"So I have this idea."
I don't look up toward Cal as I pick at the knotted ribbon of my pointe shoe. My right foot's already free, but my other foot is thoroughly trapped in satin.
After my trip to Central Park with Maven, I returned to the Academy alone, put on some dancing clothes, and tied up my pointe shoes so that I could rehearse Giselle in Julian's studio. Apparently distracted by fresh memories of my brother laughing at me—although he had heard the story of my fall from Ann before, Shade thought it was extra-funny coming from the victim herself—I forgot all about how tight to knot my shoes.
"What's your idea, Cal?" At the same time, I pat my head, hoping to find a stray bobby pin somewhere within my hair. Sure enough, my fingers hit a tiny bar of steel just above my ear. I fish it out and stab the ribbons with it.
If I were to look up, I'd find Cal in his fold-up chair, notebook on his lap and crooked grin on his lips. Instead, I ignore him and shimmy my pin into the center of the knot.
The knot comes undone when I pull, and in the next second, I'm undoing my laces and throwing my other pointe shoe behind me. I already have socks on, since I decided earlier that it was a no-tights kind of day.
"Every time we have a lesson, I get to ask you a question, and you get to ask me a question."
With no pointe shoes on my feet, I have no choice but to look up to Cal once I've tucked my pin back into my hair. I lean back on my palms, studying my contemporary teacher. His inky hair's stuck to his forehead again, and sometime during my struggle against my pointe shoe, Cal lowered himself from his chair to sit on the stage. His notebook's still at his lap, though, and he dons a subdued grin as he glances between it and me.
I'm tempted to tell Cal that he doesn't need a designated time and place to ask me things nor does he have an allotment of questions. There's nothing stopping him from asking me about my life, my hobbies, my family, my . . . whatever. It's only my decision whether I answer his questions or not.
But he knows that. He also knows that he can get more out of me with a single, meaningful question than with little snippets of small-talk throughout the night.
"Okay," I say after a moment, finding no real reason to argue with him. "I assume you already have a question in mind?"
Because I have to know what kind of game I'm playing, he's going first. I stare at the wooden floorboards, the seamless lines where one plank meets another, the tiny scratches and marks from years of dancing. All at once, I find a dozen questions in them and none at all. Some are too personal, others are too vague and thoughtless, and I come up with nothing in between.
"You seem happy today. Why?"
Well, that's just vague and deep. As usual, Cal's hit a mark. A moment ago, he probably saw the reminiscent smile that I couldn't keep off my face as I picked away at my pointe shoe. I haven't been able to stop thinking about Shade all afternoon, and those giddy, happy thoughts are enough to cancel out the annoyance of being here.
In spite of the terrifying new plans of the Scarlet Street Fighters—Farley used the word attack, while Shade said warning—I got to see my brother today. We spent a full-blown hour talking about the last year and a half, which have included wild adventures on Shade's part that make my own story sound dull. He's broken into corporate buildings, coordinated a firework launching in Midtown, and more recently, my brother and a few other Street Fighters managed to rob a bank in the dead of night.
And still, Shade wanted to know every detail, every breath and every moment of my last year and a half. So I told him. I told him about Mom and Dad and dance and how I cried the day I quit, and then I told him about the money I made in Times Square this summer. He smiled at that. And though I left out the part about our sister spraining her wrist, Shade was the first person to hear the full story, Cal and all, about me auditioning for the Manhattan Dance Academy after a lousy pickpocket attempt.
"I saw my youngest brother today," I say to Cal against my better judgment. In what reality it hurts to tell him a little about Shade, I don't know, but it makes me nervous. My giddy, happy feeling subsides.
Cal stares back at me inquisitively. The stage lights paint his skin a deeper tan, his eyes a richer shade of amber. "Can't you just go home and see your family whenever you want?"
That's an answer to a question in and of itself. Maven never told Cal about what I did.
"He's your age. He doesn't live at home anymore," I say, realizing that Cal's question isn't relevant to Shade. I still sigh before I go any further. "It's a long story," I explain, inwardly wincing at exactly how long and dangerous of a story it is, "but it was good to finally see him after so long. I've always been closer to him than my other two brothers and my sister."
Of course, Shade doesn't live at home anymore because he joined the Scarlet Street Fighters, the soon-to-be sworn enemy of the Calores. Of course, I only saw him after so long because I joined their gang. I keep all of it off my face.
"That's good," Cal says after a beat. I doubt he knows quite what to respond with when I've given him so little.
But he pauses, tilts his head. For a moment, I worry what he's going to say. I decide I'll tell him that he already used up his one question, and then some.
"Four siblings?" he says instead.
Something like a hybrid of laugh and a groan leaves me. I wasn't expecting him to ask that.
"Yeah. It's awful, trust me." I think of the one tiny apartment my entire family shares, the grotesque amounts of cereal Bree, Tramy, and Shade would devour in the middle of the night when they were teens—Tramy's still like that sometimes. Gee hogged the fan all summer, leaving me to Manhattan's merciless heat. Practicing stage faces in the mirror, I once kept my brothers waiting at the bathroom door long enough that they decided to take a leak right out my bedroom window.
"I believe it. I have one brother, and sometimes, I can barely stand him."
That gets a snicker out of me. I can just imagine Maven and Cal shoving and teasing each other the way I did with Shade once. But I also know Cal doesn't mean it. Maven talks about going over to Cal's apartment all the time, watching movies and playing chess with him. They're brothers, probably as close as brothers can be.
"He says similar things about you," I say with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. It doesn't mean anything, though. Maven resents his father, not Cal.
Cal narrows his eyes. He looks every bit the picture of a slighted older brother, the one who's supposed to do the harassing and the one who's supposed to be annoyed at his younger brother all of the time, not the other way around. As if to ask what sort of things Maven's said about him, Cal opens his mouth.
But I don't want to be here all night. "I have my question," I announce, glancing toward the stage wing past Cal. The lights make it so that the stage itself is evenly lit, no plank of wood brighter than another. The wings, on the other hand, shine every shade of shadow and light.
"Shoot." My contemporary teacher decides that a pursuit after his brother isn't worth it.
"So this is the first year you were a Principal dancer," I say. "You were a Soloist before that, which you shouldn't have been. You should've been a Principal dancer when you were seventeen, if not before that."
If I continued talking aloud, I'd get to the answer. But I want to hear him say it himself, and I can't think of what else to ask him anyway.
"Why?" I ask. What I say almost sounds like a compliment.
Cal gives me this exasperated look, slumping his shoulders and bowing his head. He even shuts his notebook, as though that little action will make me choose a different question. Then he sighs, and the sound is an overly-dramatic, loud kind of noise.
"I want to hear it from you," I say, smiling.
"You're supposed to ask me questions you don't know the answers to, Mare."
"You never said that," I remind him.
It's his turn to look down at the stage floor. Cal's contemplating. His mouth twists and turns into a smirk before settling into an impartial line.
"Sixteen was too young for a Principal. When I was seventeen, the youngest woman Soloist who was up for promotion was eight years older than me, and she already had a partner. So I was made a Soloist, and a similar thing happened last year."
No one his age could compare to him.
Cal acts like he's not impressed with himself the way Maven came across when he told me, Farley, and Shade about how he snuck into his father's office while Cal and Tiberias Senior were watching the Mets. Cal tells the story with a straight face, voice like one that's reading from a boring book. But damn it, he's making a story out of it.
"Last year, Evangeline auditioned for the first time. I managed to convince Blonos, Elara, and my dad that she wasn't a match for me, even though Evangeline was the obvious choice for a partner. The Academy offered her a position as a Soloist, but she turned it down to train for another year with her private instructors." Cal, billionaire's son, rolls his eyes at private instructors. "She came back this summer stronger than ever, and I didn't have much of a choice with her then."
Cal returns my stare passively.
My expression is somewhat different, with my cringe and wide eyes that ask, are you kidding me? "Soloist wasn't good enough for her?"
He shakes his head. "Apparently not. She found out about what I did, too, telling the ballet mistresses and my dad that I didn't think she had what it took. Evangeline's still pissed at me for it."
Pissed, and yet dead-set on dancing with Cal. Part of me understands it, as he's the son of the Academy and one of the best dancers here, despite his age. Evangeline probably puts up with him, knowing that having Cal as a partner is worth the notoriety. Another part of me will never understand it, though, this . . . world and the strange social ladder that somehow involves who you dance with.
"It's kind of ironic, in a way. Evangeline finally gets what she wants, only to end up not able to dance at all."
Cal barely mentioned Evangeline on Wednesday. At the time, it hadn't been twenty-four hours since her accident, and nobody knew exactly what was going on. Since she was in stable condition, Cal didn't seem especially worried over what had happened to his partner nor interested in talking about her. He only said that she was awake, albeit delirious, and that when her mother told her who had taken her spot as Giselle, she congratulated me. Three days later, I doubt she's happy for me now.
A question occurs to me that I hadn't thought of before.
"Now that you don't have a partner, what are you doing all season?"
Cal shifts his eyes past me, as though he, too, looks to the stage wings for an answer. Idly, his fingers tap the wooden floor planks below him. At the beginning of the week, he was ready to begin six, seven-hour ballet rehearsals, and now he no longer has a role of any kind in Giselle. Though I have to think that Tiberias Calore's son is busy enough without the Academy.
"Well, I still have technique in the morning. I'll probably pick up some classes for Julian, since I have the time and he'll be back at NYU part-time for the semester. And it's only a matter of days before Blonos asks me to start sitting in on Giselle rehearsals to offer my eye."
I don't have to ask Cal if he'll miss dancing in the ballet when he's already told me that he doesn't like it that much in the first place. I have a feeling that he'll enjoy his time off—not to mention his time away from Evangeline—teaching modern dance and that crap he's into.
"And besides, my dad wants me downtown at our company's headquarters more. I have all kinds of things to do there."
The heir to Calore Industries is sparing me the details. I have no doubt that Cal's already holding meetings, negotiating with business partners, and learning everything that it takes to be the ruler of a dynasty. One day, it'll be his company to run, and he knows that. Perhaps he knows that one day, New York will be his city to own as well.
I just wonder what details he's sparing.
"I can only imagine," I tell him.
But I don't imagine. Instead, I put my feet under me and get up off the ground. I don't want to be here all night, and I don't want to think about Calore Industries or Tiberias Calore or anything else. So I'll have to dance instead.
"Ready then?" I ask.
"You don't have to ask me that."
I don't move, but the ground does.
The warmth of Cal's stomach from beneath his T-shirt presses into my back as he carries me across the stage floor. One of his arms is wrapped around my ribcage, the other around my thigh, and I'm somehow suspended in midair and grounded at the same time. I'm floating like a ghost, and if I were doing it all by myself, I'd be having fun.
But it's just Cal's biceps holding me up.
I point the leg that he holds upward to the rafters, and my second leg bends in so that my toes touch my knee. My body's tilted, and I look out on the auditorium, far more spectral than I'll ever be with its empty air and empty seats. My arms extend up and down, towards the stage and away from it. All of the lines and shapes that I make are just the technicalities of ballet, things that Cal goes over but doesn't really care about. I do the technicalities anyway.
Cal put on music from a speaker, though I don't pay it or its echoes much attention. I don't even bother to count the beats, knowing that the rhythm we go at has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with when I'm ready, when he tells me he's doing this or doing that.
Like this practice, our first practice could've been worse.
On Wednesday, after too many trust falls, Cal and I moved onto lifts. I had psyched myself out. None of them were extraordinarily terrifying, mainly because they didn't require much faith in myself nor involved my head going close to the floor. He lifted me by my hips, and I arched back into him and saw the rafters. I leaped, and Cal lifted me higher than I could ever go by myself. A few times, he put me over his shoulder, and I stared at the floor while suspended, stick-straight.
We did some simpler things too. He took my hands and turned me around myself, an arabesqued ballerina encased in a snowglobe. He let me get used to what being dipped feels like. At one point, Cal got down onto one knee to hold my hips while I leaned into him and did a split.
It took over two hours. I didn't get to bed until eleven, and it screwed up my plans for an early warm-up the next morning.
In the present, Cal's grip adjusts from my stomach to my side. The ground starts slanting away from me, and I'm staring at the rafters again. Cal's other hand is still braced at my upper leg.
I'm above Cal's head, more than six feet off the ground.
My ghostlike feeling nearly leaves me.
His straightened arms don't waver against my body. They never do, and he's been lifting me for an hour. At five foot two, I'm probably the lightest thing in the world to him.
Last practice, Cal told me that, along with his brother, he's been lifting girls like this since he was fifteen. And aside from that, aside from his obvious strength, I've watched Cal dance dozens of times. His movements are sharp and focused, smooth and effortless. They're always limned with control. A pas de deux is no different for him, whereas it' a foreign language to me.
"Arabesque," he says, lowering me to the ground.
My foot of my free leg touches down, and I balance on the ball of it for a moment before Cal releases me.
Sometimes after a combination, he'll decide that I'm comfortable enough with it and that we can move on. Other times, he'll straight-up tell me that we need to do it again, and I'll agree with him.
This time, however, Cal doesn't say anything. He steps back a few paces, apparently surveying me with his drawn brows. Cal puts his hand to his jaw, palm at his chin and fingers at his ear.
"What's wrong?" I ask. With nowhere to put them, I put my own hands at my hips. I thought that I just about had that lift mastered.
Cal almost seems confused. He looks at me for another moment, as though I'm something to be deciphered.
"What?" I say again. I keep my tone patient.
"That was really good," he says, even though something displeased lingers in his own tone.
"But?"
I have a good-enough guess of what's bothering him about me. I want him to say it aloud.
"Say it."
Cal blinks at me.
"You're too tense. You need to loosen up."
I don't blink back at him. I even nod in agreement.
I've been waiting for somebody—anybody, for that matter—to tell me that. Julian never did, nor did he say that to any of the other ballet dancers, many of whom had similar problems. His modern class was just for fun, after all.
Cal goes on. "Your ballet . . . is near-perfection. But then when you go and dance jazz, or say, contemporary, you keep thinking like a ballerina. And it makes you too tense."
He's not talking about this exact moment. We're currently practicing ballet lifts, and Cal already told me that we're not dancing to his choreography for another two practices. But Cal's been watching me, and he knows how I dance. I'm the beautiful ballerina who has perfect posture and elegant lines and nothing but. He just happens to be thinking of it now.
"How are you going to fix me?" I ask, genuinely curious to hear his response when I have no clue how to fix myself.
Cal laughs a little. "I have plans. I'll reveal them to you at a later date."
I scoff, though it's mainly an attempt to hide my unease.
"In the meantime, let's continue." Cal makes a motion for me to come closer. "We'll keep going over the old stuff, but I think you have a good handle on everything we've done so far."
He won't say it, but I've surprised him in how fast I've caught on to the lifts, how I've managed not to squirm or flinch too much since the trust falls. But it's not like I've never seen these lifts done before or don't know what they're called, and I've realized it's just a matter of learning where to put my weight, when to shift. After the first half-hour, I also realized that there's nothing strange in dancing with Cal, and I started getting used to it.
Like he has before, Cal gets down on one knee. When I stop before him, he's no more than a foot below me. His eyes glimmer, and it means nothing good.
Along with the feeling of dancing with Cal—if lifts can be called dancing—I've gotten used to the auditorium. The curtains, endless seats, and shadows will always loom, and our voices will always feel too empty, but I know that being here has something to do with Cal's contemporary plans. I'll put up with it.
"Jump up at an angle towards me. Balance your weight," Cal says, words echoing. His hands return to my hips.
Unless I ask, he isn't the type to go over things or explain them much.
"Like from Dirty Dancing?" I can't help but ask. I think of Kilorn.
Cal grins. "Yeah. Like from Dirty Dancing."
I hold back a sigh. Once Cal realizes I can handle doing this with him kneeling on the floor, it's going to be way, way up in the air for me. With nothing to trust but Cal and my own balance.
"Okay. Okay."
I blow out a breath of nervous air. We haven't done anything like this yet.
"Need a minute?" I tell myself that Cal's not mocking me.
But he is. I try to convince myself that he doesn't know me well enough to be able to poke at what bothers me, but he does. He knows that I'll never ask for a break, never draw back, if only because it would make me look weak.
It's enough to make me jump.