“And when was this?” Marie replied, caressing her neck flagrantly, like a child wondering at her body.
“When you left. When you moved out. When you left us,” Charlie said. “Did you take that too?”
Marie stared at him a moment, her teeth tugging into her lip.
It was a standoff of some cryptic kind and Dara chose not to get involved.
* * *
*
That night, Dara couldn’t sleep and wandered the house, no creaking floorboard loud enough to wake Charlie from his sleeping pills.
Nice house you got over there, on Sycamore, Derek had said. And he’d mentioned it again, that day. She didn’t like the idea of him looking at their house, evaluating it. She didn’t like the idea of him even thinking of their house, its insides. It felt like there was something behind it.
She moved from room to room, her hands on every splintery doorframe, every wiggly doorknob. Last was their old bedroom, its door closed. She always kept it closed.
Any time she spent more than a few minutes inside, she felt sweaty and unsettled. With its sloping dormer walls, the space was so small it could only fit a dresser, a lamp, and their bunkbed, its wood shellacked to a lustrous shimmer, the wagon-wheel headboard with the spindle spokes you could hold on to or fondle, reading a scary story, waking from a bad dream.
Even through the door, she could smell it, a room redolent of their girl selves, the must of sweat-stiff leotards, the sting of balms, their bodies, budding and fulsome, their clammy underarms and thighs. The sounds, the squeaking bunkbed, the click-click of Marie’s teeth while she slept.
For each of them, it was their most private space, which, of course, they shared. The hidden cove where Dara dreamt and wondered, her body always aching and changing and fighting itself.
“Are you thinking about a boy?” Marie would whisper from the bunk above. Long summer nights, the click of the beetles, the soft grind of the cicadas, all those crickets rubbing their legs together, the low moan of the mosquitoes at the screen.
“I’m not telling you,” Dara would say, even if she was always thinking of a boy—Peter Garcia, who pressed against her once at recital, the Marshall brothers at school—or even more just thinking of herself, her own body, hard and scraped raw from dancing.
Her own body, its secrets she was just beginning to unfold, slowly, with quivering fingers.
Marie figured out how to do it before Dara. Dara could hear her above, the little panting sounds. She could picture Marie’s face pressed against the slats, red and veiny.
Dara did it differently, though.
Dara couldn’t be as quiet as Marie. Because, she decided, she felt it so much more deeply.
Because, every time, Dara thought she just might die from the feeling.
Every time, she saw stars, just like with the turnout. You don’t see stars, Marie? Are you sure you’re doing it right?
Marie wanted to see them too. Wanted Dara to show her.
But Dara kept it for herself. Marie was always bragging that her body was different. That she had something no one else has. Well, maybe Dara did too. Once, the feeling came through her so strongly she kicked her right leg hard against the footboard, snapping one of the slats in half, shooting it across the room.
Giggling in the dark, Dara and Marie crouched over the carpet, trying to find the pieces.
They Elmer’s-glued it back into place and no one knew until, a few weeks later, Dara knocked it loose again, her ankle caught between the slats, her body drenched and shaking.
* * *
*
For weeks after the slat broke, Marie liked to sit on the floor at the foot of Dara’s bed while Dara tried to sleep. She liked to finger the spot the broken slat had occupied. The roughness, the scatter of sawdust. She liked to crouch down behind the footboard and squeeze her fist through the empty space between the slats. Or push her hand through and point her index finger at Dara while she tried to sleep. Her eyes glowing, wolflike, in the dark, she liked to point her finger at Dara as if to say I know you.
THICK AS THIEVES
Two Weeks Later
The Nutcracker performances began in twenty-six days.
Twenty-six days, which is nothing, a blink. Twenty-six days, which is everything, is two dozen rehearsals, hundreds of corrections （Elbows up! Rib cage in!）， thousands of tendus and jetés, the endless repetitions that make ballet.
The Nutcracker began in twenty-six days and Studio B seemed no closer to completion. In fact it seemed less, its subfloor still exposed, the new flooring still not yet arrived, an unmistakable smell of mold hovering hotly in the air.
The Nutcracker began in twenty-six days and Studio B was still a hazard site, wires hanging from the walls, floorboards piled, tarps slipping loose, the windows forever flung open, the air thick with plaster and dust.