“I should go,” I say. Throat burning. Tongue sour. “I’ll miss the train if I don’t leave soon.”
“Theodora, you know you can always talk to me, right?” He’s standing next to the island and he could be the father in one of those feel-good coffee commercials right now if he didn’t look so sad. His eyes, they kill me.
“Of course, Dad.” I start making my way to the door. Hoping he’ll get the hint. Hoping he’ll drop it.
He doesn’t.
“Or you can talk to your mother. Or someone . . . professional, if that’s more comfortable for you.” He clears his throat once, twice. “I know this is hard, Donovan coming home after all this time when we thought . . . And now this. It’s . . . it’s really hard and I want you to know you can talk to us, babygirl. Anytime.”
“Sure. I mean, I know.” I’ve almost got one foot out of the room now. “I do. Thanks, Dad. I’m going to class now, okay? I’ll come home right after and rest.”
He nods. “Have a good class. Merde.”
I’ve told him dozens of times that dancers say that to each other only before they go onstage—the ballet world’s answer to “break a leg”—and that if there’s no performance, he’s simply saying “shit” in a poor French accent.
But as I walk up the stairs, I can’t help thinking he’s inadvertently described how I feel about this day.
CHAPTER SIX
BALLET IS SUCH A UNIVERSAL, RECOGNIZABLE ART FORM THAT people always think they know more about it than they do. I’ve endured more than my fair share of goofy fathers pirouetting in place as they pretend to be me. And the guys who don’t realize that they’re the millionth person to ask where I’ve hidden my tutu. Or girls who say, with such authority, that they used to dance and then sheepishly admit to only taking classes for three or four years.
Ballet is my life. I’m powerful, untouchable when I’m out on the floor, and one day I’ll hold the titles I’ve dreamed of since I was a little girclass="underline" Soloist, then Principal Dancer. The Misty Copelands and Julie Kents and Polina Semionovas. The cream of the crop, the best of the best, the dancers nobody can fuck with. I started to think seriously about a professional career when I went on pointe five years ago, and that’s when I truly realized just how few black dancers are performing in classical ballet companies. Sure, sometimes you can find them in the corps, but that’s not the same as having your talent highlighted for everyone to see. I can’t let that stop me, though. I’ll keep training as hard as I can, become such an amazing dancer that the companies will have to judge me based on my talent instead of my skin color. I want to be the best, plain and simple.
But today, I feel like a beginner. I’m sluggish and the taste of bile coats my mouth and it’s affecting my dancing. Not to mention the face of Donovan’s kidnapper is everywhere I turn.
His smirk dances across the top of the barre as I stand in first position and bend my knees into a grand plié, my heels rising off the floor. I see his eyes in the mirror as I extend my leg straight behind me; they follow me around the room as I promenade in arabesque, daring me to break my slow, controlled balance. Usually, dancing calms me when I’m upset, but those goddamned eyes won’t let me go, and I’m starting to wish I’d never left my bed this morning.
Donovan was found nearly 2,000 miles away with an older man, and that’s reason enough to believe he could’ve been abused. But I can’t stop thinking about how inexperienced he was when he disappeared. How scared he must have been. I’d had sex by the time he was abducted, but neither of us knew much about anything until he found that book a few years before he was taken. We were aware of the mechanics, of course. How babies got here. We knew that kissing led to touching, which led to sex. We knew that people in our class had kissed, though having a boyfriend or girlfriend back then mostly meant holding hands at recess for a couple of days and sharing your lunch without complaining. We just didn’t know about the whole “touching” part and certainly nothing about how sex actually worked—not beyond the occasional glimpse of a watered-down scene on one of the shows our parents watched when we were supposed to be in bed.
But all that changed the day Donovan told me he’d found something I had to see. It was the winter of our fourth-grade year and we were in his room on a Saturday afternoon, forced indoors because of a snowstorm. I was bored at home, so I’d bundled up in my boots and coat and walked two houses down to be bored with Donovan.
I was sitting cross-legged on the rug, paging through one of his Avengers comics, when he said, “T, I have to show you something” in a low voice that promised secrets.
His door was closed, but his eyes kept darting toward it, as if someone would burst into his room at any second. We were safe. His sister, Julia, was just a baby, and she was down for her afternoon nap. Mr. Pratt was kicked back in the den with a tumbler of scotch, watching the Bulls shoot for victory, and Mrs. Pratt was in the kitchen, slicing apples for a cobbler.
Still, Donovan put a finger to his lips as he reached behind his bookshelf and pulled out a heavy-looking book with strange writing on the cover and an illustration of a man and woman facing each other. Bodies intertwined, the man’s hand cupping her naked breast.
I gasped. The people weren’t real, but I was nine years old and it was the most explicit thing I’d ever seen. And from the look on Donovan’s face, I knew the pages inside had to be even worse. He sat down next to me, placed it on the floor between us.
“What is that?” I brushed my hand across the title and the people, then snatched my fingers away as if someone would go dusting for prints later.
“The Kama Sutra?” He said the beginning of Kama like “cam” and I thought that was how it was pronounced for years. Not that I ever advertised I’d been up close and personal with a copy.
“Where’d you get it?” Now I was looking at the door, listening for footsteps, plunging my fingers into the carpet to keep from opening the book.
“I found it in the garage last night,” Donovan said. His jeans-clad knees were drawn up to his chest, his chin resting on top. He eyed the book warily, like it was going to stand up on legs, walk downstairs, and announce its presence. “I was looking for my old glove and there was a box . . . It looked really old, like they hadn’t opened it for a long time.” He paused to scratch his nose. Maybe to stall. “Do your parents have books like this?”
“Um, I don’t think so.” My parents were sweet to each other;
they snuck kisses when they thought I wasn’t looking and shared glances that made me know they were very much in love. But I’d never come across anything like that in our house. I pushed away the Avengers comic. “Have you looked in it?”
He nodded, and it’s like that was the permission I needed, because I inhaled long and deep and then I opened the book to the middle and began to flip through it. More soft, full bodies. More illustrations that made me do double, triple takes. Some of them I just stared at, sure there was no way two humans could possibly put themselves in those positions. Or that they’d actually like it once they got there.
I could feel Donovan looking over my shoulder, but he didn’t touch the book again. All he said was, “Pretty gross, right?”
“It’s just . . . weird.” I didn’t know how else to put it.
I noticed boys, but every time one of my friends mentioned kissing or even holding hands, I felt like that was so far away for me, it was beyond comprehension. And clearly, Donovan was even less interested at that point. He’d much rather toss around a baseball with the other boys in class than spend time worrying about girls.
I looked away from the book after a couple of minutes. I felt warm all over, though I’d barely moved except to turn pages with the very tips of my fingers. It all seemed weird and a bit wrong, but I also felt a sense of relief. At least now I’d know what people were talking about whenever sex came up. Sort of.