“I’m sorry about your knee, Hazel,” Jenny said finally.
The admission felt impossibly small. This was the first time Jenny had addressed the accident. Hazel understood, with a shock of clarity, why Jenny had been ignoring her knee. It was not because Jenny didn’t care. No, Jenny knew exactly what Hazel’s knee meant—what her failure meant—for both of them. It was easier not to look.
“Hard things will change you,” Jenny said. “Ansel taught me that. I don’t know real struggle, and neither do you.”
Hazel was about to protest, to defend her own suffering, but Jenny continued.
“We’ve had everything handed to us, Hazel. This boring little house, three bedrooms, cream carpet. We have parents who love us.”
Jenny paused, bit her lip.
“Ansel is different. He lived in four separate foster homes. And his little brother, the one he mentioned at dinner? I’ve never heard him say it aloud, before tonight. That his brother died. Ansel has never told me the story, but he screams in his sleep. The baby, he says. The baby.”
Jenny had always seemed older than Hazel—as kids, she reminded Hazel constantly of those three minutes. Sitting now in her childhood bed, a stuffed giraffe squashed beneath Hazel’s thigh, the disparity felt stark. Drastic.
“Ansel is not like everyone else,” Jenny said. “He doesn’t feel things like other people. Sometimes I wonder if he feels anything at all.”
“If he doesn’t feel anything at all,” Hazel asked slowly, “then how do you know he loves you?”
Jenny only shrugged.
“I guess I don’t,” she said.
The differences between them were loud, nearly deafening. Jenny, with her whiskey breath and smudged eyeliner, had been touched by someone else, shaped and formed by him. She was no longer the other half of Hazel’s whole—instead, her own throbbing and vibrant thing. Come back, Hazel wanted to beg, though she knew it was fruitless. She was no longer the closest thing to her sister. They were no longer an us, but rather two separate people, growing at two separate paces, one awake and blazing, the other formless and grasping.
When Jenny stood, the imprint of the wall had mussed her hair. It stuck out straight in a static puff. She stopped at the door, melting back into silhouette.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “About your knee. I’m sorry I didn’t come home. I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
The words felt useless. Far too light.
“Why didn’t you?” Hazel asked.
“I could feel it,” Jenny said. “Like back when we were kids. I was in the library, studying, and I could feel it the second it happened. Like my very own tendons were snapping. It hurt, Hazel. It was the first time I felt that power and wished I didn’t have it.”
When Jenny left, Hazel’s room felt empty, changed. On the blanket, Jenny had left a single shiny hair. Hazel picked it up at the tip, watched the tail sashay gracefully through the air. She brought it to her lips. Rolled it into her mouth. The strand of hair tasted like nothing at all—she could only feel the shape of it, firmly existent, a spider on the pad of her tongue.
*
The performance had begun like any other. Swan Lake. The stage lights were hot, Hazel’s shoes soft against the marley. They were on their last wear, before she’d sew the ribbons on a new pair. She didn’t feel it in her toes, though perhaps she should have. She’d made it almost to the finale, her last solo sequence, and she felt edgeless, full of energy. When Hazel began her fouetté turns, the audience spun and righted itself, eight counts and again, her head flicking to keep up with the whip of her body.
She was fully inside the choreography when it happened. Remembering, Hazel felt grateful for those last few moments of herself. For the way her legs carried her into the preparation for the leap, the pas de bourrée, the two bounding steps before the grand jeté. In the infinite moment before the landing, before the twist and crack of her knee as it bent sideways, Hazel thought: Love is adoration. Love is a gasp, love is a stretch, love is this. A blinking glimpse of eternity, aflame beneath a golden spotlight. It was the only thing she had ever learned to want.
*
Hazel did not know how long she’d been asleep when she jolted awake to the sound of barking.
She was still wearing her Christmas dress, rumpled up around her waist, legs splayed uncomfortable on top of the covers. The room was dark, stale, and hushed, the quiet interrupted by Gertie’s barking, which echoed insistently from the back door—they’d learned to ignore the dog until she lulled herself back to sleep. But as Gertie continued, frantic, Hazel heaved herself from the bed, hopping one-legged past the window.