There comes a special time in a young lady’s life when, constant darkness messing the hell out of her circadian rhythms, she stumbles at five in the morning straight from the shower, wearing jeans, a faded T-shirt, and no makeup, all T3-screwy and blinking in the fluorescent lights of an Antarctic science station dining hall to find an Irish guy in an ill-fitting tuxedo kneeling before the oatmeal pot, offering her a bouquet of dusty silk flowers, and his hand.
The other kitchen guys are crowding around near the ovens to watch.
“Harper Scott.” Aiden’s voice reverberates around the hall, leaning heavily on his already distinct Irish accent for effect. “Most prized maiden in all the village, would you do me the honor of allowing me to escort you to the festivities this midwinter eve?”
I nearly drop the three paper cups of hot tea I’m juggling.
Scientists and mechanics and every random person getting breakfast at this ungodly hour stop to watch and whisper. Every single pair of eyes, Aiden’s included, is on me and waiting for what I’ll say.
Through a frozen smile, I whisper, “What festivities are we talking about?”
“The dance!” Aiden whispers back. “Midwinter Formal. You know this, come on!”
“When?”
“Harper! Tonight!”
My entire life spent dancing, and I’ve never been to a dance. No one has ever asked me, but I couldn’t have gone if I wanted to, always rehearsal or performance.
I turn to look at everyone watching, smiling expectantly at this ridiculous situation—it’s laundry day, and I’m wearing my dumbest work clothes while the good ones are in line for the washer. This sucks so much.
But look at him—all dark hair and green eyes and smiling….
“Where did you find a tuxedo?” I ask. “Did you bring that with you on the plane?”
“Hey!” a familiar voice calls from the assembled audience. “We’ve got places to be. Get on with it!”
And then someone else yells, “Shut up, Ben!”
Oh, good. Beard.
Aiden smiles hopefully up at me. “The floor is killing my knee, Scott,” he says. “Help me out here….”
“Okay, jeez, give me a second….” I can’t tell if I’m mortified or flattered. But I set the hot cups on the nearest table and do my best to announce, loud, “Uh, kind sir, I…shall…”
“You can just say yes,” he whispers. “That’ll do just as well.”
“Oh, okay—Yes! Let us prithee…”
“Take the flowers!”
I do, and he stands and raises one arm triumphantly, using the other to pull me into a close embrace while the crowd cheers. “You’re the loveliest, most awkward girl I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “I think I need to marry you.”
Again, the rush of Is this humiliating, or am I swooning? It’s a joke—he’s tossed it off lightly—but his arm around me, his focused attention on me, he’s so…
Charming, Shackleton sighs in my mind. Charm and sincerity—do not confuse the two.
Okay, but this is the first time a boy has asked me, ever, to go somewhere with him—
Not true. Owen did. He did, and we spent a whole day together. He asked me. Just not like this.
I slip from Aiden’s embrace as the crowd rushes in to congratulate him, shake his hand, and I gather the tea cups and cinnamon rolls for Charlotte and Vivian. At the door I catch Aiden’s eye and wave. “Eight o’clock,” he calls above the din. “Be ready!”
In the lab, Charlotte is half asleep, forehead on her arms, beside the lab table sink. Vivian’s sitting there, watching her.
“Hey,” Charlotte says, pulling her head up. “Is it just me, or is your sleep all screwed up?”
“I’m going to the dance,” I blurt, still standing in the doorway with tea cups and cinnamon rolls clutched in my arms. “Aiden asked me to go, and I said yes and so we’re going. Together. To the dance.” I sound like I’m twelve.
Vivian takes the bag and a cup from my hand. “This is lukewarm,” she sighs, and fires up a Bunsen burner.
“Harp, really?” Charlotte says, brightening. “Hooray! I’ve already got a roped-off nonbooze section set up for you three!”
“What three?” Vivian says. “I’ll be in bed, asleep.”
“Vivian, you’re going. Don’t be ridiculous.” Charlotte sighs. “Harp, when did he ask you?”
“Just now! Right now, in the dining hall!”
“Oh…” Charlotte smiles dreamily. “That’s so romantic!”
“Is that what you were wearing?” Vivian says.
“I know,” I groan, finally surrendering the tea and slumping on a lab stool. “And in front of about a million people. Beard was there. It was…”
“Humiliating?” Vivian chirps, and pops her earbuds in for the day.
“Romantic,” Charlotte repeats, shooting Vivian a look. “You look beautiful just like every day. He’s lucky to have you for his date.”
Date. I think of Owen, of sitting beside him at the ocean, and my stomach burns. All the kissing and making out I’ve been up to with Aiden, but it’s date that plummets me into guilt—what is wrong with me?
“Do we have to be roped off? Can’t I just sit near you?” I whine, already freaking out.
“Oh God, I’m not going,” Charlotte says, tearing into the center of a roll.
“You have to! You said we have to!”
“Babe, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m exhausted.”
“So am I!”
“Yeah, but I’m…I can’t fit into any of my clothes other than sweatpants, I’m cranky and preoccupied…I can’t do it. I’m going to wash my hair and crawl into bed.”
“Wash your hair? Like that’s an all-night event?”
“It is!” she cries piteously, and drops into her recliner. “I’m black and so is my hair, it’s a whole big production!”
“I cannot believe you,” I say. “What am I supposed to do at this thing?”
“You’re supposed to hang out with your date!”
“And what the—what am I supposed to wear?”
“We’ll find something you can wear. Get a hold of yourself. Did you freak out like this before your school dances, too?”
I shake my head.
“Well, it’s no different from those, just—fewer teenagers and no one’s spiking the punch, because they’ll be drunk already. We’ll go to costume storage at lunch and find something that fits you.”
“Costume storage?”
“For when people do plays,” Charlotte says. “The maintenance crew put on a horrible production of Pippin last year, but the costumes were pretty great, so don’t worry.”
The tuxedo.
“Pippin? What am I going to wear, circus pants?”
“What are circus pants?”
“I don’t know! But I don’t think this is a good idea. At all.”
“Harp,” she says, “calm down. Go. Have fun. For me?” She glances over at Vivian. “And work on her, will you? See if you can get her to at least go to the dinner part?”
“There’s a dinner, too?” My head drops to the lab table.
“Maidin mhaith, Antarctica! Aiden Pot-o-Gold-Riverdance-Soda-Bread Kelly with you on June twentieth, this glorious midwinter eve! From this day forward, we’re nearer every moment to seeing our dear old sun rise above the Transantarctic Mountains, but until then, here’s hoping you’re all preemptively hydrating and got your fancy pants pressed for an evening of drunken abandon, fine cuisine, disco dancing, and the treasured Midwinter Plunge. I’m off to pick up my own lovely lady for the festivities, so I’ll see you all. Welcome to midwinter!”
Aiden’s coming to get me at eight. Which gives me two hours to persuade Vivian to put on a dress and join us—or to nap.
Or I can just sit in front of this computer while Vivian naps and dare myself not to open any more Owen mail.
I’ve gotten off my ass and read and answered all of Mom’s, and Dad’s, and Mom and Dad’s. Which were nearly all variations on the theme of: How much they love me. And miss me. And hope I am okay. They do not bring up ballet. Or Simone. They do not ask if I am dancing, and it makes me love them more. And so every week I try to be an adult about it, and I write them to tell them, truthfully, how much I love them back. And miss them, too. And that I hope they are okay, and then untruthfully I say I am okay, and then I talk about working with Charlotte and how super fun my co–grant student Vivian is.
I resist Owen by opening the most recent of Luke’s.
>>>Harp,
Mom says you’re getting all this mail but that if you don’t answer it’s not a thing. You’re just there to do stuff like not answer mail. And I’ve got a whole long list of things I’m not supposed to write about. Which I’m sure is obvious. But maybe not.
You seriously can’t call? Because this feels like when a person’s in a coma and you have to sit there and talk to them like they’re awake so they know they’re alive. Makes me kind of worry you’re not okay. But maybe you are. I hope you are.
Also they say telling you about my stuff is good, so here’s some stuff: LucasArts is AMAZING. I’m in a cube with three other guys, I’m finding a crap ton of bugs in every level of this game I’m testing. Last week I surpassed the previous record for number of legit bugs found. They got me a cake with a Stormtrooper on it. From Dad, haha! For a second, I was like, “Noooo…worlds colliding!” But it was good, so I ate some and just went back to work, like a BALLER.
The cafeteria—I shouldn’t call it that. It’s like a restaurant with the best view of the Golden Gate and this huge salad bar and a fajita thing, and everyone says George always comes for burrito Friday. I haven’t seen him yet. But you should come. I can bring guests in for lunch.
Okay. This may be the worst thing or maybe you won’t care, but Kate says she’s written you, and of course we all told her you don’t write us back, either, but did you see her email? You should maybe Google her because I can’t keep the shit straight, like positions and principal and soloist or whatever. But anyway. Are you sure we can’t talk on the phone? Because she’s back. It’s been maybe a month? She said she loved New York, but someone from San Francisco Ballet went to a performance she was in in New York, and I guess they lured her back home with a better contract. Or something. For real, Google her and it’s all this stuff about how she broke her NYC contract to come to the SF Ballet, and how awful and irresponsible she is. Which I think is stupid. But anyway, she’s over at our Presidio place a lot. Which, in case you were wondering, is still also AWESOME. We call it the Cockpit. (Because of some Shakespeare theater, Owen says. Don’t be gross. But yeah, it’s all just dudes, so…pretty hilaire.) But anyway, she and Owen talk all the time and go out to lunch sometimes, so I’m sure he’s getting filled in on the whole sitch.
Anyway, I didn’t know if you knew, and if you did, that’s good because that means you’re reading her letters, and if not, then I’m really sorry. I don’t know what to say except that. Sorry. It’s so messed up. But I know the main reason she said she’s back was to be near you. When you come home. Which I hope you do, soon.
Luke. (I am your brother.)
I am colder than I’ve been since I got here. My hands are ice, my scalp is tingling, my stomach is frozen.
The San Francisco Ballet. Without me. Hanging out at the Star Wars house, Cockpit, whatever. Going out to lunch with Owen? She’s a professional ballerina; is she even allowed to have lunch?
That was their date. The Legion of Honor and pancakes at Park Chow and the beach. But why? He said no to her. He stayed with me all day….
Says the girl about to go on a date herself. With Aiden.
Hanging on the door are two dresses that Charlotte and I scavenged from the costume closet. One is blue satin; the other is sparkly and slinky and strappy, slip-like and practically nonexistent. Like something Kate probably wears on her San Francisco lunch dates. Her museum-and-pancakes dates. With Owen.
I take a shower, a long one. Fifteen minutes, most of which is spent standing, still staring at the drain while water runs into my open mouth. I knock on Charlotte’s door and push it open. It is sleepy warm in there, and dark.
“Sorry!” I whisper. “Got any makeup?”
“Yay, midwinter fanciness!” she cheers hoarsely, directing me to a small bag on her dresser top. “You are going to have fun! Good for you!” She yawns.
My short hair is finally starting to grow in just a little, enough for a barrette to hold on to some swept across my forehead. Back in our room I let Vivian sleep and use some charcoal pencil from Charlotte’s bag to give myself a stage-worthy smoky eye. My lips are glossed, legs shaved; this dress fits perfectly.
I have no shoes for a dress. Rather than bother Charlotte again, I just pull on my snow boots.
Aiden knocks to fetch me, and I open the door to his smiling face and a sweater the color of his eyes, which widen as he takes me in.
“What?”
His green eyes move from the sparkly Kate-and-Owen-date slip dress, to my new body in it, to my feet. “You gonna wear those boots?”
“Yes.”
“You still want to go to the party?”
I laugh. “Yes.”
“Because we could just stay here. In your room.”
“Um, no, you cannot,” Vivian’s sleepy voice comes from her bed.
“Sorry, Viv!” I whisper, grab my key, and follow Aiden out the door.
Antarctica is a free-for-all. The dining hall is draped with flags of every nation claiming some part of this continent, reminiscent of the photograph in our dining room at home of Scott’s last midwinter dinner, Union Jacks and silk sled flags sewn by the crew’s wives and mothers hanging above the beautifully laid table. The last celebration of their lives. It is all very elegant and formal. Except Charlotte’s carefully taped UNDERAGE ONLY table has been trampled already. I feel like a grown-up because (long story long) not only am I wearing a bra with regularity, I also have now tasted alcohol. Vodka, I think—or whatever is in a cosmo, a drink I have chosen simply because (depending on whom you talk to) it was invented in San Francisco. It is a deceptively delicate shade of translucent pink, but it’s a legit drink that provides legit results, especially in a small person who has never had even a sip before.
Being a ballerina is sort of like being a monk.
I wish I could enjoy this. My first dance, first actual date.
A planet away but foremost in my thoughts, Kate is in San Francisco. Kate is a member of the San Francisco Ballet. Kate is with Owen.
I ask Aiden to bring me another drink. He’s more than happy to.
He maneuvers through the crowd and finds us a place to sit, never taking his hand off the small of my bare back. Were Charlotte in her right mind, not so exhausted and overworked, I’m pretty sure she would not have chosen this dress for me.
Dinner is an amazing, fancy buffet, and I eat some rice and start feeling a little better—at least not as tense and very warm and sort of buzzy—especially when I am three drinks in, and people start leaving in small groups. There is laughter and straight-up shouting, and the formal crowd is half gone.
“What’s this?” I slur, “Where are they going?”
“How’re you doin’ there, teetotaler?” he yells above the Diana Ross album the Midwinter party-planning committee decided to favor us with.
I am very fine so far, and I tell him so and ask again why everyone’s leaving.
“You want to see?” he asks.
We run to get into our parkas. But not before he catches me in the dark doorway of the dorm room, pushes me against the wall, and kisses me. Hard. Which makes me want to ditch the parkas and stay here, but thank God Vivian’s sleeping because I am not in a state to make decisions like this. Drunk and reeling. Kate is home, she’s a company member of the San Francisco Ballet, and she is with Owen. So instead I pull him along to go outside in thirty-degrees-below-zero air down the main road and out just a bit into the vast darkness, until we see floodlights set up on the dark ice around a group of clearly insane people.
They’ve taken a chain saw to a thin patch of ice near a crevasse, exposing a large rectangle of the ice-cold Ross Sea.
People are jumping into it. In their underwear.
There’s some kind of warming pool nearby, and the moment they submerge themselves in the freezing ocean, they practically fly back out and straight into this makeshift black plastic hot pool, where they yowl from the instant temperature change, then lean back and revel in the experience.
“The water’s warm,” Aiden tells me, low beneath the screaming of jumpers. “It’s what, thirty-five below out now? The water’s around one or two degrees. So it’s a huge temperature swing once you’ve disrobed and you’re in and out. Hot tub’s supposed to be nice, though.”
“Uh-huh.”
If I wait one more second, it won’t happen.
My parka is off, boots and sweaters, and finally I hand Aiden the sparkly dress. He accepts it without comment, and I’m running on the ice in a black bra and underwear. Years of existing in various states of undress for quick changes in front of stage crew have rendered me unfazed about being half naked around fully clothed people, but even if I were—fazed—I might not be in this moment.
The soles of my feet are on fire, bare on the ice.
People are cheering for me. A guy hooks a wide belt around my waist, attached to a rope on a pulley. I am the only woman out here. Probably because the others have the common sense not to be, and they aren’t underage drunk and missing ballet, and Kate joining the San Francisco Ballet without me and having lunch with Owen—seriously, is that a euphemism?
I drop in. The water is a meter deep, I slide beneath the surface—Oh God oh God burning burning burning cold—and I am out and running to the hot tub and in it. Aiden’s still standing on the ice where I left him in the dark, clutching my huge parka and all my clothes.
“Come in!” I shout to him.
He smiles. “Divers only!”
I climb out, accept a towel some nice stranger hands me, and race again across the painful frozen snow to the door of our building, followed closely by Aiden who drops my clothes and wraps my parka around my icy, basically bikini-clad form.
Beard stares. Huh. I had not noticed him when we ran past.
“Let’s get you warmed up, Drunky.” Aiden smiles, then picks me and my clothes up, a fireman rescuing a frozen hammered lady, and carries me up the stairs toward my room.
“Oh, wait, stop, first I have to pee so badly,” I whisper, loud, above the Bee Gees blasting from the party downstairs as we pass the restroom door. He sets me on my feet and wraps the cold towel around me. His hand lingers at my waist, I turn my face to his, and we stand in the hallway, kissing.
“Hey,” he says, and pulls me back to whisper, “want to let Vivian have some time and stay with me tonight? You know, in case you get hypothermia. Or something.”
Kate will be a soloist. She will be Gisele. She will dance with Yuan Yuan Tan.
I can never go home.
“Yes,” I whisper back. “Please.”
I duck in the bathroom, dive into the first stall, and it’s like I’ve never peed in my life; every glass of water and tea I’ve consumed since birth has been waiting for this moment. My head is so floaty. Did I really just tell Aiden I would spend the night with him? What the hell is happening?
The tiled walls echo someone being sick in the stall two over from mine. There’re only a handful of women in this building, I’ve met them all but only in passing, so I’m not sure what to say besides, “Um. Hello? Are you okay?”
More being sick. Booze. Stupid party. So far I feel fine, but what if my body hates vodka and I get sick, too, and have a hangover? I never should have done this—
“Harp?”
I’m out of my stall, standing outside the one Charlotte’s in. “What is it? Do you need the doctor? I thought you weren’t going to the party. Are you drunk? Oooh, what did you wear? I think I got your dress wet….”
“Harper.”
Her voice—the tone—is sobering me up pretty quickly.
“Charlotte. Unlock the door.” But she doesn’t even have to. I push it open with my shoulder.
She’s sitting, exhausted, on the gross tile floor beside the toilet. In her pajamas.
She leans her head against the toilet tank.
“Oh, Char, are you drunk? Don’t get drunk in your room alone! Call me next time because do not tell my parents, but I’m drunk, too!”
“Not drunk,” she says, closing her eyes. “Pregnant.”
I close my eyes against a wave of dizziness, and all I see are the McMurdo condoms. Piles, and baskets, and Halloween-candy-sized bowls of condoms.
“Charlotte,” I say. “That’s not possible.”
She is sick again. I hold her hair back.
“Antarctica,” she pants. “It’s all possible.”