Rose Sees Red (4 page)

I would have to remember to mention that to Todd. He’d be stoked to know that he got something right, and to learn something new about Yrena.

She smiled at me. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and even though she was smiling, there was a kind of
sadness about her that felt familiar to me. Her sadness seemed wistful. Nostalgic. Fragile. Like what I liked most about a beautiful performance. Something delicate and intensely human.

My sadness tended to repel, to alienate, to isolate. I tried to smile brighter.

It was nice to have someone sitting next to me to talk to.

I sighed.

She sighed back.

I didn’t want her to have to go home. I looked toward the door because I could hear the garage opening and closing, which meant that either another of Todd’s friends or the pizza had arrived. Yrena stood up and looked apologetic.

“You must want me to go so that you can go to the party,” she said.

“The party?”

And then, just because I did have a party I could go to, and I wanted Yrena to think I was cool, I said, in a kind of big, kind of braggy voice, “I’m going to meet my friends Callisto and Caitlin at a huge party downtown. You should come with me.”

I didn’t know why I said it, except that it felt good to say it. It felt good to invite her. Thrilling. Daring. Out of control. My pulse quickened, like when I had to do the combination in class by myself, with all of those eyes staring at me. I got nervous. So nervous.

To calm myself a bit, I started getting ready, as if I really was going to go to the party and Yrena was really coming with me. She followed me around my room as I gathered things up. I put on my shoes. I put on a little makeup. But just before I started brushing my hair, Yrena spoke.

“Oh. I can’t do that,” she said.

“Oh. I see,” I said.

Rejected. Raw. That little spark that I had felt had tricked me into stepping out, but I had been slapped back into place. I was disappointed. I hardened. Something had changed between us. I had misread the cues. I had gone left instead of right.

I put the brush down.

“I thought you would go to the party that happens every Friday in your garage,” Yrena said.

“What party?”

“I thought maybe since it was just downstairs, that I could go there with you,” she said sincerely.

“I think you’ve made a mistake. There is no party at my house.”

When I looked up at her I could see that she looked sorry. Vulnerable.

“Sometimes, I am at my window and I see the boys going into the garage. And sometimes there is pizza. It looks like a big American party. I have always wanted to go. To be invited.”

She was talking about my brother’s D&D game, which was about as much of a rager as a mid-afternoon grandpa nap. I realized that it
could
be hugely misinterpreted as a party, if you didn’t know all the facts. I felt a weight lift off of me. She wasn’t rejecting me. She just couldn’t leave the Bronx.

“That’s not a party!” I told her. “My brother has his Dungeons and Dragons night every Friday. Trust me, you don’t want to go there.”

“Dungeons and Dragons?” Yrena asked, in a way that made it clear that geeky role-playing games with multi-sided dice hadn’t yet made it to Moscow.

“It’s a game where you pretend that you are a wizard or a fighter or something and you battle orcs and hunt for treasure and play with dice,” I tried to explain.

“A game party?” She actually looked kind of impressed and interested. “My parents and I play card games together. It is fun!”

“Dungeons and Dragons is not cool,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, looking a bit disappointed. “I don’t know what is cool or not cool.”

That floored me. I would never admit that I didn’t know what was cool or not. That kind of truth could only lead to more humiliation and alienation. I felt protective of Yrena; someone needed to show her how to be a teenager in America, or she would never survive. I knew I was barely surviving myself, but at least I had observed what to do. How to
be.
I would never consider myself an expert of cool. I didn’t
have my own opinions; I was never sure of them. In the past, when we were friends, I had always followed whatever Daisy said. And now I just listened to what everyone around me said was cool at school and tried to keep up. It was funny how some people just seemed to know what was cool and what wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t cool. But somehow, at that moment, I was the expert in the room.

“Dungeons and Dragons: not cool,” I said again. Of that, at least, I was certain. I knew Todd would turn my life into one of his beloved slasher movies if he ever learned that Yrena had wanted to party with him and that I had convinced her not to be trapped in his nerd lair. There was just no way I was going to introduce Yrena to the role-playing rivals.

“So, there is not a party there every weekend?”

“It is definitely not a party,” I said.

“I always thought that your brother’s Friday parties were proof of teenage American decadence! I always wondered what it was like.”

She said “teenage American decadence” with great joy, not like it was a bad thing. Like it was something that her parents said all the time to warn her.

“Well, I’m sure they wish it was,” I said. “But it is most definitely proof of teenage American
loserdom.
”

Yrena looked down at her jeans and started picking on a stray thread. She was doing that thing that I knew I had done a million times, where you tried to readjust your
thoughts when you realized that everything you had previously thought about something was totally wrong.

She had probably written up a whole story in her head about me and my brother. She had probably thought she was being daring hanging out with me in my bedroom and asking to go to the party downstairs.

And what had I done? I had burst her bubble. I had let her down.

What did Yrena want? She just wanted something to do. I could come up with something to do.

“Do you like ice cream?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Who doesn’t?”

“We could go up the street to Zips and get an ice cream.”

“Okay.”

I went to open my bedroom door, but Yrena whistled to me and motioned to the window and started to climb through it, disappearing outside.

I didn’t stop to think about it. I didn’t think it was weird. I just followed her out the window in my pink slip and backward sweater.

It was a funny thing, climbing out of a bedroom window. It got you out of the house, just like a door did, but somehow it made you look at your own house differently, as though the use of the window had just expanded into something more profound.

A window could be an exit.

I had two states of being. When I was on pointe and when I was in sneakers.

When I was on pointe, the world was heightened. I had a voice. I was really me.

And when I was in sneakers, I was nothing. I was a mouse.

I didn’t want to be a mouse forever.

This was why, as eighth grade drew to a close, I’d booked myself an audition at the High School of Performing Arts. I dusted off my ballet shoes and cobbled together an audition piece using parts from an old recital I had done when I was twelve. I bribed Todd with homemade chocolate chip cookies for time in the garage to practice my moves.

I did it in secret. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. Not even my parents. I did it like I was ashamed. Like if I told anyone—especially Daisy—I would be convinced to quit.

What was I thinking? That I could be a dancer?

Yes.

When I got to the school, the building looked ominous. It was nestled on the street just up the road from Times Square, which was a scary mess. I found myself in front of an old, run-down brown building.

I made my way upstairs to the dance department. I saw Stanley, from school, but he was auditioning for the drama department and the music department, so I didn’t say hello. I knew he wouldn’t rat me out to my friends because he didn’t mingle in Daisy’s circle.

I pinned the number that the audition check-in girl handed me onto my bodysuit and sat on the floor in my tights, stretching out against the mirror as I watched the other dancers in my group auditioning. They were good. They looked good. They looked cool. They looked skinny. I was woefully out of shape, my muscles tighter than they used to be. I stretched a little harder, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

But even though I had quit dancing, even though my dancing was going to be rusty, at that moment I felt like a dancer.

I knew it the way that a bird knows how to fly when it is pushed out of its nest. The way that a baby penguin knows how to swim. How a flower knows to bloom in spring.

“Numbers five through ten, please take center,” the woman with the accent and the cane yelled. She was small and hunched and her hair was shockingly short and white.

I was number nine, so I got up and took a place on the floor in the back row.

But suddenly, I didn’t want to be seen, even if I was going to give it my best. Suddenly I felt
shy.

The woman showed us the combination and we learned it quickly and did it. I thought perhaps we’d sit down like the other group had after they’d done it once all the way through.

But no. “This group again. And this time, let us have the two reluctant young ladies in the back do it in the front,” the woman said, banging her cane on the floor.

(Later, I would learn that she limped because two of her toes were cut off, but at this moment I had forgotten why it always seemed as though ballet teachers were old as time and strangely misshapen.)

I moved to the front row. The piano player started to play, and I danced.

I was terrible. I stumbled. I missed a step, and even though I was still doing the combination, I figured I’d failed the audition already. I stopped trying. I knew what my fate was. It was the zoned school for me.

Everyone in the room could see that I was not up to par. I could feel my heart, and how much I wanted it to go into my feet. But my heart wouldn’t comply. I was scared. My heart was pulling away from me rather than going where it was supposed to.

I danced as though disconnected. And the harder I tried to reach for it, the farther it went away from me. My fear had won.

When they called numbers to stay behind, my number
wasn’t called. I knew that meant that I could go home. I knew that meant that I hadn’t gotten a callback.

“Wasn’t that so fun!” a girl next to me said as she put on her street clothes. “I hope I get in. This is my dream school!”

I knew for sure that she wasn’t going to get in, because I had watched her and she was a bad dancer. I knew I wasn’t
that
bad. I could blame my rejection on being rusty, out of shape, and mediocre at the audition.

But I couldn’t absolve myself of the fact that none of this mattered, if you danced with no spark. If you kept something to yourself. That was probably worse than being bad.

That girl was lucky. It was better to be like her and to just have no talent at all than to have just a little bit of talent and not be able to even let it out.

I barraged myself. Maybe if I had practiced more in the garage…Maybe if I’d taken a few dance classes after school to help me get my dance back on…Maybe if I’d used different music in my solo piece…

There I was in the locker room, changing into my street clothes, when it hit me for real that I had totally blown it. I wanted to go to Performing Arts. Not a zoned school, and definitely not Bronx Science. I didn’t want four more years of all of those people.

I slammed the locker shut with my hand. It popped back open and hit me in the forehead.

I was alone then, in the back corner so none of the other girls who had auditioned with me could see. Some of them
must have been upset, too. Or maybe they didn’t realize that they had been cut yet. I could tell they had some hope they were clinging to that they were going to get in because a few of them were chattering as they left the dressing room, like excited birds. They would go home and wonder and wait for their letter and be surprised or bummed out when it was a rejection.

I waited a bit until they had left and then I started crying. I didn’t want anyone to see that I was upset. There were mirrors everywhere and I caught sight of myself, and was amazed because I didn’t recognize myself.

Where had the real me gone? There I was, crying, in secret, dressed in street clothes that Daisy had made me buy at the Galleria. Why was I wearing this Fiorucci sweatshirt? I didn’t even like it.

Seeing myself in all of those mirrors, so sad and in an outfit that I didn’t like, that wasn’t even me, made it more upsetting, so I pulled my sweatshirt up over my face so I couldn’t see anything at all.

I waited until the whole locker room was silent and then I went out in the hallway.

I stopped to look at the bulletin board with pictures of the dance department that I would never be in.

That was when I saw her coming toward me, holding a sandwich bag under her arm and a to-go coffee cup in her hand—the woman with the limp who had auditioned me.

“You. Didn’t I cut you an hour ago?” she asked.

I felt embarrassed.

I nodded.

“Why aren’t you gone yet? There is no loitering.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to speak in case I started crying again. I couldn’t look at her face because it was so severe. She was all pointy angles, high forehead, purple lipstick, and that shock of extremely short, extremely white hair.

“You are out of shape, and you haven’t danced in a long time, I think,” she said.

I shook my head from side to side. No. I hadn’t.

“You do not want to leave now, but you should have not wanted to leave when you were auditioning.”

I nodded in agreement, because she was right.

“Do you remember the combination?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah, she speaks,” the woman said to the empty hall, as though there were a large audience around her and she was onstage. “Do it for me now.”

“Here?” I said.

“Yes. Here.”

“I’m not dressed right,” I said.

“Does that matter? No. It does not. I asked you to dance for me. Dance does not care about clothes.”

I put down my shoulder bag and took off my jacket and put them on the floor under the bulletin board. And then I did the combination. I channeled all my anger, all my disappointment, all of my simmering into the combination. I attacked it.

No errors. Not bad. Not great. But not bad. Definitely better than in the audition room.

“Do you feel better now?”

I nodded. I did feel better.

“Sometimes a combination is best remembered a little bit after it is learned.”

“Muscle memory,” I said.

She nodded.

“Watch your back leg—you tend to drag it and you are very out of shape,” she said. And then she turned and retreated down the hallway.

When my letter arrived, I figured it was too thin to be an acceptance letter. I figured I must have been rejected.

But when I opened it, I had gotten in.

The first thing I did was take dance classes to get back into shape.

The second thing I did was try to figure out how I was going to tell Daisy that I was going to be a dancer.

You’d think that telling someone the truth would be easy. But it was harder than I thought, because I had quit dancing. Forever quit. Never-going-back quit. Totally-swore-up-and-down quit.

I got in to Science, too, but I knew there was no way that I was going to go.

Daisy was so excited.

“We’re going to go down to Canal Street and get cool clothes. We’re going to henna our hair. We’re going to get
ourselves summer boyfriends at the Mockridge pool for
practice.
”

She had big plans for us at Science. She kept saying how we were going to reinvent ourselves over the summer and be the coolest freshman girls when we got there.

I let Daisy go on about our reinvention all summer. I went down to Canal Street and bought more things I didn’t like. I wore my matching swimsuit to the Mockridge pool and pretended to have a crush on Danny Wasserman.

I waited until two weeks before school started to tell her. And even then it wasn’t planned. I was at her house, sleeping over. She had gotten a letter telling her what homeroom she was in and she wanted to know if we were going to be together.

“I’m not going to Science,” I said.

“What?” Daisy said. She was putting on purple eye shadow even though we weren’t planning on going anywhere. It was a thing we did, experiment with crazy makeup when we had sleepovers. It was another thing that I didn’t like to do. Daisy would bring over piles of magazines and her hand was guided by the New Wave look she found in them. She wanted to cultivate a style for high school.

“I thought you got in? I saw your acceptance!”

“I did get in,” I said. “But I’m not going.”

“We have a plan,” she said. The shadow made her eyes look bruised. “We have to stick together. Just tell your parents you won’t go to private school.”

I sucked in my cheeks and started applying makeup, too.

“I’m not going to private school. I’m going to Performing Arts.”

“What?” Daisy said, holding her blush brush midair. She only had one cheek done. “You can’t just decide to go there. You have to
audition
to get in. Besides, you know who is going there? Stanley. And he’s gross. Gross people go there.”

It was ironic how she said she was all about the strange and different. That’s what she liked best in the magazines. But there it was something contained and frozen on the pages, in its assigned role of the weird. It couldn’t get loose and do something unexpected. She obviously couldn’t stand someone in real life going off script.

“I auditioned and I got in.”

“But you didn’t tell me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you tell me everything,” she said. “Best friends don’t keep secrets.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I was afraid to tell you.”

She stopped looking at me and only looked at her own image in the mirror. She resumed making herself up.

“Why?” she said slowly.

“I thought you’d laugh at me.”

“Well, what talent do you have?” she asked, and to make it worse, now she was laughing, like she didn’t know.

“Dance.”

Daisy’s eyes narrowed. Her cheeks were hot-pink triangles. She looked sharp and geometric.

“You know what your problem is?” she said. “You’re a liar.”

She threw the makeup brush at the mirror, snatched her bag off the floor, and pushed past me.

I grabbed her arm. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Just because we’re not going to the same school doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends.”

I wondered if I looked as surreal as she did, with wild-colored spots on my face, or if it was just the scene that she was making that made everything look absurd.

“Friends don’t betray friends like that,” she said, shaking me off. “We had a plan.”

“I didn’t betray you,” I said. “I just made a different choice than what you wanted.”

“We had a deal,” she said.

And right at that moment, I wavered. My resolve broke. My knees were weak.

“Maybe I could change my plans,” I said. “Maybe I can just go to Bronx Science.”

“No,” she said. “It’s too late. I can never trust you again. You’ve ruined everything, and I will never be your friend again.”

“Please,” I said. “Please.”

I begged her all the way down the stairs. All the way to the front door. All the way to the corner.

And then she turned around and spit at me so I would stop following her.

And that was the moment when I thought that maybe I shouldn’t have any friends at all.