“They have pools and movies in Paris, too.”
She ignored my snarky tone. “Mia, there’s more to life than ballet. You need to have a plan B. Everyone should have one, especially when they’re only seventeen and chasing an impossible dream.”
She’d never put it so plainly before. An impossible dream? Thanks for believing in me, Mom.
Despite everything she’d said, I kept rehearsing for my video, checking the requirements—an introduction to explain my experience and credentials, a showcase of each of the key steps, then a personal routine of at least two minutes. Grandma Joan even surprised me with a new leotard in a beautiful shade of dove gray.
“It’ll be your Paris leotard,” she said as I dashed to my room to try it on. It fit perfectly and complemented my blue eyes.
“I haven’t even been accepted yet,” I told her as I adjusted the straps over my shoulders. My hands shook as I imagined myself practicing pliés in a light-filled Parisian studio.
“But you will be,” Grandma said, her voice firm. “How could they ever say no? It’s in your blood.”
“Mom!” Mom said to Grandma Joan as she walked into my bedroom. She cast a skeptical glance at the Degas poster hanging over my bed. “Can you please stop saying that? It’s not even true.”
Grandma sighed, then turned to me. “Of course it’s true. You come from a long line of ballerinas, Mia.” She gave me a wink. “You believe me, don’t you?”
Grandma Joan has told me the same story since the day I put on my first tutu. The first part of it is definitely true: My great-grandmother was French. She met an American man in Paris when she was twenty-three, fell in love, and moved to the U.S. soon after their wedding. But before that—and this is when things get a little murky—she practiced ballet. Like her mother before her, and her mother before her, all the way back to the late 1800s, when my great-great-great-grandmother was a danseuse étoile, a principal dancer, the highest, most prestigious ranking in the Paris Opera. Supposedly, this was around the time Edgar Degas created his world-famous paintings of ballerinas.
Grandma insists that Degas painted my great-great-great-grandmother, and that she was the subject of one of his masterpieces. The nonspecifics of this family legend drive Mom crazy. She doesn’t believe this story, and whenever Grandma Joan brings it up, she’ll happily point out that no one actually knows which painting our ancestor might be in, or even remembers what her name was. If she was a ballet dancer at all. Mom never lets me forget that it’s most likely made up, and that there’s no way to know for sure. She doesn’t want me to believe in fairy tales.
But I do.
The myth itself is proof enough that ballet is my destiny—how could anything as strange as this get passed down from generation to generation if it weren’t true? This story has always been part of me, of how I dance. When I’m performing, I sometimes imagine my ancestor twirling across the stage, spotlighted by gas lamps, while Degas sweeps his oil paints and pastels onto canvas and paper. I like to think she was part of his inspiration, that he watched her spin in a sea of color and light.
I wore my new leotard for my audition video, which Camilla, my best friend from ballet school, helped me film. She’d decided to only apply to local summer programs, and swore it had nothing to do with the fact that she didn’t want to be away from her new boyfriend—an aspiring musician named Pedro. I think Mom wishes I had a boyfriend as well, but my dating experience so far has only proved that no one can make my heart flutter the way ballet does. To go with my leotard, I put my hair up in a tight bun, my face fully made up. And two months later, I got into the Institut de l’Opéra de Paris, just like Grandma had promised.
I close my eyes for a moment, and when I reopen them, one of the most famous churches in the world stares back at me.
“Notre-Dame!” I squeal to Audrey, who doesn’t react. I press my face against the window, soaking in its beauty, the two towers disappearing off behind our taxi, the arched structure revealing itself in the back, and the grand majesty of it all. My first look at Paris! But I don’t have time to revel in the moment, because our taxi makes a right turn, and, a couple of minutes later, we pull off to the side of a wide street packed with cyclists, buses, and pedestrians.
“Finally,” Audrey says, looking out the window.
The driver slams his horn as a bike zooms past, and I’m definitely awake now. The cyclist turns back and yells what I can only assume is an insult. Though, because it’s in French, it sounds almost pleasant to me. Our driver just shakes his head in response as he parks in front of a white stone building, about six stories high, with small double windows all with matching gray curtains—our home for the summer. Thanks to my Google Street View research, I know exactly where we are—a stone’s throw from the embankments of the Seine, and the lively student neighborhood called Saint-Michel.