Bailey onstage, so small amid the darkness, her body whirling antically, seeking her Nutcracker, braving the unknown.
It was so beautiful, like the grainy production they used to watch on their mother’s portable black-and-white set. Their favorite Clara, a big-eyed waif, petal thin but impossibly strong. It was years before Dara realized they were watching their mother, recorded on videotape twenty years before.
“Bravo!” Madame Sylvie called out.
Onstage, her arms in a perfect port de bras, cradling the Nutcracker between them, Bailey looked out into the dark theater, her face blue in the spotlight. Her eyes wide and face open, with all Clara’s fear and wonder.
That’s it, Dara thought. That’s Clara.
“Shall we move on?” called out Madame Sylvie from the back of the house. Wanting to go home.
Dara looked up at Bailey, her chest still heaving, her collarbones pulsing.
“Not yet, please,” she said, her voice surprisingly strong.
Bailey, who hadn’t left the stage in hours, was lathered with sweat, the sweat of a longshoreman, the heels of her pointe shoes flecked with blood.
Bailey who said, “Once more, please?”
Dara nodded.
You had to let them keep going. Bailey knew to stop if she needed to. She knew to ask for first aid, to ask for Anbesol to numb her toes, to say she needed to rest.
But Bailey didn’t want to rest—I don’t have it yet. Please, one more time—and she kept going again and again, her face blazing under the lights, strands slipping from her immaculate bun. Chasséing across the stage again, one foot chasing the other, feet skimming the floor.
Dara heard the dull crack of feet pressed against seatbacks and turned, spotting the same spiky thicket of fellow Level IV girls—Pepper Weston, Gracie Hent, Iris Cartwright—their legs hanging over the seats, their heads dipping up and down from their phones to the stage. Pepper silently stitching elastic bands to her slippers and occasionally yawning.
They weren’t making any noise, but they were still asserting their presence and Bailey’s eyes kept flitting to their corner.
“Our Clara is relentless,” Madame Sylvie whispered over Dara’s shoulder.
“She’s sending a message,” Dara said.
The light board operator called for a pause and Bailey stopped a moment, hands on her hips, catching a breath, bending at the waist to steady herself.
From the thicket came the abrupt screech of a quickly suppressed laugh.
“Bailey,” Dara called out, “do you need five?”
Bailey paused, trying not to look at the Level IV girls, their low whispers, their prison-yard stares, Pepper’s slit-eyed gaze lifting to the stage.
“No,” Bailey insisted, lifting her body back in her arabesque, one impossibly long arm up, one out, holding the Nutcracker, her left leg in the air, her right leg planted still.
“Bailey,” Dara repeated, rising, moving down the aisle, thinking of the dazed, glassy look on the girl’s face after her time locked in the supply closet, after the pins in her shoes. “Let’s take a break.”
You have to leave them to it, their mother used to say about the plight of Claras every year. It’s jungle logic. You have to let them handle it amongst themselves.
“I don’t need it,” Bailey insisted, teeth gritted as Dara approached the lip of the stage. “I’m really fine.”
With that, her arms fell, the Nutcracker slipping from her hands, clattering to the stage floor just as Bailey leaned over at the waist and vomited.
* * *
*
You’ll be okay,” Dara said, both of them bent over the stagehand’s bucket, deep in the wings now. “Let’s take you to the restroom.”
Bailey didn’t say anything, her hands on her hips, taking long gulping breaths.
“Maybe it was something she ate,” someone said.
Dara turned and saw Gracie Hent lingering in the shadows, her face dark.
“Someone brought cookies from the deli at break,” Gracie added coolly, her eyes on Bailey. “The cookies had mold.”
There was such a boldness to the girl, a barbarism to her. This pink waif, her tidy bun.
“And how do you know that, Mademoiselle Hent?” Dara said sternly, moving toward her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bailey blurted, reaching for Dara. “Forget it.” Clearing her throat, lifting her voice. “I’m fine now.”
Dara looked at the girl, her face wet and her eyes glittering, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
This was, Dara had to remind herself, the same girl who once burst into tears over a correction （Elbows ups! No chicken wings!）， who had, for years, fretted openly over her body, the length of her neck, and burst into tears again when girls started calling her stub neck, nub neck. The girl who, just six weeks ago, had wondered over Clara, over her own talents—that girl was gone.