A startle, when he said her name.
“Hazel,” Ansel said, a spotlight swiveling. “Jenny tells me you’re a ballet dancer. How is your knee feeling?”
“She’s almost healed,” Hazel’s mother jumped in. “Just a few more weeks on those crutches, then physical therapy. She’ll be dancing again in no time.”
Hazel nodded politely. Ansel idled on her, genuine, curious—no one had looked at her this way in months. Without pity or discomfort. She recognized a flicker of awe in the moon of his smile, a sliver of the reverence she pulled out of the audience after a perfect series of fouettés.
“I have an announcement,” Jenny said, tearing Ansel’s attention away. Jenny’s lips were flecked purple with sediment—a flare of hatred burst through Hazel, uncontrollable.
“I’ve been thinking about our birth story,” Jenny said. “About the nurse who saved us. We never even learned her name, but she’s the whole reason we’re alive. Or at least the reason Hazel is, right? Anyway, I’ve decided on my major. I want to study nursing. Specifically, labor and delivery.”
Hazel’s parents beamed across the table, the pride spreading involuntary. Exaggerated, nearly obscene. The room felt cold, everyone drunker and sloppier than they had been only minutes before. The whole display, so abruptly pointless. As her father raised his whiskey for a toast, as Jenny lifted her smudgy wineglass, Hazel clutched her water and stared into the kitchen light until the bulb had sufficiently blinded her.
That night, Hazel fell asleep to a memory.
Come on, Jenny was saying, her gangly arms hanging from the farthest monkey bar as the sun beat down on the scorching playground. Jenny was wearing the costume they’d begged their mother to buy, a sparkly wedding dress that they shared, with sleeves like Princess Di’s. Fear crystallized in Hazel’s chest—her shoulders ached from the two monkey bars she’d already reached through careful assessment. Jenny looked very far away in the billowing white, her fingers slipping sweaty. You have to believe you can do it, Jenny said. Put your body into it, Hazel, and swing.
*
Christmas morning. A gentle film of white blanketed the neighborhood—dawn had just broken, the sun rising a supple orange over the snow-glittered suburb. Hazel lay in bed, thick and anxious. Jenny was staying in the guest room with Ansel, and the bare twin mattress across from her own looked singularly empty.
Since the accident, Hazel’s body had taken on a shape her clothes did not recognize. Her stomach and thighs had thickened; the muscles in her calves had shrunk. The seam of her pajama pants felt too tight. Hazel stuck her hand beneath the elastic cord, stretching it away. Her body felt so foreign—it could have been someone else’s hand, sliding into her underwear, beneath the tuft of hair and down into the wet. She thought of Ansel. The silky cream of his skin. How his smile leaked like a flood across his face. It played out like a film, lit in gauzy yellow—Ansel was hovering above, Hazel splayed out on her bed—his shoulders were tight, muscled beneath her fingers, the skin on his stomach tensing into the fine trail of hair that led into his waistband, his checkered boxer shorts sliding down over his hips. He was leaning, spreading her with two fingers, his smile lowering, riveting, contagious—
Hazel came before she was ready. She bent into her own fingers, shuddering a gasp that melted far too quickly, her legs trembling beneath the sheets, suffocatingly sticky. An accusation. When she pulled her hand back into the open air, her fingers were shiny and slicked, the skin wrinkled like she’d stayed too long underwater.
*
Hazel’s parents were waiting downstairs. Her dad’s old-man hair stuck up in every direction, an affront, and her mother was lumpy in the armchair, her pilled bathrobe pulled tight. Gertie snored from the couch, drool pooling on her favorite cushion. On television, the news was mumbling. Hazel craved a shower, but it was too difficult with the knee brace—she could smell her own sweat, the stale stench of her desire.
“Did they mention what time they’ll be up?” Hazel’s mother asked.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Hazel said.
It was another half hour before Jenny and Ansel appeared. Jenny’s hair was wet from the shower, and Ansel wore a pair of tight-fitting corduroys. When Hazel noticed how they scrunched around his knees, she filled with a boiling shame.
They opened the gifts one at a time. Jenny had gotten a new backpack, made of real leather, ordered from a store that didn’t exist in Burlington. Hazel’s mother must have sent away for it. For your textbooks, her mother said, shining proud. Hazel mustered all her energy into an exclamation of delight; they’d gotten her a set of fantasy novels, a genre she’d liked as a child. Every gift before this year had been related to ballet, and everyone looked pointedly away as Hazel mumbled her thanks for the books, the sweater.