Catch a Falling Star (23 page)

Not politely.

“Well, so much for the idea that your generation has better

manners.” I laughed, skipping a few songs ahead on the CD until I

hit an old favorite. It was deliciously languid and not too long, just

acoustic guitar, and it let me move like water, lyrical and unhur-

ried. Perfect for the end of a hot day. I tried not to imagine Adam

watching me move, watching me spin in the slanting light of the

evening, my body shifting to this slow, dreamy song.

When I finished, everyone clapped, including Adam, who was

staring at me with distant, sad eyes. I hurried to take the CD from

the player. Helen and Elsa scurried over to Adam so he could sign

autographs for their grandchildren. After retrieving Mr. Hines,

they gave me a final wave at the doorway. “Great class! That dance

was beautiful,” Elsa told me. Mr. Hines frowned his approval.

I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, avoiding

Adam’s eyes. “Thanks, I love that song.” I waved as Elsa wheeled

Mr. Hines out of the room.

Mrs. Adler meandered toward me, a towel around her slender

neck. I adored Mrs. Adler. At ninety-four years old, she simply

oozed poise and grace, but wasn’t afraid to tell you how she saw

things. “Thanks, darling. Always the highlight of my week.” She

gave my hand the little pat she always gave me after class.

“I’m glad you liked the class.” I popped the CD into its plastic

cover.

She gave a dismissive wave. “Oh, the class, sure. Lets us shuf-

fle our old bones. But the best part is always watching
you
dance.”

I smiled, blushing, and stuffed the CD into my bag. She noticed

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my discomfort and put a cool hand on my arm. “Can you introduce

me to your gentleman friend?” Her watery eyes gleamed as Adam

came over to shake her papery hand.

“Adam,” he said, almost shyly. Mrs. Adler could even make a

movie star avert his eyes. She was that classy.

She introduced herself. “Well, I’ll be. Ninety-four years old

and I’m shaking the hand of a movie star. You’re no Paul Newman,

but you’ll do.”

Adam let out a genuine laugh. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Adler.

Ninety-four years old is impressive.”

She waved him off, the towel slipping from her neck. “It’s not

impressive, young man. Nothing impressive about something I

have no control over. Just get up each day.”

I bent to retrieve her towel. “It seems impressive to us.”

She hooked it once again around her neck, somehow making it

elegant. “You’re young. Always getting impressed with the wrong

sorts of things. Give it some time.” She gave a little wave before

shuffling from the room.

“She’s a riot.” Adam watched her go. “That was fun. You’re a

good teacher.” His eyes fell on me. “And dancer,” he added softly.

I turned away. “Oh, that wasn’t really much of anything.” I

moved around the room, repositioning the chairs that were pushed

up against the wall back into rows so they’d be ready for the book

club I knew they held at night.

Before he could respond, the reporter sidled up. “So, it’s

Carter, right?”

I blew a strand of hair from my eyes. “Yes.”

“Nice to see you again. Robin Hamilton with
Watch!
magazine.”

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You could even
hear
the exclamation point in the way she said the

magazine’s name. “I was wondering if I could chat with you for a

minute for my story?”

Adam’s face darkened. “Hey, Robin, I don’t want Carter feel-

ing pressured. She’s a private citizen.”

Like he was some sort of general in an army.

“It’s okay.” I waited for her question, my hands hovering over

the back of one of the chairs.

Robin’s eyes lit up. She asked about my job at Little Eats, about

the way we met, about our time together so far, all questions

Parker had prepped for me. Then, she had a final question, touch-

ing her pen to her lip conspiratorially. “So, girl to girl, Carter.

Does it bother you that he’s shooting a
kissing
scene with another

local girl?” She flipped through her notes. “Someone from your

grade, if I’m not mistaken. Beckett Ray? Do you worry he’ll stray?”

She giggled at her rhyme. My head clouded. Beckett Ray? What

was she talking about? I clearly couldn’t hide my surprise because

she looked positively gleeful. “Oh, didn’t you know? She was just

cast. He was shooting with her all day at a house by the river!”

I squeezed the back of the chair. “Adam’s a professional. If he’s

working, he’s working.” I didn’t really know where that came

from, but I thought it actually sounded pretty good.

The cameraman snapped a picture.

Adam put his arm around me, his eyes guarded. He had my

bag slung over his shoulder. “We should really be going. Let Parker

know if you need anything else.” As he ushered me out of the

room, and out of their sight, his arm dropped away from my shoul-

ders and he handed me back my bag.

181

fifteen

outside, the evening darkened the trees. We crossed the park-

ing lot where Mik had the Range Rover tucked in the shadows.

Before we could reach it, Adam caught my arm, turning me toward

him. “Why didn’t you take that scholarship?”

I watched over his shoulder as Robin Hamilton and her cam-

eraman pushed through the doors of Snow Ridge. Seeing us, she

stopped, nudging her camera guy. He snapped a few pictures.

Adam turned, saw them, too, and knowing they would mistake

this for a fight (not in the script), he hurried me into the Range

Rover. “My car’s here,” I started, but Adam assured me he’d have

someone drive me back to it later.

“Okay.” Soon the cool air of the Range Rover enveloped us.

Mik pulled the car out of the lot.

With Snow Ridge fading into the distance behind us, Adam

asked me his question again.

“It’s kind of hard to explain.” I studied the houses passing us

outside, each yard familiar to me yet foreign — little universes of

their own. On one lawn, a family sat in folding chairs, their yard

threaded with colored lanterns, the kids playing with sparklers,

the Fourth starting early.

182

Mik turned the car toward town.
We must be heading back to base

camp.
I closed my eyes, leaning my body into the soft leather of the

Range Rover, my muscles limber from dancing. The car hummed

over the road.

I heard myself talking before realizing I’d started. “Remember

when you were little and you were just supposed to love some-

thing? No one asked you why. You could spend hours and hours on

it, and nobody worried about whether you were going to turn it

into anything. It didn’t have to be about anything . . .
productive
.

You could just paint or dance or collect bugs or sea glass and it was

just a lovely thing, remember?”

Adam shifted in the seat next to me. “I never really had that.”

I hadn’t thought about that. He’d had the show, always the

show, so he’d been creating something for that bigger world all

along, the world that wanted products. He sighed, his head turned

toward his own window. With the purple sky behind him, he

looked like he should be the prince in one of those fairy tale retell-

ings Hollywood kept churning out. Which, now that I thought

about it, he had been a year or two ago in a remake of
Sleeping

Beauty
.

Finally, his head still turned away, he said, “I used to collect

baseball cards. I remember there was a store in this funky part of

L.A. that my dad would take me to, rare cards and that sort

of thing. We’d spend hours in there. Then people found out I col-

lected, and they just started sending me all these really hard-to-get

ones, so I stopped. I mean, it was nice of them and all, but it just

took the fun out of it.”

I nodded. In so many ways that was what had happened to my

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dancing, that slow melting of fun. “That’s like dance. I don’t know

when it happened, but somewhere, all the fun just
evaporated
.”

Mik pulled the car up to the gate.

I took a breath, knowing I was about to tell Adam something

I’d never told anyone else. Why did I feel like I could talk to him?

Maybe because I knew he was leaving soon. In a week, he’d be

gone and could take my secret with him, but even as I thought it, I

knew it was more than that. “You know that audition, the one that

got me the scholarship?”

He nodded, tractor beam eyes fully locked in.

“Well, it was part of this summer camp, right after my sopho-

more year. All these dancers in San Francisco. We’d applied to get

in and were all just a bit too proud of ourselves for being there.”

My throat felt dry, and somehow, Mik knew to hand me an icy

bottle of water from the front seat. I thanked him, sipping it, as he

pulled up to Adam’s trailer. Mik slipped silently from the car, leav-

ing us there.

I told Adam about that summer afternoon in San Francisco. If

there was a moment when I really began to doubt dancing, it

hinged on that afternoon.

There had been a dancer, a guy who was probably in his late

twenties, and he came to talk to us. We’d been sitting on the floor

of a studio, the mirrors all around us, just chatting and laughing.

We’d just finished an especially hard day of classes, so we were

tired, but happy.

When he came into the room, something about him made us

all just shut up. Instantly. He was dressed in a tight black tank top

and jeans, his arms muscular and tan. He had dark hair and a severe

184

hairline and, without much intro, he launched into a speech about

how hard this profession was, telling us he “didn’t want to lie to

us” and that we needed to know “what we were in for” if we

expected to dance professionally. He used that word a lot, in all its

forms:
profession
,
professional
,
professionally
. Each time he said it, it felt like someone was punching me in the stomach.

Then he told us to close our eyes.

Sitting there in the backseat of the Range Rover, the heat of

summer leaching into the closed car, I described it to Adam: all

of us in our beat-up jazz shoes, our slouching leg warmers, our

faded leotards, all these outfits we’d worked so hard to make look

like we’d just thrown them on haphazardly. We sat there in that

too-hot studio that reeked of sweat, and we listened, our eyes

closed.

Then he told us: If you could imagine doing anything else in

the world besides dancing, anything at all, you should do that. Do

that
instead of this. Because dancing was competitive, exhausting,

ruthless, and it was a very, very short career. He told us: Unless

you can
only
imagine dancing, with all its pain and heartbreak and

constant drive to prove yourself, you should go home, get good

grades, and go to a regular college, because you’re not cut out to

be a dancer.

“Then he walked out of the studio. He didn’t take questions or

anything. That was it.” I finished, not sure if it was Adam’s face

darkening or the light leaving the sky outside.

Adam shook his head, his eyes wide. “And you listened to him?”

I licked my lips. “He was very convincing.”

Adam made a sound like he had something caught in his throat,

185

a sound of disgust. “He was some jerk that camp paid a hundred

bucks to come scare a bunch of kids.” Adam took a deep breath and

leaned back against the car seat. “Oh, Carter — if you listen to

every idiot who claims to be a professional in this world, every so-

called expert who makes you feel like crap, you’ll never try

anything. That guy probably went home to his junk apartment and

fed his cat and got Chinese takeout and resented all of you — all

the possibility you stood for. What a jerk. He was just trying to

sound important. Don’t listen to guys like that.”

I hurried to explain, my cheeks reddening. “It wasn’t just that

guy; it wasn’t just what he said. He just got me thinking about the

whole world of it, the whole dancing world. It’s when I realized it

had stopped being fun and started being, I don’t know,
forced
.”

“You can’t have fun all the time. Sometimes it’s hard.

Sometimes it’s frustrating and miserable, sometimes people
are

mean, but you have to push through that. You’re talented.

Sometimes being talented is just hard.” His voice caught on this

last sentence, and something suddenly connected us, a ribbon of

understanding twisted out and tied me to him.

I drank more water, my head spinning. “
That
was the problem.

I was sick of being talented. I didn’t want to be talented. At some

point along the way, talent started screwing everything up. It

started dictating things. It started saying yes, I could do that or

no, I couldn’t do that. It stopped being about the love and started