I don't reel backward or fight the stranger with molten eyes as his grip tightens, twists around to face me completely. Just stare at him, assessing his strengths and weaknesses, madly pulling together a plot regarding how I'm getting out of here in one piece. "Obviously," I say with an edge of fabricated humor.
Young, maybe a year or two older than myself, but the man is a foot taller than me. His inky black hair glistens in the moonlight, almost curling. Even in the shadows, his face is tanned by the summer sun, complimenting his hair nicely. And though he wears a black sweatshirt and loose-fitting jeans, his jaw is sculpted out of rock and his hand on my wrist is solid iron.
So strength will not be a weakness when I make my move, then.
The stranger watches me too, and something about the way he eyes my generic and dirty dress bothers me. He looks to my shoes, which are equally disappointing, and then the gold travels up to my face, soaked in pity.
His hand releases my wrist, and it drops limply to my side. Confusion surges through me, and then some as he reaches into his jeans pocket, pulling out a crisp hundred dollar bill.
"Take it," he says, nodding to his own money.
I merely stare at the bill, half-obscured in the scope of nearby lamplights and the brilliant city two miles south. Against the indigo sky, the buildings shine brightly even in my periphery, each of their windows like a star. The actual stars' reflections shimmer on the East River, to the left.
As daunting as that skyline often seems, it's no safer here, on the sidewalk outside of the brick bar. The buildings certainly aren't as menacing, small and fracturing and spray-painted, but bad things happen here too. I remind myself of that as I look up from the bill.
The man in the hooded sweatshirt bleeds back into existence, his hand nudging the bill into mine.
"Why."
He shakes his head. "You need it more than I do."
Though pickpocketing is hardly better than accepting money from strangers, my hand takes a long while to curl around the bill. It reminds me of the weight I carry in my purse, every one of those credit cards frozen by this hour.
"Thank you," I say, biting my tongue to avoid a witticism. Why does this man give me his own money when he has every right to call the police on me?
At least Mom would've gotten her wish to pick me up at a closer precinct, I think darkly.
He starts walking in the opposite direction of my apartment, but faltering, the man turns back around to face me. "My name's Cal," he says by way of formal introduction outside this gross little bar. "Let me walk you home—it's not safe to be out here so late at night."
Cal. He walks to me, stopping at a respectable distance.
"Mare Barrow," I reply, though I should know better than to give Cal—the man I just attempted to steal from—a last name. He holds out his hand to shake mine, but I cross my arms. "Somebody with the likes of your wallet shouldn't be out here so late, either. You may look scary in that hoodie of yours, but the men in that bar are ten times worse, I promise."
Cal drops his hand, neatly tucking it behind his back with the other. He steals a look at the bar, the windows as dirty as they were five minutes ago. "I can take care of myself. Yet you were going to go in there?"
Shrugging, I start into a walk down the cracking street, not waiting to see if he'll follow me. "I've learned the tricks of the trade over the years. Besides, most of them are too drunk to stand, let alone assault me."
Most.
With his height, Cal catches up to me with no trouble. "Over the years?" I have half the mind to snap at him for interrogating me like this, judging the things I've done to take care of my family when they couldn't fend for themselves. I only think twice because of the hundred pinched between my fingers. "You're not older than eighteen." Sadness traces his tone.
"Seventeen," I say, craning my head to look at the man I've barely met. "And my family needs the money, questionable or not." I eye him again, and despite the ordinary clothes . . . "You're not from around here, are you?"
He seems to question it for a moment, gazing around at the lonely street.
Then Cal becomes interested in the pavement, his eyes glued to the ground. Almost as though he's afraid to meet my eyes. "No. I'm not."
The way he maintains his shoulders as we walk, relaxed and pressed backward, reminds me of a dancer, a habit I still keep up with to this day. He holds himself tall and keeps this . . . awareness of his body about him. Interesting.
But if he isn't some East Harlem drunk, then what is he?
When Cal comes to terms with the fact that I don't plan on speaking again, he says, "Well, as I don't live here. Do you like East Harlem?"
An idle piece of conversation and he better know it. My knees nearly buckle under me, but I keep walking, the apartment fast-approaching. Nobody, nobody likes living here. And maybe Cal sincerely means the question, but I can't help but find it hilarious. The buildings in East Harlem are ancient and rundown, the streets are dirty, and fights break out every time a streetlamp stops working.
"Does anyone?" I ask a question for his question, pausing on the sidewalk to motion around. "Though I don't spend much time at home anyway. My profession demands many hours." To hide the pain in my voice, I give him a little wink. "Better than living up there isn't it?" I point towards Midtown's skyline. "Better than living a life with everything handed to you."
His throat bobbles and I wonder if I've hit a nerve. Cal can't be overly rich—the son of a Wall Street man wouldn't end up in the claws of East Harlem—but maybe he sees things differently. Differently than somebody who's had so many years to become so jaded.
"Tell me," he says, coming out of whatever emotion I bestowed upon him. "Is there anything you like to do? You know, other than pickpocket from innocents and harass unwitting men?" Cal cracks a smile, crooked and light.
I huff, glaring. He has a sense of humor to match my own.
Still, that hundred burns a hole of guilt in my pocket. "I used to dance," I whisper, and his eyebrows raise. "I was good at it too, my teachers told me. Really good." Yet my story didn't end the way it does for princesses in between the crisp covers of fairy tale books.
Then, not having any obligation to tell him about my life, I explain to him how everything has gone to shit and hell since the day I quit dance.
Cal listens, probably much more enthralled than a stranger should be.
His ears are perked as I tell him how I cried the afternoon my parents pulled me from my dance lessons. It had been a messy, awful day of arguing, screaming, and begging, ending in a silent night in my room, Gisa conveniently sleeping over at a friend's house.
How over time my pickpocket jobs have gotten more and more lawless. The time I ended up in the NYPD holding cells overnight. What happened just today on Wall Street.
How my sister sprained her wrist, the sibling who was like a shining light in the dark harbor of our apartment. Who knows how long it'll take for her to recover fully.
And how I dropped out of school last spring because of my rage, my hate. If I couldn't dance, then I wouldn't do anything at all. As if I thought I could spite the world by doing so, even if it just made me spiral further.
I finish my story, eyes surprisingly clear, Cal's presence enough to sharpen my senses and keep the tears away.
He shoves his hands into his pockets and looks me full on. "You had a real passion, Mare Barrow." There's a glint in his eye that I don't quite understand, that I'm not meant to understand. Maybe it's just from the nearby lamplight. "I'm sorry."
I bristle at his sympathy as Cal offers me another hundred dollar bill for exposing myself so stupidly to him, but I allow him to shove it into the outside pocket of my bag.
"Don't feel bad for me, Cal," I say under the light, a block away from my brick-red apartment, where Will's store window still gleams. "There are worse lives to live."
At that, we part ways, never to see each other again in a city of eight and a half million.
Sitting on the cement rim of my apartment, six stories above the street, I gaze outward. My legs dangle over the edge, but my palms brace the rest of my body, careful.
Mom gave up in reprimanding me off this roof ages ago. And though I don't take pleasure in making her worry about me, after everything I've gotten myself into . . . sitting up here, as close to the stars as I'll ever get . . . there's something freeing about it. The wind blowing from the Harlem River—that eventually becomes the East River—plays with my hair, and though the scent isn't particularly great, I don't focus on the less glamorous parts of my neighborhood.
Not right now, at least.
Cal.
His face is already fading in my memory, being cataloged with everybody else who's come and gone.
Why did I tell him such things? He didn't offer up a bit of information on himself during the walk beyond his name, just listened. A collector of others' memories.
But like my memory of Cal, the feeling of dancing in the studio and on stage is slowly drifting away.
It wasn't a high-end ballet company where I learned everything I know, but a simple studio that taught all forms of dance. But regardless of how famed the studio—that was always changing its name, experimenting to discover a name that would at last attract new customers—was, I loved it. More than anything in the world.
Even when I was small and Mom and Dad weren't terribly concerned about the thirty a month they'd pay for my little-girl ballet class, I loved it.
Before my parents knew it, I started wanting to come back more, and promising to do extra chores, they let me enroll in the tumbling class. Then it was tap. At some point or another, I started jazz.
But when I was eleven, it was then I started pointe.
While I complained about my ugly feet relentlessly to Gisa, pointe was my favorite. The absolute joy I got from twirling on my toes was like nothing else, knowing how many years had gone into getting me there.
It was expensive. I drag a hand over my face, remembering the glittering costumes and high-end pointe shoes. By the time I turned thirteen, I was burning through pointe shoes, going to competitions every weekend, practically living at that studio just blocks away.
At fifteen, I started teaching a few classes a week to the little ones when my teacher—fully aware of my family's financial situation—offered me a job in exchange for a discount on tuition.
Still, between that and the pickpocketing, Mom still fished out her checkbook each month, still paying too much. At her shoulder, feeling so incredibly guilty, I'd promise myself to collect extra money. Somehow. When I wasn't busy with school or dance.
In a sad way, I think my parents were relieved when they finally told me it was over. It had been a Friday afternoon, and they had waited for me in the living room, waited for me to come home from school. And simply told me as it was: they couldn't afford it anymore and had already taken the liberty of speaking with my teachers at the studio.
More than likely, they had been looking for a way to break the news to me for months. In hindsight I saw the signs, clear as day: the silent looks across the table as I told my family how excited I was for my latest competition, the looks of pure dread Mom hid deep in her eyes as she pulled out her checkbook.
Am I so selfish? For not telling my parents it was okay sooner? For raging at them when I was told the truth I had known all along? Mom's been working as a hotel maid for years, and Dad . . . he has his limitations. It's a miracle they managed to keep me enrolled for long. I remind myself of that and the sacrifices they made.
They love me. They do.
From my place on the rooftop, I can see the rundown studio with ease. There were only two rooms inside of it, one big and one small, but they achieved the same purpose. The barres glued to the rooms' edges adorned peeling paint, and the floor in the small room always creaked. I never talked to the other girls who danced there. They didn't take it seriously the way I did—they weren't stupid enough to think that a professional ballerina could come from a place like they attended. Even if I won ribbons and trophies at every one of those competitions.
Though the street that touches its wooden doors is the best, safest way into the downtown, I avoid it at all costs. I haven't talked to any of them since. Them.
It feels like a lifetime has passed since this winter, not a year ago.
At all costs, I make sure I avoid it. Especially because of the headteacher and owner of that place. She was my mentor, taught me everything that I viewed as valuable, she was . . .
The mother I never had.
As though Mom can hear my thoughts, I look behind me to find nobody on the rooftop.
She never confirmed it, but I thought of myself as her favorite. When the other girls left our ballet technique classes, she always kept me after. To correct me on the way that I held my shoulders, so now I can hold them the way Cal held his; corrected me on the way I pointed my foot, shifted my weight. She herself began giving me private lessons—free of charge and at her own expense—beginning when I was fourteen.
I don't think about her very often.
Sighing, I stand up on the roof so I can feel a little taller.
The eternal lights of the city sparkle in all their glory, and skyscrapers stick out of the earth like swords coming out of their sheaths. As a little girl, still wearing my bubblegum-colored hair ties, she'd ask me: Why does the sun bother to set if they leave all those lights on?