The audition is a Saturday morning, the third day of January, and I leave before Mom wakes up. Dad and Luke are already at the bakery, but in the kitchen there is a jam jar of white sweet peas and a note: Break a leg! We love you!
It appears that Owen is an excellent secret keeper. No one, not even Luke, knows anything about anything. I’ve not seen Owen since before Christmas—since shoe shopping and curb kissing—because I am so tightly wound and focused and trying to concentrate on nothing but this audition, and he is also kindly keeping a promise he made me, not to text or call until it’s over. Kate is in New York with Simone, competing in the YAGP Finals, and I am alone.
Owen was also right about calling Kate. It gave us Christmas together and a tearful slumber party, where I stayed silent about my failed auditions—about anything involving Owen—and she filled me in on Simone’s urging her, all year, to think beyond San Francisco. What if San Francisco didn’t want her? Why not be seen now, before she’s any older, build a career, let a bunch of companies fight over her?
“She got me all panicked,” Kate admitted through tears. “She made it seem like if I didn’t go, I’d end up in a Grey Gardens situation, living with my mom until I die, and never be a dancer, ever.”
“But do you want New York? More than San Francisco?”
She fell back, tortured, in the blue chair. “I don’t know. But I think I’m curious. Aren’t you? Even a little?”
I smiled. Sadly. Shook my head. “San Francisco.”
She nodded.
“Did you ask Simone why I couldn’t come, too?” I asked her.
Kate looked at her feet. At the wall. “She said your talents lie in teaching. I told her that was crap, that you’re a gorgeous dancer, because you are, Harp. She said I couldn’t see the truth because I love you too much. That it isn’t fair to you.”
“Do you believe her?” I asked.
“I do love you more than might be healthy for either one of us.”
To which I could only say, “Me too.”
I wished her luck when she left on New Year’s Eve for New York. She wished me luck in San Francisco.
None of it felt real.
This was not The Plan.
Today, now, does not feel real. Walking through the early-morning fog to our audition, to the start of our lives together fourteen years in the making—but alone.
The hall outside the audition studio is impassable, legs all over the floor and up the walls, quiet conversations but mostly silence, earbuds in iPods and nervous pliés and relevés beneath framed photographs of soloists from 1933 until today. Yuan Yuan as Juliet, Coppélia. As the Snow Queen.
Through the closed door, we hear the pianist finish barre music, then begin again and again, the same short Shostakovich theme over and over, auditors calling combinations, corrections.
I whack my Maltese Cross pointe shoes against a metal doorframe, soften the shanks as much as possible, so they show my arch. I tie them securely. Retie them.
My lucky leotard is clean, black. Thin straps that don’t fall off my shoulders, lucky pale pink cotton tights, lucky hair tie, brand-new hairpins. Paper number safety-pinned to my back: 232. Through the door, the music ends, everyone around me in the hall freezes midstretch, looks up.
Sweaty dancers file out the studio door, spill down the stairs.
“Group eleven. Ladies.”
I shake my limbs, rise to demi-pointe.
We take our places at the barre, me and ten other girls, rest our fingers lightly. Why are they all so much taller? Perfect? Are they? I close my eyes. Head up, eyes forward, spine straight, energy directed into the floor. Don’t fight gravity—use it….Core strong, in, shoulders back, down. First position. Tendu.
The music swells. My heart swells.
Tchaikovsky.
I couldn’t love anything more.
Aut moriere percipietis conantur.
Do or do not. There is no try.
Up narrow stairs, out the heavy stage door to the sidewalk, hands on my knees to catch my breath. Audition over. I stand tall.
Head rush. I sit down hard on the curb.
“Harper.”
Owen helps me to my feet.
“I drove,” he says. “Want to go to the park? The beach?”
I nod.
“All right.” He opens the passenger door of a car, some kind of hybrid Subaru-type thing—Oh, great, he’s an environmentalist too? Can he be any more wonderful? God!—and he gets us out of downtown and into the avenues. I lean my head against the window.
“Cold?” he asks. I’m only in my lucky tights and lucky leotard, boots, paper number still pinned to my back. It crinkles against the seat. He cranks up the heater, warm air on my legs.
Through Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach, along the shore past Seal Rock, and we park on a hilltop beside a low stone wall on the cliff edge, beside the fountain at the sculpted white Legion of Honor museum.
We sit on the wall, with the Golden Gate Bridge view, so near we hear its muted Saturday traffic. Cold ocean wind sweeps fog around our faces, and Owen wordlessly drapes his hoodie over my shoulders. I zip it up, still warm from his body. Smells clean. Like his sweater the day we kissed. Soap, and…something sweet?
“Do you wash your clothes in grapefruit extract?” I ask.
“Yes!” he laughs. “I mean, not extract. It’s just, like, grapefruit-scented or something? Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, one of those.”
I hold the sleeves, way too long on me, over my face and inhale. “I like it. Smells like you.”
“I’ll buy a fifty-gallon drum of it tonight.”
“Good.” I lean into him, and he pulls me close with one arm.
Below us, the actual Golden Gate—the narrow, treacherous ocean opening leading into San Francisco’s bays—crashes against black rocks.
Ship horns sound from the horizon. The fog thins and rolls so the rocky Farallon Islands are sometimes visible, a tiny black patch where the sea meets the sky, where the great white sharks feed.
“Why anyone wants to live anywhere else in the world is beyond me,” Owen says.
Only later will I think how humiliating it would have been had he moved away instead of pulling me nearer when, those words barely out of his mouth, I turn, suddenly thankful for all the stupid make-out scenes in all the dumb ballet movies, because how else would I know how to even attempt this, and I kiss him. Again. I mean kiss him, kiss him.
If he is surprised, he gets over it fast. He pulls me closer, both arms firmly around me now.
After a long while, I hold on to his hand and pull away. He steadies me on the wall and won’t let me turn my gaze.
“Do you want to talk about it? How it went?”
I nod. But I can’t speak.
Seagulls tilt into the sea salt air, through Point Bonita Lighthouse’s bright white light flashing through the drifting mist.
“Would you rather I ask yes-or-no questions and you can let me know that way?” he asks.
I nod.
“Okay,” he says. “Ready?”
I squeeze his hand.
“Was it…I mean, was it hard?”
I nod.
“Are you glad you went?”
I nod.
He takes a deep breath. “Will you be okay?”
I shake my head.
“Oh, Harp…,” he says quietly. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
I breathe deeply, in and out, the salt air. “I think I may start crying in a second, but I don’t want every single time I’m with you to be me crying. It’s getting ridiculous. I feel stupid.”
He pulls me to him again, holds me tight, keeps me warm. “You have no idea,” he says, “how not stupid you are.”
My heart breaks for the years I’ve spent preparing for this one day, this single moment. For the life I’ll never have.
Number 232, you are excused from the barre.
An entire life—my whole existence—for nothing.
At last I am so tired, it subsides. The grief. I am empty.
And still Owen holds me.
“I think,” he says, after a long while, “the best parts of San Francisco weren’t born till after the earthquake. The bridge. West Portal. The entire city was in ashes, and it rose again more beautiful than before. This place is a phoenix. San Francisco is in your blood.”
He is trying so hard. Even if such a thing, another life, were possible—how would I live it, still mourning the one I’ve lost? This is…an end. It is panic. I’m drowning.
Lost city of my love and desire.
When the sun is low and the water under the bridge is pink, I ask Owen what time it is.
“Um…five. Fifteen.”
“Take me home?”
“Of course.”
Once more through the park, and we drive beside the beach, past the college, and into West Portal.
The fog is swirling down the street, around our house and Owen’s car. I reach behind the seat, grab my bag, and the paper audition number crinkles. I turn my back to Owen. “Can you…”
He carefully unhooks each safety pin, his warm hands against the bare skin between my shoulder blades. He drops the pins in the center console thingy and holds the number out to me. “Want to keep it?”
I shake my head. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Harper. Please call me. Just to let me know you’re okay? If you don’t, I’ll call you.”
Even in the near dark I can’t help staring at his eyes. “Why?” I ask.
“Because—what do you mean, why?”
“Why do you want me to call you? So I can cry on you some more? I’m a complete disaster.”
“You’re extraordinary.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’m trying to.”
I smile sadly. “I can’t believe I’m meeting you now. This is awful.”
“I can’t believe I met you at all. This is wonderful. Call me. Please.”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
I move to get out of the car, but once more, his hand lightly on the back of my neck, he kisses me.
“Okay,” I say. “I promise.”
I walk slowly up the drive to the house, all the days and weeks leading to today unraveling again and again.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, Harper.
But it did. It is.
My head hurts. Too much foggy sun. Not enough water.
Number 232, you are excused from barre.
I let myself in quietly through the kitchen door and drop my bag on the table. The familiar, hollow clunk of my pointe shoes turns my stomach. There is television light in the living room; Mom is on the sofa, wrapped in blankets. She turns around to me and pauses her movie.
“Baby!” she says quietly, climbing off the sofa to squeeze me tight. “How was it? Dad told me to leave you alone about it, so I was good all day, not one text. Aren’t you proud of me? Tell me now. It’s killing me!”
I go to the freezer, move things aside, find the foil package, and unwrap my sand castle cake.
“Harp.”
I get a fork, sit at the table, and hack into the chocolate. I put a huge, frozen forkful into my mouth and chew.
Mom stands and watches me wolf the entire thing, and then my stomach swims. I hold on to her and stumble to the door, but too late. The barely swallowed cake is all over the immaculate kitchen floor.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m so sorry….”
“Breathe,” Mom says. She leads me to the sink and I rinse my mouth with cool water, rest my cheek against the faucet.
Yet another benefit of the ballet bun: no one has to hold your hair back when you throw up.
I press my hands against the sink edge and turn to look under my arm. She’s anxious. Already mopping.
“Mom, I’ll do it. I’m sorry…”
“Stop! Just hold on for a minute. Drink some more if you can.” She bleaches the floor, done in ten minutes, and I’m on the sofa, head back, my face beneath a cold, damp kitchen towel. She sits beside me and offers ice tinkling in a glass of ginger ale. Too sweet. She frowns and presses her wrist against my forehead.
“You’re pink. But not too warm.”
I shake my head. “Sunburn.”
“How?”
I shrug. Outside all day with no hat. Doesn’t matter now.
“Where’s your coat?”
I shake my head.
“Harp.”
Stage five: acceptance.
“Mommy.”
I spill it all, weeks’ worth of a mess worse than what wound up on the kitchen floor.
Mom’s face is blank. Then baffled. “Simone would never say that.”
“She did. She’s right.”
“She’s not. Where is Kate now?”
“New York. With Simone.”
“No.”
I nod.
Mom tears up. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
My throat is tight.
“Dad and I will talk to Simone. This doesn’t make sense.”
“Please no, don’t. There’s nothing to say.”
“There’s everything to say. This is bullshit! She should have spoken to Dad and me before she went to you. What the hell is her problem?”
“There’s nothing to say,” I tell her again. “Honestly. She didn’t want to say it. She had to. It’s true.”
“Honey, no.”
“Mom, I didn’t even make it past barre. They don’t want me. No one does. It’s true.”
“It isn’t. Stop saying that.”
I blink through stinging tears. “I’m scared,” I whisper.
“Of what?”
“Everything. What have I done?”
I lay my head in her lap. She pulls the pins from my bun. Carefully, one by one, because they’re in so tight. She pulls my ponytail loose, unwinds the elastic, pulls off the hairnet. She massages my head and combs her fingers through the long, straight strands, and I soak her pajamas with my tears. I can’t breathe; I can’t stop crying. Until finally I do. She rubs my head, and after a long while, I stop choke-breathing and just breathe. I close my swollen eyes.
“I knew practically from birth,” Mom says, “that I would be a mermaid when I grew up. I had to face facts, but marine biology is at least in the mermaid ballpark. Grandma could barely yank me out of the tide pools. So when I met Dad at State, I thought, Oh my God, my soul mate! Because he knew he was, too. He was obsessed with whale migration.”
“Who was?” I ask.
“Dad.”
“My dad?”
“Your father.”
“He was not.”
“He was. He wanted to work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and his apartment was wallpapered with posters of sea stars and elephant seals and every known species of whale. I mean, he…Oh, I was smitten.”
I cannot imagine Dad obsessed with anything not involving dough and an oven.
“Don’t make stuff up.”
“I’m not. But our sophomore year, of course, I got knocked up with your brother. Grandma and Grandpa let Dad move in with us. We lived in my bedroom…and he took extended leave from school to work so I could finish. He had to find a night job so I could be at school during the day once Luke was born. That meant janitorial work, or baking.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“I wish you could have known him then. I’m telling you—the ocean was his life. It was. But after, like, two weeks at the bakery, he had forgotten about whales.”
“Mom.”
“What?”
“You don’t need to make stuff up.”
“I’m not! This is the absolute God’s honest.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ask him! Wake him up right now! I’m just saying, you know…you never know. You just don’t.”
“I do.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“No. It’s not the same. I’m not anything anymore. I’m nothing.”
She pulls my head to her shoulder, finds the remote, and turns her documentary back on.
A calm, meditative guy is talking about ice worms. In Antarctica. The soundtrack of my toddler and elementary-school years.
The continent is plunged into six months of darkness, silence, and temperatures consistently near a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
Mom is putting the Antarctic marine life unit she was teaching when I was little back in rotation. The documentaries we watched again and again when I refused to sleep, the stories of our Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen racing to the South Pole that lulled me finally to dream night after night of their ships moored in ice, studying penguins, eating their dogs.
As I am in Mom’s arms, curled on her lap, my heart unclenches. I sit up. She makes room for me beside her, covers me with her blanket, and we watch the rest of this film and then one more. And another.
Aut moriere percipietis conantur.
The answer comes as abruptly as the end of the only life I’ve ever known. And the answer is a relief.
I need time to stop. I need to take a breath and be still and think, just let me think and figure out what is going on. Let me navigate this sea change. I need to be alone in the dark and quiet. I need to be frozen.
I don’t go to ballet Monday. Monday is the Golden Gate Bridge’s eighty-second birthday, my seventeenth. This magical January 5, which, I have learned from the books about Scott I’ve borrowed from Mom, is also the date in 1922 when Ernest Shackleton died. Who tried, and failed, to reach the South Pole first. Or at all. But while he and his crew waited for the ice to swallow the Endurance, he got some major thinking done. And figured some shit out.
Mom has filled Dad in on my “situation.” Luke, too, I suspect, because everyone’s being extra super nice to me, and to be honest, they’re all generally really nice already, so it’s pretty obvious and kind of suffocating even though I appreciate that they want to help and that they feel bad—so I plan an escape.
“On your birthday? Let me call her. This is ridiculous!” Mom says.
“No, please,” I beg. “I’ll be back soon. She just needs me for a couple of hours. Last-minute. I want to help her.”
Mom gives in and lets me go to Hannah’s, who does not need me to babysit. And who will be surprised to see me, but desperation calls. I promise Mom I’ll be back in time for my birthday dinner, and I race to Hannah’s and knock. Willa is thrilled.
“Are you staying? Are you going to ballet today? Can I come with you?” she yelps, jumping and yipping around my legs.
We bribe her with television and a Popsicle, and I get Hannah alone to ask, “Who do you know in Antarctica. At McMurdo. Right now?”
She blinks.
“Honey,” she says, her hands on my gaunt cheeks. “How are you? You feeling any better?”
The whole world knows. Thanks, Mom.
“No,” I sigh. “I’m not. I need help.”
“Of course. Anything. What can I do?”
“Antarctica. Who do you know?”
“What do you mean? Like, people? Working there?”
“Yes.”
She frowns. “I don’t understand.”
I heft my backpack to the kitchen counter and pull out Mom’s NSF books, the books I’ve borrowed from the library, and piles of printed Wiki pages. “What do you know about the NSF Senior Winter Over Grant? Do you know anyone who can get me in?”
Hannah sits at the table. “Harp,” she says, “you can’t go to Antarctica. You don’t just hop on a plane—that senior program only offers two spots and they’ve been filled for months. Plus, it’s for students going into college for science and research majors, and the thing is, Winter Over is…harsh. It’s intense. I know you’ve had a horrible time lately, but I’m pretty sure Antarctica’s not your answer. Have your parents talked to Simone?”
I’m about to cry. Again. I feel it in my chest, crawling up to squeeze my throat, and I fight it back, like I’ve fought the nausea that keeps creeping in when I think about Kate, and Simone, and the studio I miss so much it physically aches, about the kids I’m ditching, who now must have class with impatient, scary Simone.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I say for the millionth time, straining not to break, “and it would be incredibly humiliating to have my parents go talk to her about…what? Tell her to make my genetics different? Tell her to change my anatomy and toss me in a time machine so I can go back and relearn everything from the past fourteen years except this time do it the correct way with the right body? Hannah, I need help. Please.”
She sighs. “Harp, people totally overqualified for the jobs there apply year after year and never get hired. It’s a thing; it’s on people’s stupid bucket lists.”
“I know.”
She looks me up and down. My hair in a sloppy ponytail, unwashed for days, skanky old hair gel residue still left from my San Francisco audition bun. The deep shadows and creases beneath my tired eyes, matching the never-thinner rest of me. I can’t eat. My stomach burns. I can’t sleep.
“All right,” she says. “There may be someone—I don’t know for sure, but—”
“Who?”
“I’m not promising anything. Okay?”
“But you’ll talk to him?”
“Her. I’ll try. I’ll push the ‘Scott’ thing, see if that works.”
I throw my arms around her, nearly knocking her off her chair. “Thank you,” I whisper. “Thank you so much.”
“I’m not promising.”
“For trying. Thank you for even trying.”
“Your mom will hate me forever.”
“She loves you. She’s never hated anyone, ever. I’d figure out a way with or without you. This isn’t your fault.”
She shakes her head. Encircles my wrist with her thumb and pinkie. “I’ll tell you one thing right now: Winter Over requirements are unforgiving. No matter who you are or who I know or who they know, no one is setting foot on that ice in poor health. Physical or mental. Gets Shining-esque down there pretty quick. Isolation. Freezing. The darkness.”
“Sounds like heaven.” I hug her hard. “Thank you.”