My Life in Dioramas (23 page)

But I very much liked the idea of hanging with Benny.

“Us?” She slid her sunglasses onto her face. “Never.”

“Can we get another dog?” I asked. It was like I could feel the ghost of Angus, licking my palm.

“First things first.”

30.

I couldn't sleep the night
before the competition and I woke up
way
too early the morning of it. After a quick shower I went to the kitchen but had a hard time thinking of anything I wanted to eat. I forced down a piece of toast and grabbed a few granola bars and shoved them in my bag. Then I went back upstairs to do my hair. Which was sort of pointless. I wasn't any good at it. I was about to text Stella to ask if she thought her mom could do my bun later but maybe that wouldn't be the best idea.

We hadn't spoken all week but I'd gotten texts from Madison and Nora, who wrote,
Heard you are doing solo!
and
Break a leg!

I wrote back to apologize that they'd had to reblock their whole routine because of me. The fact that they'd
both forgiven me seconds later only made me sadder that I wasn't dancing with them. What if they bombed or choked?

What if
I
did?

What if
Stella
did?

Would she even
let
me apologize?

“You ready?” My dad entered the room looking barely awake, my mother on his heels.

I nodded.

When we got to the car my mother took the keys from him and said, “I got this. You're still half-asleep.”

I played “Semi” over and over again with headphones on, running through my routine in my head. I wasn't sure I'd ever listened to it while on the road and it felt somehow right to be listening to lyrics like,
It's raining / It's pouring/Got sixteen miles till morning
, while the world whipped past in a blur of lines.

After a nap, my father declared he was starving and needed coffee and I was actually finally feeling hungry, so we went through a drive-through and loaded up. I had a Coke, which I only ever really had at fast-food places, and it really pepped me up.

The one-and-a-half-hour drive seemed endless—the world waking up around us, the traffic thickening—until we were there and it felt too soon.

There were dancers everywhere
at the conference center, all dolled up in sequins and tutus. I'd opted, at Miss Emma's suggestion, to just wear a black leotard with a squared-off, boy-short sort of cut. I felt a little plain alongside the others, but I felt like me.

We found the registration desk and searched for the dressing area I'd been assigned, glimpsing a peek of the main stage on the way. It looked huge from the back of the hall. I felt like I might throw up.

My dad was flipping through the program and looked up. “You're dancing to ‘Semi'?”

“I thought you knew.” I hadn't been hiding it.

He shook his head, kissed me on the forehead hard.

Then we found my dressing area, where a ton of other girls were pacing and warming up, then we found Miss Emma.

“How are you feeling?” she said, taking me by the shoulders.

“Good, I think.”

“You look great. But wait. Come with me. Let's fix your hair.”

She sat me in a chair in front of a mirror and my parents came over and Miss Emma said, “So, Mr. Marino, you're like a rock star, huh?”

My dad smiled. “You're hired.”

“That's my mom on violin,” I said. “I don't think I told you that.”

“You didn't!” Miss Emma said. “That's amazing.”

An announcement was made, asking nondancers to leave. So my mom kissed me on the cheek and squeezed my hand. “We're already so, so proud of you,” she said.

I pressed away tears so as not to mess up the little makeup I'd put on.

“Break a leg, Kate,” my dad said, and they were gone.

Miss Emma started to redo my bun.

“Where's Stella?” I dared.

“She's freaking out over there somewhere.” She was holding a bobby pin in her teeth. “Apologize yet?”

“To Stella, no. I wanted to do it in person.”

Miss Emma spun me around and smiled. “Well, then hop to it.”

Music surged into the air
around us. Lights shone like kaleidoscopes behind curtains. Names started being announced through an echoey microphone. Bodies shuffled this way and that. Soon I was alongside Stella, waiting for my turn. Or hers.

“I'm sorry about troupe and making you guys have to relearn everything,” I said. “I hope you guys do great.”

She tilted her head and light caught the glitter speckled on her cheeks. “Thanks.” She shook her arms out and looked off toward the stage. “Honestly, solo competition is way more important to me, anyway.”

I was going to say something else—maybe just “break a leg”—but then too quickly, it was my name being called and I was there, center stage.

I couldn't make out any faces in the crowd—a packed auditorium—but I didn't have time to anyway.

I heard the opening guitar and keyboard bits of “Semi.”

I felt so grateful for Miss Emma and for music and for my body and for my dad, who had superpowers like finding a house we could afford, and for my mom and the stuff she was going through, even though it didn't make her the most pleasant person to be around right now.

I imagined them watching me, maybe feeling sad about the good old days and also thinking how different I was from them and yet still such a part of them.

I saw the whole of the stage as a diorama, with me at the center, with a spotlight shining on me, maybe for the first time in my life. Maybe for the last. Who even knew?

And then it was done.

And there was applause, and when I took a bow, I felt like we didn't even have to stick around for the scores, the results.

I'd done it.

That was the thing that mattered.

31.

We waited and waited,
days upon days, for the phone to ring, for it to be Bernadette with news. I even started think of her as that, Bernadette, in order to up the good karma. There was paperwork and more paperwork coming and going and my father had a few appointments related to the house stuff but mostly I was living in a vacuum of information.

I spent a lot of time watching the video of my “Semi” dance, which had taken seventh place in a group of fifteen. Stella, who'd taken third place, had come over to congratulate me after the competition.

“You did great,” she said. “I'm happy for you.”

“You're only happy for me now that you did better than me,” I said.

She looked a little bit mad, or stunned. “I don't know how I got this way.”

“Well, we have to figure out how to fix it,” I said. “Because there's a
possibility
my parents are buying a small house near Big Red. So there's a
possibility
I'm coming back to Miss Emma's classes. And we can't be like this.”

She nodded. Then smiled. “You might really be moving back?”

I nodded.

“That would be amazing. Truth is, I've been miserable without you.” She leaned into me. “Not as miserable as your boyfriends Naveen and Sam, but miserable.”

“Quit it,” I said but it didn't really bother me. Not like it used to.

On Tuesday of that week
my grandmother came home with a pair of new shoes, and she left the empty box sitting on the living room floor.

I was watching something random on TV but the box just kept calling to me.

It had been weeks since I'd made a diorama, and I missed it.

“Hey, Grandma.” I found her in the kitchen. “Do you have any craft stuff? Construction paper? Ribbons? That kind of thing?”

“There's a box of stuff in the office closet but it's not much.”

“Can I look?”

“Sure.”

I left then popped my head back in and held up the empty shoebox. “Can I have this?”

“Knock yourself out,” she said.

I went up to the office and looked around in the closet and found the box. There was more good stuff in there than I'd expected. Some gift bags from various parties and holidays. Colored tissue paper. Old greeting cards and ribbons.

I opted to do a tall diorama. I lined the three back walls with blue paper, like the sky, then put green down on the bottom for grass. I took the shoebox lid—made of white cardboard—and cut a few rectangles and triangles, then colored them with gray markers, after drawing some windows and doors. When the ink dried, I set about taping them together to form the shape of a house. Using more cardboard, I made a circular roll, then went downstairs and got some toothpicks from the kitchen cabinet. I used them to prop up a small “roof” for the wishing well.

Lastly, I made a little me, a little mom, and little dad.

I put us out on the front lawn with some boccie balls of Play-Doh around us.

The whole thing felt cramped. Too small.

Life was bigger than a shoebox.

It had to be.

So I took a pair of scissors and cut open the box, folded out all the sides so that the house stood on a flat piece of cardboard.