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Taryn
AFTER LUNCH, JAIDEV and I meet for our next practice. I’m full of nervous energy, and I can feel it simmering under my skin. Sibylle is all I can concentrate on. I share a room with her. What if she actually hates me now? And now I’m supposed to be putting my all into learning to dance with a new partner, and the more I realize just how distracted I’m getting, the more frustration builds up within me.
“You’ve got to keep time better,” Jaidev says after I’ve made the same stupid mistake for the third time in a row. We’re only doing light work, given we just ate, and it’s stuff I should have no trouble with.
I nod. “I know.” Great, he’s going to think I’m a rubbish dancer now.
I try to push my worries aside. I can’t let those company dancers get to me. If it wasn’t for their words, I wouldn’t even be thinking that Sibylle hates me now.
Just concentrate!
But I can’t.
I just...can’t.
I need to pull myself together.
###
FIVE HOURS LATER, AFTER training that just got more and more intense with every hour, at dinner, I watch Sibylle carefully. She’s got red lipstick on. That’s the first thing I notice—and it looks good, contrasts with her pale skin. Along with her black hair and the statement glasses she sometimes wears when she gives herself a break from her contact lenses, the look is striking. But seeing her wearing that shade of lipstick makes me start sweating. It’s the same as what those company dancers wore.
I breathe deeply, try and tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. Sibylle sometimes does wear makeup. And she has a lot of different shades of lipstick. This doesn’t mean anything.
She talks to the others at the table—Ivelisse, Alma, Peter, Xavier, and Jaidev—but not really to me, and the longer it goes on, the more nauseous I feel.
“How was your day?” I ask at last. My voice wavers. Is this the right thing to ask, when I’m the one who’s now dancing for Roseheart’s company, even if it is only temporary? And she’s... well, I don’t know what she’s doing. Applying to other companies?
“It was okay,” Sibylle says, stirring her food round and round.
I wait for more, but she just pushes keeps her salmon circling her plate. Her eyes are dark, and her knuckles show white with how hard she’s clenching her fork.
“Do you want to go for a run later?” I ask. There’s still a good few hours before it gets dark, and we often run at dusk.
“No. My Achilles tendon is flaring up a bit.”
Alma and Ivelisse make a joke about something, and I catch my name in their sniggers and notice how Sibylle snorts—something said about me? My gaze shoots to Alma, but she and Ivelisse are both laughing. My stomach tightens, and I try to listen as they begin whispering. Their gazes keep crossing back to me, then darting away.
I take several deep breaths and make myself concentrate on my surroundings instead. The harsh clicks of cutlery on ceramic plates. Peter’s grating voice as he talks to Jaidev and Xavier about how he’s suddenly got two auditions with great companies, and he’s sure it’s because of the showreel that the academy put out—Teddy’s accident is in it to draw in viewers and the attention of other companies, just as I suspected it would be. But then I become too hyper-focused again, knowing why I’m trying to concentrate on the guys’ conversation and not Sibylle and Alma and Ivelisse.
Have those company dancers’ words really had an effect on Sibylle? On all of them? Because maybe they were saying it all anyway, among themselves, about how unfair it is that I’m getting a second chance at getting into the company when the places should’ve gone to the understudies. They could all really hate me now, especially Sibylle.
I try to push my fear away.
No. Sibylle is my...friend. As much as anyone is friends here.
I zone in on the guys’ conversation again. Jaidev and Peter are chatting away, but I notice Xavier’s not being friendly with my new partner. Because he’s the displaced understudy too? Like Sibylle?
I stir my bowl of plain kefir and oats, feeling sicker and sicker.
“You okay?” Ivelisse asks. Her tone is neutral, her voice oddly clipped.
I nod. “Just tired. I’m... I’m going to go to my room for a rest.”
I never really rest, and I can feel their eyes on me as I leave hurriedly. Anxiety swirls deeper and deeper within me. I need to speak to Teddy. He’ll calm me.
But he doesn’t answer his phone as I ring him when walking to the dorms. He doesn’t reply to my texts, and my worries about everything are just getting bigger by the time I reach my room.
I open the door, and—
There’s some rubbish on the floor. Bits of paper and—
My mouth dries.
It’s not rubbish. It’s my photo board. My most precious memories of me and Teddy, lies in tatters across my carpet.
I stare at the mutilated photos, strips of glossy memories. Some have been torn, but others have been crisply cut with scissors. Tears pierce the corners of my eyes. Scissors—that indicates premeditation, doesn’t it? Someone really hates me. And whoever it is wants me to know it.
I gulp and look at Sibylle’s bed. Then Ivelisse’s. I sniff and feel sicker. Could they have done this? Or someone else? With a start, I realize that, barring Jaidev, I could have no friends—or people who don’t hate me—at all here now. The company dancers all clearly think I shouldn’t be dancing on their tour, regardless of whether Jaidev and I make it work, and now the dancers I’ve trained with for years probably hate me for getting special treatment.
The small amount of kefir and oats I had managed to eat weighs heavily in my stomach as I gather up the tatters of my photos. My eyes linger on a strip of a photo that I recognize instantly, though I can only see the bright pink of my shirt and Teddy’s arm. But it was the first photo, the first photo we took after our very first pas de deux session. Mum had sent me some new practice clothes, loose fitting shirts and joggers and leg warmers. She’d picked the pink shirt most likely for a joke as she had to have known it was my least favorite color. But the morning of the practice, I’d spilled tea over my bed, and my open suitcase had been on my duvet, ready to finally be unpacked properly as I’d been putting it off. I’ve never been that good at organizing my things. The only shirt to miss the tea was the pink one.
Peter made fun of me for wearing it. I never wore it again, and I took it back home when I went for Christmas the first year. My sisters saw the shirt and they loved the color, so I gave it to them, even though it was much too big for either of them. But, here, that shirt lived on via my photo board. And it became more than just a shirt. It was the start of mine and Teddy’s career. The start of our friendship. Our connection.
I try Teddy’s number again. He doesn’t pick up, so I grab my jacket and change into my running shoes. I grab my purse and navigate to the bus app on my phone. A few minutes of searching tells me which buses I need to get to see him at the hospital. Thankfully, buses run pretty regularly here in London, even on Sunday evenings, and I need to see him. He’s my best friend and we help each other. I helped him when he was struggling to cope with his mother’s death in the first year, and he knows how much I worry about things. Earlier this year, when we had our formal assessments just after Christmas, I got so stressed, but it was Teddy who was able to keep me sane. We spent extra evenings in the studios, not practicing the performance dances, but choreographing our own fun routines, dances that reminded me why I fell in love with ballet in the first place. And I need his steady reassurance now, his grounding effects. And I should be there for him, too. I should’ve already gone to visit him, I know that. It’s been two days since his accident.
The corridors are silent as I slip out of the school and down the main drive. The air’s stickier than I anticipated and within a few moments my skin is tacky with sweat, keeping my jacket pressed tightly to my arms and neck. I reach the bus stop just as the bus comes into sight, and my luck with that lasts when I make my connecting bus in good time. Just forty minutes after leaving the school, I’m walking into the hospital.
I give Teddy’s name to the staff at the desk and after a moment consulting their computers, they direct me up to his ward. He’s in a private room, lying on his side facing the door. His nose has some sort of splint over it, and I wonder if it’s really painful. His eyes are unfocused, and I wonder for a moment if he’s actually asleep with them open. Xavier said he does that sometimes.
Teddy jumps as I open the door and then scrambles to sit upright. There are monitors clinging to him, spider-wires stretching to big metal machines.
“Hey,” I say, my voice soft.
He’s staring at me, mouth open. “You’re...you’re here? What the hell, Taryn?” He shakes his head, like he’s trying to shake away an apparition.
But I’m real.
“Of course I’m here.” I sit at his bedside. “I should’ve come sooner. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s... It’s fine,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting anyone this evening.”
I cross one leg over the other, then lean forward. “I was worried, when you hadn’t replied to my messages today, and even more so when you didn’t answer your phone.” My eyes fall on his phone, on the little tray at the foot of his bed.
“Oh,” he says. “It...it ran out of battery.”
“Oh, Teddy,” I whisper. “I didn’t think to bring a charger. But I can bring one tomorrow. Maybe I can do it before first practice. The buses are twenty-four hours, right?”
He nods. He looks so fragile. So alone.
“But how are you?” I ask. “I looked up that heart condition. So, what’s happening next?”
He shrugs a little. “Still being monitored for the moment—because of the concussion. And they’re worried about low blood pressure and bradycardia now as well, but what’s new? I’ve had those for a long time. But they’ve said I’ll switch to outpatient monitoring soon. And then I’ll have a diagnostic catheterization to look at my heart—but I don’t think it really can be this HCM condition they’re talking about.”
He sounds so determined, like he doesn’t want to believe it could be. And who would want to be told that?
I squeeze his hand. “Does your head hurt? Your nose?”
“My head, not really.” His voice is small. “My nose is sore, and my front teeth hurt quite a bit still. The doctor said that can happen after nose surgery though. Something about a nerve that connects to them can get bruised in the surgery or something. But everything feels weird. Being here and not... I just want to dance.” His words crack, and I squeeze his hand even tighter, then stop a little. His hand feels more fragile now, somehow. Like I could squash all the bones together, fracture them so easily.
I don’t know what to say as I look at him, my best friend.
“Has your dad been to visit?” I whisper.
My gaze falls on a box of chocolate on the tray, next to his phone. It’s unopened, and Teddy doesn’t like chocolate. That was one of the first things I learnt about him on our induction day when we all went to the canteen. There was chocolate mousse. I couldn’t eat it because of the fructose content of chocolate, and Teddy also said he couldn’t eat his. Said he didn’t like chocolate. I’d thought at the time he’d only said it because Peter had said I was a weirdo for not eating chocolate, that Teddy had been doing this solidarity thing—even though we hadn’t yet been partnered together—but it turned out he really doesn’t like chocolate. I’ve never seen him eat any.
Teddy grimaces. “Won’t stop fussing. Seems to think this is his opportunity to redeem himself. But he’s still a dick.”
A small smile comes to my lips. “Yeah.”
“So, how is it?” he asks, his voice a bit stiff and his tone oddly formal. “Dancing with your new partner?”
I run a hand through my hair. “Terrible. We’re so out of sync, and bar Mr. Vikas and the other company staff, no one seems to think we should even get a place with them.”
Teddy swallows a little awkwardly and his Adam’s apple visibly bobs. I wonder if he is in fact thinking that, too, sharing that view.
“They all hate me at the company, all the dancers,” I say, and I tell him what the women have said to me and how they’re trying to ignite fire in Sibylle, make her and the others angry at me. “And then someone tore up my photo board.”
His eyes widen at that. “No?”
I nod.
“Oh, Taryn.” He reaches for my hand and squeezes it.
Tears pierce the corners of my eyes, and I know I shouldn’t be talking so much about myself, feeling sorry for myself, when Teddy’s in here, when he may never dance again, but now I’ve started, I can’t stop.
“That’s not even the worst of it. I’ve got to get this position, learn to dance with Jaidev in eight weeks, else I’ve got to do another year. And I can’t afford it. And then Mum will find out I’ve failed.”
“Wait. She doesn’t know about any of this?”
I shake my head. I don’t tell him I lied though. I can’t bring myself to utter those words.
“Just breathe,” he whispers, his voice soft. “Just dance for yourself, okay?” he says. “You’ve got to do that. Dancing is how you look after yourself. You’ve got to do that.” He pauses slightly. “You know what happens when you don’t.”
I feel my face heat up. I don’t want to think about that. But I know he’s right. I’ve got to dance. It’s fine to dance for the company and try and get this part, but I can’t let it consume me. I’ve still got to dance for me.
I manage a smile—just as something vibrates. A phone. Teddy’s. The screen has lit up.
So, it’s not out of battery after all.
“That’ll just be my dad again.” His eyes are a little shifty, but he doesn’t offer an explanation for his lie.
I don’t push him. Maybe he just got mixed up, a voice in my head suggests.
Maybe.
“And that’s visiting time over,” an unnecessarily cheerful voice says. I turn in my seat to see a young nurse poking her head into Teddy’s room. “You can come back tomorrow, dear.”
For a second, neither Teddy nor I say or do anything. There’s a strange atmosphere in the room, like there’s too much tension and it’s going to shatter any moment. Then we both sort of jump into action, saying goodbyes.
“I’ll be back soon,” I promise.
I hug him. He feels bonier than I remember from just a few days ago. Has he lost muscle mass that quickly from being in here? I mean, he can’t have been training at all, and we’re always told we need to train daily to maintain our skills and fitness. But I hadn’t thought he’d lose weight this quickly, and I can’t ask because the nurse is ushering me out.
“Remember to dance for yourself,” Teddy calls after me, and I’m nearly crying all over again as I leave.
Remember to dance for myself.
That almost seems pointless now, when Teddy and I will never dance together again, and I can’t connect with Jaidev. There’s no point in dancing at all if I can’t get on the tour and make my mother—and Helena’s memory—proud.