It's not exactly a walk of shame, but it feels like one anyway.
I avoid his gaze for as long as I can, passing by the curtains and through the stage wing while keeping my eyes out on the theatre seats. Cal's eyes burn holes into me, searing my dark-blue T-shirt, black leggings, and crew socks. It takes every fiber of my being to avoid blushing, and I keep a polite smile glued across my lips. Inevitably, it turns into a smirk when I begin feeling nervous.
In time, I'm forced to settle down on the floor. With my legs sprawled out in front of me, I lean forward so that I can add another hair tie to the bun I wound up earlier.
Cal waits quietly. His stillness bothers me. In my periphery, I watch his tall legs, wearing his usual Adidas training pants. A corded, strong forearm rests across his notebook, currently closed.
Fine. He won't be the one speaking first.
He wants to unnerve me. Make me scared. I can only imagine what Bree and Tramy would do to Maven if they knew about our romantic status.
I don't think about what Shade would do if he found out. Which is why he doesn't need to.
"Cal," I say suddenly, tilting my head up. Bronze eyes meet mine, just like they did yesterday evening in the hot tub after Blonos exposed me. They don't look pleased, wearing warnings and many, many questions. "I didn't see you there. What's up?"
He has to see through my relaxed, blustering face.
From Maven's texts this afternoon, Cal continued to pester him about me after he returned from "Columbia." At some point, Maven locked the door to his bedroom and put on headphones so that he could ignore his brother and get through his calculus.
We never came up with a plan to explain what the hell is going on. After I agreed to be his girlfriend, Maven and I got sidetracked this morning in the shadows of Bryant Park. You know.
"I don't know, Mare." Cal's voice sounds as mocking as ever, but there's something different about it today. Maybe it's because Cal's no longer just exchanging fire with me but actually has reason not to like me. "What is up?" He enunciates each word.
"You must be frustrated," I tell Cal. His lips are turned up, but he's not smiling. Maybe I just never noticed it before, but his canines look sharper today. I feel smaller than usual in his presence, as he lounges across the stage floor with his precious folding chair at his back while every cell in my body is unimaginably tense. I haven't felt this nervous around him in a long time. "I hear your brother won't tell you what's going on between me and him."
Agreeing, Cal gives me a few nods of his head. "Yeah, I am frustrated. And confused. And extraordinarily unhappy that you lied to me on Friday night when you said that you didn't have a secret boyfriend."
Any misstep in this conversation could result in unwanted pushups.
Cal's eyes burn me, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like I can look away from them.
"I didn't lie to you," I tell him. "Maven was never my secret boyfriend."
"Oh, yeah. Friends who kiss, right?" Cal repeats.
I nod, up and down, up and down, hoping that Cal will come up with something to say.
He doesn't. It seems impossible for somebody to be able to tear me apart with only their eyes, but Cal does it anyway. I start to wonder if he's somehow finding his answers in my eyes, my slight movements, my ticks.
"He held my hand for the first time three weeks ago," I tell him, blurting. My heart pounds unreasonably fast, and unthinking words fly out of my mouth.
It's eight o'clock on a Sunday night, and I don't want to be here going back and forth with him for longer than I have to.
Cal makes a face. He looks disgusted, his forehead rimmed with lines and mouth in a cringe.
"We were just out. Maven reached for my hand, and I let him hold it for a little bit. And then a few days later, it happened again."
The creases on Cal's forehead deepen.
"That was the night of Evangeline's crash, actually," I tell Cal, realizing that disturbing him with extra details might be fun. "We were waiting for the subway to get up to the hospital from SoHo, because, you know, we like to hang out together, and he reached out and held my hand again. And then we held hands for the entire subway ride."
I remember the subway station a couple of blocks from Shade's apartment. Maven held my hand those first two times because we were terrified of what we were getting involved in, but it was still nice. The subway headlights flashed through tunnels, and their wheels screeched along the tracks. I just remember that in spite of all that was going on that night, Maven's hand against mine felt nice.
"And then early next week, we're rehearsing a pas de deux together in Blonos's studio."
Cal presses his lips together. His brows contract with them. He's heard this part already.
Along with the rest of the yacht.
"I've been busy, okay?" I start, a blush finally working onto my face. I shouldn't have to say this, but some part of me feels the need to justify to Cal why I've never kissed a boy before. My shoulder blades tense up, and I lean back on my palms, if only to create the illusion of looking comfortable. "I've been dancing seven days a week for my entire career as a teenager. My parents and brothers never wanted me to date. And most of the boys back home are trash anyway and—"
Cal's deepening grin, held together by pursed lips that become an extremely thin line, cut me off.
"This, Cal, would be the time to tell me that if I wasn't such a mean bitch, I could've gotten a boyfriend by now," I snip, raising a brow.
Surprisingly, he shakes his head. "I wasn't going to say anything about that, Mare."
Somehow, that makes it worse. I force myself to continue, even as my throat begins to close up.
"Blonos forced me to kiss Maven. We both told her that we had never kissed anyone, and she told us that we should just try it. Apparently, we didn't do well, because she told us that we should practice in private on our own time. So we did. We have."
And now, as Cal saw on the yacht, we're super good at kissing.
"We kissed that day after rehearsals in one of the empty studios on the sixth floor. Then there was another time that we kissed in the back hallway of this restaurant down in Chelsea. We tried to kiss in the town car before the gala, but then you called about your missing shoes. Maven was very annoyed that you interrupted us, you know."
Cal's back to cringing. He even puts up a placating hand, begging me to stop detailing every location where I've kissed his brother. He even shudders his shoulders, as if he's trying to shake my words from his skin. "Okay, okay, that's enough." He hardens his eyes, bronze turning deadly and molten before me. "But now that you and my brother are good at kissing, you can stop. You can go back to being just friends who don't kiss, Mare."
A dark chuckle leaves my throat. Maven hasn't dropped that bomb on Cal yet.
I blink at my contemporary teacher. He's probably counting push-ups in his head as we speak.
"But I like him. And he likes me."
As though he hadn't considered this before, Cal tilts his head.
"No you don't," he tells me. "He's just your friend. You've just never kissed a boy before and now you're just assuming that because you kiss him, you like him. It's all brain chemicals, Mare."
A strange half-sigh leaves my mouth. That's a rather scientific way to put it.
"You know I don't treat him the same way that I treat you," I say, on the verge of a deep conversation with Cal. "I actually like Maven."
Cal, finding what I say funny, laughs a few notes. His throat bobs with the motion. "Oh, I know." He pauses for a moment, thinking about something, and when his eyes return to mine, they're a little lighter. Less threatening. "He constantly talks about you. He has been for weeks. 'Mare and I did this, Mare and I did that. Mare tried to throw my Yankees hat into a fountain. Mare has a scented candle addiction, and she just bought a hundred and thirty dollars worth of candles at Bath and Body Works and dragged me along.' Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that we're dealing with the same girl."
Cal scowls, averting his eyes to the floor.
He got the Bath and Body Works price right.
"He made a real effort to get to know me after we first met." The first time Maven and I laid eyes on one another doesn't count. I smile at the memory of him asking me to go shopping with him. "That was nice of him. He was the first connection I had here, my first friend. He's always had my back. And we just sort of . . . click. I don't know," I say. Looking out at the theatre, a place of some cosmic struggle between dark and light, shadows and the glare of stage lights, I look for my answer as I often do in the shadows. "In a lot of ways, we're not very similar. But we like to talk. We get each other, I guess.
"He knows everything about me. He knows how I paid for dance, knows all about some of the crazy things I've done with that over the years," I continue. "I wish that he knew how we met, but I suppose that it's a little too late for that."
Before I throw myself off a cliff, I seal my lips shut.
Any reaction that Cal has to my words is gone by the time I look at him again.
"To be fair, if anyone's innocent here, it's definitely me," I add, smirking. "Maven's the one who held my hand in the first place, and Blonos is the one who forced me to kiss him. And then this morning, it was Maven, not me, who asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend."
There.
At least I got that bomb out of the way.
Cal looks as though he's been hit in the gut by a hammer. My words probably break a couple of ribs, maybe give him some internal bleeding. His face drops, and his eyes go uncharacteristically wide.
It's nice, I admit, to see that Cal can be shaken.
He's just realizing that Maven never went to Columbia.
Cal simply shakes his head. "You don't have my blessing to date Maven."
I lean forward, cupping my chin with my hand. "Do you think I'm a bad influence on him? Because for the record, I think he's a bad influence on me. You know. Underage drinking and all. Or maybe I'm a golddigger and am just after Maven's money."
Cal ponders my questions for a moment.
He knows me well enough to know that I have no interest in Maven's money.
"No. I do think that you're prone to bad decision-making, but Maven's the same way, so it doesn't really make a difference. You're not a golddigger. I'd just prefer that he dated anyone else but you. Did you say yes?" Cal asks, stringing one thought after another together.
I nod. "Yes." I smile. "And then we kissed."
Putting his face in his hands, Cal growls.
"Your dad and Elara said it was fine, Cal," I say, pouting.
He might as well not even hear my words. "You could do better than Maven. What if I helped you find a better boyfriend after you broke up with him?"
Stunned but also expecting something like this from Cal, a deep giggle, if there is such a thing, echoes through my throat.
"Would he be cuter than Maven?" I ask. "Are we going to use Tinder to find him?"
Cal nods eagerly. "Considering my brother isn't cute, yes. And yes, absolutely."
I scoff. "Cal, you two-faced bastard."
Over our coffee at Bryant Park, Maven mentioned how Cal had said he could do better than me. Cal even offered to help Maven start online dating.
"You said the exact same thing to Maven about me."
Caught, Cal blinks. He recovers quickly though, flashing me a charming grin. "Yes. But you're the one who I actually think can do better than Maven. Not the other way around."
My abs start to ache from laughing.
"As Evangeline said, you should chill out and stay out of it."
Cal doesn't take kindly to my suggestion about chilling out. Maybe it's the wrong thing to say, considering how he glared at Evangeline after she said it last night. Curling the edge of his lip, Cal rolls his eyes. I'm usually the eye-roller here, and the action looks unnatural on him.
"Don't talk about Evangeline," he says after a minute. They're quieter words, and they remind me of how he acted around his partner during the yacht photoshoots.
I do anyway. "She's like a witch," I murmur. "She's dancing en pointe three weeks after a meniscus tear, and then she somehow figures out that Maven and I like each other. I don't know how she did it."
Especially after she caught me gawking at Cal's half-naked body in the hot tub.
Cal gets this curious look on his face. "What do you mean?"
I blink at Cal. "Well, I just assume she was trying to expose me, humiliate me as best as she could. Maven figures that she saw us look at each other like we liked each other or something like that. Having me choose between you or Maven was just . . . a spectacle."
It's my half-assed theory with plenty of holes that don't answer half of my questions.
"Oh." Cal just nods, wearing a distant look.
"Remember," Cal says again. "Melt."
His forearm at my back, Cal coaxes me to relax as he dips me with my legs half-bent into a split.
"You're completely wound up. Even your fingers are stiff."
A long while ago, Cal had the music going. It was a song that I liked, with a slow beat and a man's voice. It wasn't quite Indie, but an older song Cal took from his playlist. Autoplay has since moved us onto another song. And another.
His choreography is difficult, for one. It's full of foreign movements that have details tinier than those of ballet. Bent limbs, sprawled-open hands, and arches of my back trip me up, along with my own feet. It's a miracle that I haven't yet fallen on stage.
The lifts are tricky things, movements that I have to throw my trust into Cal with. It's not just lifting me up and putting me back down anymore; Cal's new contemporary lifts involve us moving together.
Like, at the same time.
He added a throw to the Dirty Dancing lift, where once I'm up, he bends his arms and quite literally throws me up a little higher before I come back down. I'm supposed to arch my back when I'm in the air, throw my hands out to my sides.
I'm tempted to tell Cal that I'm not a Cirque du Soleil performer, nor am I his ragdoll.
He trails me as we fall out of our dip, mumbling counts that are just loud enough for me to hear. Cal doesn't seem to have his half of the dance choreographed, only watching me dance when we're not doing lifts.
"Heavy, not light," he continues, eyeing the way that I move on my feet like a ballerina. "The floor's pulling you down. Stop fighting gravity."
I go through this series of steps that mostly involve me throwing myself from one foot to the other, strange angles of my arms, and a weird switch kick.
It's the same choreography that Cal taught me on Wednesday. At least I'm not learning it from scratch this time. I lost count of the number of questions that I asked Cal then.
Whether he was expecting it to be this bad or not, Cal has stayed true to his promise and made me feel like I'm not embarrassing myself with every other step on this stage. He might constantly be telling me what I'm doing wrong, but he's not exactly judging.
"Wait." I turn around myself so that I face my teacher.
Cal likes when I ask questions. To him, it means that I'm actually trying with his choreography, that I'm actually interested in doing good.
He nods, awaiting my question.
"So it's like," I say, sighing a little as I move from what foot to the other and go through a few turns. I backtrack, stepping back like a graceful cat before marking a jump that would usually end with Cal's hands on my hips. "Yes?"
Cal does as I expect him to. "Almost. But no."
And then, doing as I expect him to, Cal shows me the right way to do the steps.
"So where were we?"
Having showered, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas, I flop onto my bed and waste no time in pulling back the covers. One of the maids came by today, and now my bed has this nice, clean scent to it that reminds me of the sea. Even though I've never been to it. Enjoying the feeling of my freshly-shaved and lotioned legs against the sheets, I sink a little further into my bed before reaching for my first pair of pointe shoes.
Lucas, as he does every week, brought me a box full of my custom-made shoes earlier today. They're all pink and perfect, but they're missing elastics and ribbons and haven't yet been cut and stitched back together. Their tips still need to be darned with thread, and the arches still need to be broken. With a plethora of pointe shoe-related supplies set out before me—of which include dental floss, needles, and scissors—I pick up my first shoe.
The shoes are similar to the ballerinas that wear them. They show up each day pretty and perfect and leave broken and in need of stitches.
"You were telling me about Evangeline," Mom says through the phone.
In the background, I hear the distinct sound of a knife chopping vegetables, in spite of the late hour, and under that, the faint buzz of the TV.
I imagine the scene at home. Gisa, already familiar with the whole story and in fact in high school, is in her room, working on her homework. Bree and Tramy are half-listening to the phone from the living room, but their attention is quickly slipping away to the TV, where they undoubtedly have some "hot babe" show playing. Dad, however, is at Mom's side, listening to my voice in silence.
I talked to Mom until midnight on Friday evening. She called me again on Saturday morning to talk, and we did until I told her that I had to get to class. We talked again after my yacht outing—an event that I left many details out of—and now we're talking again.
Honestly, we've been through everything. If only because Mom has the tendency to ask every question that pops into her mind, the story has taken twice the time to tell as it has to anyone else.
For a moment, my thread and needle become too easy to focus on. I don't know what else to say about Evangeline when I've already covered our two confrontations along with the censored yacht story.
I didn't mention the Truth or Dare. I certainly didn't tell her about my bikini or my make-out session with Maven's wine-stained tongue in a hot tub. As far as Mom knows, Evangeline and I just exchanged snippy comments and called it good.
"She sounds like such an awful girl," Mom says when I don't come up with anything. "She must have been raised by nannies and wolves."
I suppose that I finished telling Mom all about my new life last night. Unless I want to tell Mom about Shade, her long-lost son, or Maven, my new boyfriend, we've gotten through talking about every important thing that has happened to me between July and today.
Mom can keep apologizing, and I can keep accepting her words and telling her that I'm sorry for what I did. But it seems as though we're beginning to go in circles.
Mom won't ask me to come home.
I won't offer.
Dad won't say anything, even though I know he's sitting right next to Mom at home.
I won't ask him to say anything.
"It hurt," I mutter, blinking hard. I remember feeling frozen as Mom and Dad confronted me about the pointe shoes at home, how Dad snapped at me. "It hurt really bad what you and Dad said."
It hurt bad enough for me to lose all reason, pack up my things, and sneak out my window.
Mom's silent. I've lost count of the number of times she's said that she's sorry, said it and written it in every way possible.
"Mare, honey, you know that I—"
"Didn't know," I finish for her. "I know. It's just that you treated ballet like a . . . silly little hobby for me for years. It's hurt for a lot longer than since July, Mom."
Silence again.
She knows my thoughts, I know hers. I could predict what she says next.
"It was really expensive," Mom says. Her voice is tight, and the cutting of vegetables stops. "You know that. And I—"
"Didn't know," I say again. And yet she knew how much it meant to me. It's all that I've lived for, and she's always known that what I have now is what I always wanted. "The day you made me quit, you just told me it was over. That I was done pickpocketing for the tuition, and that you were done writing checks. You didn't tell me that you were sorry or that you understood. You just told me that I was done. And you know that you never would have done that to my sister."
There. Another bomb dropped.
Mom knows as well as I about which daughter's career she favors.
"You two had very different circumstances," Mom explains to me softly. "Gisa's lessons cost half of what yours did, and her teachers always said that she was extraordinarily talented for her age. Mare, she got an apprenticeship this sum—"
"And who's paying your bills now, Mom?"
My sister got an apprenticeship. I got a six-figure salary.
It's not untrue that Gisa's teachers always flaunted her talent while my teachers honed mine quietly. I drop my pointe shoe. I can't focus on its stitching and this conversation at the same time.
My words are disrespectful. They might be happy for me, but that happiness stems from my paycheck. Now that I'm successful, they can be happy for me. But they weren't before.
I won't even start with Dad, who still won't say anything to me over the phone.
"Look," I say, probably on the verge of making Mom cry. "I don't want to fight. And . . . I do want to see you."
I hardly know what that's going to look like. But talking to Mom has made me realize that I'm in desperate need of her back in my life. Maybe talking in-person will somehow make things better.
"I have this thing with The New York Times on Wednesday," I tell Mom, thinking about the note Elara sent me this morning.
It looks like Mister Calore got around to scheduling my interview with that reporter from the gala. As if that gala photograph wasn't enough publicity, apparently the Calores think that I need a whole article in New York's biggest newspaper. Along with the brief letter, Elara included pages of notes that I might study so that when the pesky reporter is all up in my face, I'll know what to say.
Somebody's already made sure to tell the newspaper to leave out the detail that I'm a high school dropout.
"If you want to come, the interview's at nine in the morning in Mister Calore's office at the Academy. Maybe you could tell the reporter a ballet story from when I was little or something like that."
I imagine Mom nodding in the kitchen back at home. "I'd like that, Mare."