But I’m shaking with disgust. I take a few steps toward the girls who are walking down the stairs. “Excuse me,” I say. “Do you know this guy?”
They both look a little scared as they glance over to Louis. “Hmm,” the blond one says, one eyebrow raised.
Louis comes closer and positions himself in between us.
“Louis Dabrowski? He dates every girl in this school, apparently.”
“Mia!” Louis says. “My dad is going to kill me.”
Then he turns to the girls. “Désolé,” he mumbles, his chest heaving.
“Not as much as he destroyed me!” I say.
The girls open their eyes wide and freeze.
Louis says something else to them in French, but I’m too upset to even try to understand. Before they turn the corner of the street, they look back at me, giggling to themselves.
I turn to Louis. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a dream. Something to live or die by. Do you think it’s funny to distract girls? To get in their way?”
Louis’s mouth drops open. “I never stopped you from doing anything you wanted to do.”
“But you lied to me.”
He shakes his head. “Maybe I didn’t tell you everything about my past, but—”
“Stop!”
“No! I’m not stopping. I want you to succeed, Mia. I want you to get picked by the ABT director, even if it means I’ll never see you again.” He seems on edge himself, vulnerable even, but I don’t trust anything coming from him anymore. His words just glide over me, my anger stripping them of any meaning.
“You’re right about something, Louis. You don’t understand how hard I’ve worked to get here, because you don’t care about anything. I’m done throwing my future away for someone who thinks this is just a game.”
Louis swallows. For a moment, I’m certain that he’s about to yell at me just like I did at him. Instead, he just looks on bitterly, shakes his head, and walks away. A moment later he straddles his Vespa, snaps his helmet shut, and drives off without looking back.
That night, to keep my mind busy, I decide to break in yet another new pair of pointe shoes. It feels good to bend the wooden shank relentlessly. I bang the toe box against the floor repeatedly, probably harder than I need to. After I burn the ends of the ribbon and sew on the elastic just the way I like, I put them in my dance bag, satisfied. Now I’m ready for my next rehearsals.
There, at the bottom of my bag, are the pictures of élise Mercier, my ancestor. I sit on my bed, and, as I stare at them, it dawns on me that Louis isn’t the only mistake I’ve made since I arrived in Paris. Something else knocked me off my path: I let this family legend get to me. I somehow believed that my future was out of my hands, that it had been decided for me centuries ago.
But Mom was right: it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Whether élise Mercier was painted by Degas, or whether she was even an important ballet dancer in her time, my past does not define me. Only I can shape who I’m going to become, by doing exactly what I had been doing until now: working hard, keeping my focus solely on what I really want, and then working harder. I place the pictures at the bottom of the drawer in my nightstand and turn off the light. From now on, and until the moment I’m on a plane heading back home, I will think of nothing else but ballet.
OF COURSE, IT’S not that easy. I wake up several times throughout the night all weekend, wondering where I am. Then I lie there, replaying our conversation in my head. I don’t regret what I said. I just regret…everything. On Monday, I’m already awake when my alarm rings, exhausted but restless. I turn it off and drag myself out of bed. Today cannot be over soon enough.
At breakfast, Audrey is even quieter than usual. In fact, she’s barely said anything to me since my date with Louis. It’s not like we used to stay up and chat for hours before, but sometimes we’d talk about what part of the ballet we were working on and which sequences were giving us trouble. She’s avoiding me. And I want to know why.
“Do you want to rehearse together today?” I ask, surprising myself.
“I’m leaving now,” she says. Then she looks from me to my half-eaten breakfast. The message is clear: it’s now or never. I gulp down the rest of my raspberry-topped yogurt, clear my plate, and run after her, kind of surprised that she tolerated the few seconds it took me to do this.
Once we’re in the studio, she looks on absentmindedly as I practice my solo. When I fudge a relevé, she says nothing. Halfway through, I feel a sharp cramp in my calf and grimace, but she doesn’t tell me off for losing my composure. The Audrey I know would click her tongue or shake her head in disapproval. But that Audrey is not here today.