballet class religiously on time—never early. I slip in, put my hand on the barre beside Lindsay, and bolt the moment each class ends. I erase every text and voice mail Kate and Simone send, and after a few days, they back off. Give me what I clearly want, which is for both of them to leave me the hell alone, so I can concentrate on:
THE NEW PLAN
1. Audition and be offered a contract at one or more companies, which I will have to
2. Turn down when I accept my company position at the San Francisco Ballet, which will
3. Prove Simone and Kate (and the horrible cancerous doubt I’ve let them plant in my own heart) wrong.
In a studio at SF State, I record an audition tape and send it to forty-three companies in as many cities, all currently accepting applicants. And I wait in hallways crammed with crowds of short-torsoed, long-legged dancers with perfect feet, paper number pinned to my chest. At the first audition, I don’t even make the first cut. Barre exercises and I’m out. At the second, I don’t even get to touch the barre. I am cut from the lineup.
The final two auditions happen on the same Saturday, which involves intricate public transportation transfer tickets, sprinting from one station to another, and incredibly fortunate timing, but I manage to arrive in plenty of time to be cut in the first round from Dance Theatre of Berkeley and then, two hours later, from a nonprofit dance cooperative in Oakland.
I sleep on the train back to San Francisco, wake up past my stop, and walk three miles home along busy Nineteenth Avenue. Cars and trucks barrel past, exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, ambulance sirens and police cars and blaring horns and clanging Muni cars, and tweekers and homeless guys, and I cannot wait to tell this story—the failed auditions, Simone and Kate, and how I never let them get me down; how, instead, the whole mess lit a fire in me. I am a Scott. How that fire carried me to the San Francisco audition, where the director saw what no one else seemed to. How every dancer’s path to their destiny is unique and never easy, but if you truly know yourself, believe in the gift you were born with and meant to spend your life using to make art that helps the world be more beautiful, and if you work hard your entire life for this one, single dream you have and ever will have, then nothing, no one, can stop a person from achieving this dream; it is impossible that it will not come to pass.
Here I am, I will insist. I am proof.
Aut moriere percipietis conantur.
I’m up at five the morning after my walk of shame, after my final failed fire-lighting audition. Only a few days before Christmas, today is my Sunday to work at the bakery. Mom is asleep; Luke and Dad were up and gone before me. I stretch my poor legs, sore from the miles of pavement walking. Yuan Yuan Tan and Robert Falcon Scott stare down at me from the ceiling. It’s up to you, they say.
Got it.
An hour later, I’m showered, dressed, and pushing glass doors open into the warm, sweet yeasty air of our Fog City Bakery.
The bells above the door ring bright, evergreen and holly berries everywhere, mistletoe and twinkle lights. Dad loves Christmas, busy as it is. Every seat is occupied. The counter line snakes around itself and nearly out the door. I toss my bag and tie on my apron, and Luke kisses my cheek as I pass him behind the register.
“Dude, ick! What’s up with that?” I say.
“You’re here!” He smiles, tossing a bag of sugar cookies to a kid waiting at the door. The closer we get to January, to his new life with LucasArts, the giddier he is.
“Harp!” Dad calls from the kitchen. “How are you?”
“Great!” I answer brightly, The New Plan urging me forward, no room in it for worrying him or Mom. “You’re nearly out of croissants.”
He gives me a thumbs-up and disappears to the ovens.
I get down to work, taking orders against a backdrop of Johnny Mathis Christmas hits. It is nearly impossible to be in here and not feel wintry happy.
Finally, around nine-thirty, there is a lull. I duck down into the glass pastry case to straighten the rows of sugary dough in all its forms, and the bells ring. I stand.
“Hey!” Owen smiles.
“Hey.” I brush flour and red and green sparkle sugar from my hands, tuck stray hair off my face, back into my messy work bun. Why am I either sweaty, distressed, or half naked every single time I run into this guy? “Luke,” I call. “Owen’s here!”
“Dude!” Luke shouts from the ovens. “Be out in a minute!”
“I will have one bagel,” Owen says, stepping to the register.
“We don’t make bagels.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Huh. Okay.” He examines my neat rows in the case. “Plain croissant?”
I slide the very last one into a paper sleeve. “Three fifty.”
He pays with a five, puts his change in the tip jar.
“Thanks.”
He smiles and takes the croissant from the bag, pulls off a section, and chews. “Oh, wow…,” he mumbles. “That’s a lot of butter.”
I nod.
He stands there and pulls the whole croissant apart and eats it, one section at a time.
I find a clean rag and go back to the case to wipe the crumbs from beneath the paper liners. Through the glass, I watch Owen brush croissant from his hands, toss the paper sleeve in the recycling bin, pour a glass of lemon water from the pitcher near the door, and down the whole thing.
He even drinks in a casually dashing way. Oh my God, dashing? I am not well.
“Okay,” he says. “What are you doing today?”
I look up from the case. “Sorry?”
“Today. What are you doing?”
“Uh…you’re looking at it.”
“All day?”
Johnny Mathis is in a marshmallow world, and he’s not shy about his love of it. Owen perks up. “You know Johnny Mathis grew up here? Richmond District. Seal Rock.”
I did know that. But I’m amazed Owen does, too.
I’ve been not only sloppily dressed and unshowered, but also way less than receptive to his attention every time we’ve talked. So why does he keep trying? And what exactly is he trying at?
Dad steps out from the kitchen.
“Owen!”
“Hi!”
“How are things at Star Wars?”
“Oh, you know…” Owen smiles, mostly at me. “Pretty good.”
Dad stands there, wiping his hands on his apron.
“Harp.”
“What.”
“Go home.”
“What?”
“Baking’s done, and Luke and I can handle the afternoon. Go. What’re you up to today, Owen?”
“Not a thing, sir,” Owen says.
“Oh, Owen, cripes, call me Dave.”
“Not a thing, Dave.”
Dad nods. “Owen, want to walk Harp to the bus for me?”
“Absolutely, Dave.”
“Uh, Dave, I’m on the schedule till three,” I say, low.
“Now you’re not. You don’t sleep anymore. Go take a nap. Or something.”
“I’m staying. I need the money.”
“Good Lord, Harper,” Dad says, pulling some cash from his wallet. “I am paying you to take a day off, okay? Come on.” He hugs me, covered in flour and sugar, and now I am, too. “You’re bony,” he whispers into my hair. “Go eat a burger. Please.”
I take off my counter apron and hand it to Luke, who is talking with Owen, and I go in the back to wash my hands and face, run water over my hair, and then give up. I look ridiculous.
“Ready?” Owen says when I come out.
“Sorry?”
“I’ll walk you to the bus.”
“Oh, that’s—no, I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks.”
He follows me out, calling, “See you, Luke. Bye, Dave!”
The bells ring. Outside, the sun is shining cold. I pull my coat on.
“So. Off to nap?” Owen asks.
“No.” I walk away from the park, toward the N-Judah Muni stop.
“Going home?”
“No.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“I’ve got errands.”
“What kind?”
I stop walking. Owen does, too.
“Did you ask Kate out and she said no?”
“She asked me.”
“Oh.”
“I said no.”
Thin clouds move swiftly from the ocean, hazy in the bright blue sky. The sea air is clean and cold. Seagulls float above the Jordan almond–colored row houses; blackbirds sit on the telephone wires.
I love this city.
“I have errands,” I tell him again. “Really boring ones.”
He smiles.
We get off on Market Street in the Financial District. Owen follows me out of the cold winter sunshine into San Francisco Dancewear, the place nearly every penny I earn ends up.
It’s busy. Little girls with their mothers, older girls alone, and chattering groups in the racks and racks of leotards. Tchaikovsky blasts from wall speakers: “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”
My chest hurts. I’ve never been here without Kate. She’s not at Saturday breakfast anymore, no more slumber parties.
The staff of willowy, long-haired current and former dancers are up and down ladders and stairs, in and out of the curtained stockroom.
“Harper,” my favorite, Mirielle, calls above the chaos. “Where’s Kate?”
“Home,” I say. “I need shoes.”
“Sit and hold on a minute.”
Owen tags along to the square of parquet flooring in the center of the room, mirrors on every wall and freestanding barres to stretch and rise with. I sit in a wooden chair. Owen sits beside me, hands on his knees. The music plays, and we watch girls try on slippers and shoes, model leotards, throw tantrums. Owen is the only guy in the store. He smiles. Nervously.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s just…do the male dancers have a separate store or something?”
I laugh.
Owen beams.
Mirielle brings a stack of narrow shoe boxes, whips off the lids, and offers them to me one by one, in case I’ve changed my mind since last month. There are so many brands of pointe shoes—some last longer, some are more flexible, some have stiffer shanks, some are more salmon than pink. But I’ve found the ones that fit my narrow feet and arch, the kind I can make last nearly a week before they’re destroyed and ultimately fail me, and I’ll never switch.
“Freed, please,” I say. “Three pairs.”
Mirielle smiles. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” She pulls from the stack a Freed of Londons box, my Classics, and stamped on the leather sole is a familiar maker’s mark.
“Maltese Cross,” I whisper. “How many?”
“Just the one,” she says, “Let’s see.”
I move to pull my boots off, but see Owen watching, and I turn to him. “Look away.”
“What?”
“Don’t look. At my feet.”
He frowns. “Why?”
“You like this girl?” Mirielle asks him.
That smile. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
“Then trust her,” she insists. “Do not look.”
He rolls his eyes and covers them with his hand. I ease my boot off.
He gasps.
“Owen!”
“I’m sorry!” he yelps. “You can’t tell a guy ‘Don’t look’ and then think he’s not going to look! A guy is always gonna look!”
“Yeah, at, like, boobs or something. This is different! Now you’ll never see me the same way. I’m a monster!”
Mirielle laughs. Owen looks completely horrified.
But also impressed.
“Whatever, dude,” I sigh. “I was just trying to help you out.” I wrap a wad of lamb’s wool around my ruined toes and slip my feet in the Maltese Cross shoes. I rise to demi, then full pointe. In the mirror, I catch Owen wincing.
“She doesn’t feel a thing,” Mirielle assures him. “Nothing but calluses.”
He nods, eyes wide.
“Thanks, Mir.” I sigh.
“You’re welcome. If those are good, I’ll grab two more—save the Maltese for San Francisco. Need anything else?”
“Extra ribbon?”
“Yep. Meet me up front.”
I pull my socks and boots back on before Owen gets any more time to ogle.
He follows me to the register, where I pay in cash—$328 with tax—for the three pairs, which will last me, if I’m careful, till the beginning of February. Once I’m in the company, maybe San Francisco will be buying all my shoes. I take my bag, and we are on the sidewalk in the chill wind.
“Want to walk?” he says.
He’s seen my feet. Might as well.
We walk past the tall buildings of the Financial District, toward the bay, two blocks before he speaks.
“Is there wood in there? In the toe—is that how you balance on it?”
“Flour-and-water plaster,” I say. “And satin.”
“And why do you like the ones you wear?”
“They fit.”
“They all looked the same.”
“No. These have a short…it’s called a vamp, and a wide box, full shank, not too flexible…”
“Ohhh, right, the short vamp, I totally missed that. Well, no wonder, then.”
Oh my God, this guy is…Kate’s. Hos before bros. Even if you hate the ho.
I don’t hate her, and she’s not a ho.
“And what’s the Maltese Falcon about?”
“Maltese Cross.” I almost smile. “There are thirty people in the Freed factory who make the shoes by hand and bake them dry. That’s why they’re so expensive. They each have their own mark they stamp into the leather when they’re done to keep track—my favorite dancer uses these shoes, Freeds, but only the Maltese Cross maker is allowed to build hers. Sometimes you’ll find them in the stores. It was lucky I got these. It’s a sign. Feels like a sign.”
He nods. “What are you auditioning for?”
We walk. “Why are you pretending not to be bored by all this?”
“It’s not boring. At all.”
“Because I will admit, if I had to go to the video game factory, I would never stop complaining.”
“The factory probably would be boring. But LucasArts is fun.”
“Are you aware what you’re getting yourself into, living with Luke?”
“Can’t be any worse than the other three of us. It’s a big house. Lots of space to hide from each other.”
“You’ll need it.” I smile.
We walk. Seagulls cry and we are at the piers, crossing at the light to the Ferry Building. Students from the Conservatory of Music are playing “In the Bleak Midwinter” on cello, harp, and mandolin, and it is so beautiful that I stop, and Owen stops. The strings echo all around the cavernous marble hall.
Kate won’t come over for Christmas Eve. What if her mom is at a party? Will Kate be alone? What about Christmas Day?
I drop my last twenty dollars into the open cello case.
“You okay?” Owen asks.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. The sleeve of my ratty old Sunday-at-the-bakery hoodie. My hair, sloppy at the start, is now a total falling-apart mess thanks to the San Francisco wind and two Muni rides.
Owen, on the other hand, I have a feeling came to the bakery for a reason. He is wearing clean jeans. A really nice wool sweater, blue and gray, striking against his warm complexion, his brown-black eyes. Hiking shoes that look like they’ve never once seen the dirt of a trail.
Kate doesn’t even own any ratty clothes. Once they’ve been worn a few times, she gives them to me or to the West Portal Goodwill.
Kate asked him? He said no to Kate?
“Harper?”
“Yeah.”
He offers me his strong, lean arm. I wrap my own around it.
He smiles. “Let’s walk.”
We sit on a bench on the dock beneath the Bay Bridge. We watch the ferryboats come and go, the sun on our faces. Owen’s eating a sandwich from one of the Ferry Building deli counters, and without my asking, he’s brought me a huge salad. Dressing on the side.
I wolf it gratefully.
“Who’s the Maltese Cross ballerina?”
I chew, swallow. Drink some of the water he’s also brought to me. “Yuan Yuan Tan. San Francisco Ballet.”
“Sugar Plum Fairy.”
“Yes! How do you—”
“Bus ads,” he says. “She’s on every single Muni shelter near the Presidio. My mom loves her.”
“Does she dance?”
“My mom? Oh God, no.” He laughs. “She just likes that Yuan is Chinese.”
“Oh.”
We eat.
“She became a ballerina on the flip of a coin,” I tell him. “She was a little girl and she loved ballet, but her dad wanted her to be a doctor. Her mom was okay with her dancing. So they flipped a coin.”
“Huh. What is up with Chinese dads and the doctor pushing?”
I smile. A little.
Ship bells ring. Tourists and bikers get off the Sausalito Ferry; another group boards. The ferry backs out, chugs toward Alcatraz.
“You and Kate in a fight or something?”
I sigh. “Or something.”
“What’s the audition for?”
I swing my feet. “San Francisco Ballet. January third.”
“Oh, wow, with Yuan! So the shoes really are lucky.”
“I hope.”
“You auditioning alone?”
I nod.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” He tosses our trash into a can, sits back beside me. Moves closer. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It sucks. You seem lonely.”
I nod.
“You miss her.”
“Yes.”
“So call her! Say you’re sorry and she will, too.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I can’t.”
“Really? So you’re fine never seeing your best friend again, ever? I just watched you balance all your weight, which, granted, is not a lot, but still, your entire body held up by one sad, thrashed toe, and it didn’t even hurt—but you can’t call your best friend and say two words? Just text her, then.”
“Okay, Dr. Phil, you don’t even…” I can’t finish my half-assed attempt at pithy. My throat swells, and weeks of missing Kate unleash their misery. So I tell him. Everything. The Plan, Kate, Simone, the failed auditions. The New Plan. All of it. This guy I don’t know except that he’s best friends with Luke.
And that, in a group of girls all dressed alike, dancing all the same steps around Kate—he saw me.
And he listens. Doesn’t say anything for a long time. We sit. Knees touching.
“You really wouldn’t want to teach?”
“No.”
“That Willa kid seems to think you’re really good at it.”
I nod.
“Free trip to England, at least?”
“No.”
He picks my hand up in both of his.
In the midst of this sadness—butterflies.
“You’d never know, with these perfect hands, that your poor feet were so abused.” Not exactly holding hands, but he’s pressing the warmth of his into the chill of mine.
“You know what?” he says. “Maybe Simone’s on glue. And those Oakland people, those auditions—because I know I don’t know anything about ballet, but oh my God. You are amazing.”
I shake my head.
“You know why I wanted to come see you? You understand I came to the show to see you, right?”
My heart thumps. “Why?”
“My parents are real big on people having a hard-core work ethic. Like, obsessively. Luke would talk about his family, about you—everything you do to pay for classes, the teaching and babysitting on top of rehearsing and performing and graduating early with honors—by comparison, my entire family seems super lazy.”
“I have a Plan.”
“I know. That’s what I’m saying. I like that.”
A seagull strolls to us, cocks its head, and studies us. Owen smiles at it.
“I have to go home,” I say.
“Okay.”
He walks beside me to the bus stop. The wind is cold.
“Luke is in love with Kate,” I say.
“Is he?”
“Did you ask her before you knew?”
He frowns. “I already told you, she asked me.”
“You said no. To Kate.”
He stops walking. “Harper. Of course I did.” He takes my hand and holds it.
I hold his back, and we walk to the bus shelter. He waits with me.
“No one else knows,” I say.
“Knows what?”
“Anything. Any of this. Not my parents, not Luke. They don’t know, because I haven’t told them, and I’ve been wanting so badly to tell someone….” My throat’s tight again.
He’s looking so intently at my eyes, so close. “You told me.”
“I’ve needed…Thank you so much. For listening.”
“Thank you.”
The bus is approaching. We step out of the shelter stop to the curb.
The doors open. He lets go of my hand.
“Harper.”
“What?”
“Can I call you Harp instead?”
“What?”
“Everyone else does!”
I climb the steps.
“Hey, Harp—call Kate. Text, email, something.”
“Why?”
“You miss her. And I bet she needs you. I don’t blame her; I’ve spent maybe three cumulative hours with you, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never known a better person.”
I stop on the top step, my hands tingly, and say to the driver, “Hold on just one second. Please.”
Owen sees me lean out the door, he moves close to meet me, and I do not think, I do not tell him the words ricocheting around my head, my thumping heart: No one has ever said anything so kind to me, ever.
I hold on to the bus and my pointe shoes with one hand, his shoulder with the other, and kiss him. For one moment he seems stunned, nearly as stunned as me—then his hands move to my hair. He pulls me even closer and kisses me back, takes over, seawater salt on his lips. I’m light-headed, and he keeps kissing me until I pull away, until the bus is pulling away.
Dazed and ignoring laughter from the other passengers, I stumble to a window seat. I watch Owen stand on the curb, breathing hard, staring after the retreating bus until I can’t see him anymore.
And I do not text Kate. I call her.