“Are you coming?” she asks in a clipped tone, starting to walk ahead of me. “We should share a taxi. It doesn’t make sense to take two cars to the same place,” Audrey adds like she’s talking to a child.
“Right.” I hate to admit she has a point. “But we’re probably in different dorms?”
I pull up the dorm address on my phone, which Audrey reads over my shoulder. She lets out a deep sigh. “That’s where I am, too. Please don’t tell me they put all the American students together.”
“Seems like it,” I say as we make our way to the taxi stand, not bothering to hide my annoyance. There are over a hundred girls and boys aged fourteen to eighteen attending the ballet summer program, and the dorms are scattered all over the city. The minute I received my admission packet with the address of where I’d be staying, I thought I’d won the Paris lottery. Now I’m not so sure about that.
“Boulevard Saint-Germain,” I tell the driver once we’re seated in the back of a metallic gray car with leather seats. Even the taxis in Paris are chic.
The man frowns at me in the rearview mirror, and I don’t know what else to do but frown back. I have no idea what’s happening. My thoughts feel like they’re trapped in a cloud. Even if I had slept on the plane, Audrey’s presence would be enough to throw me off my game.
She shakes her head, then hands the taxi driver her phone, which is open to the map with our dorm’s address. My newbie mistake hits me right in the face. I’ve researched Paris so much that I should have remembered that Boulevard Saint-Germain is one of the longest streets in the city. It snakes across most of Rive Gauche, the side of Paris south of the Seine. Basically, it’s like telling a New York City cab driver that you’re going to Fifth Avenue.
Audrey gives me a pointed look that seems to say, Lucky I’m here.
Her phone rings just as we get on the freeway: a FaceTime call from her mom. I’ve never met her, but I know who she is—a retired principal dancer who spent her entire career in Moscow with the Bolshoi Ballet. As I listen to Audrey go on and on about how her flight delay almost ruined her life, I realize that I haven’t even told my parents I’m here yet. I send a quick text saying that everything’s fine. Dad responds immediately.
Good luck at orientation! Show them who’s boss! Love you.
I smile and respond.
I’ll try! Love you too.
And then nothing from Mom. I keep staring at my phone, hoping, wondering, wishing. She’s still mad at me. Grandma swore she’d get over it by the time I left for Paris, but clearly she hasn’t.
Ever since I was little, dancing has been my whole life. To my mom, however, it was just a hobby, something fun I did on the side, an extracurricular activity to keep me busy on weekends. I kept telling her I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer, and that I would do whatever it took to make it happen, but she always shrugged it off, like it was something I’d outgrow. Luckily, between Dad and Grandma Joan （Mom’s mom）， there was always someone to drive me to classes, help me sew costumes for my shows, and cheer me on during important performances.
But things got really tense with Mom when I started talking about applying to this program.
“You didn’t get into New York. Why would you try again in Paris?”
I’d just received my rejection letter from ABT and was doing my best not to show how devastated I was. I always knew how competitive it would be, but I figured that, after a lifetime of dedicating myself to my art, I had a real shot. But Mom didn’t agree with me. “So many girls want this; there just aren’t enough spots for everyone,” she’d said with a sad face. It hurt a lot to realize that she was right.
“Paris is every aspiring ballet dancer’s biggest dream,” I’d said.
To be honest, that’s not exactly how I felt at the time. Even though it’s true—the Paris program is just as well regarded as the New York one—I only ever dreamed of attending ABT, and of joining their company one day. But that wasn’t going to happen this summer, and I couldn’t allow myself to accept defeat. Everyone knows everyone in the ballet world, and borders don’t really exist. If I made it in Paris, then I’d find my way into ABT eventually. They couldn’t get rid of me so easily, even if I had to cross an ocean to prove it to them. At least that’s what I told myself.
Mom shook her head. “It’s your last summer of high school. Don’t you want to see your friends, go to the pool, to the movies, and just, you know, do other things?”