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A little seven-year-old. That’s how old I was when I met him. He and my brother became best friends over an afternoon of outdoor exploration down at Sweetwater River in the summer, and my brother just had to have him over at our house. I put on my best Cooper smile and was polite to him, didn’t laugh at his nickname when he revealed it, and told him it was nice to meet him. He’d been a pretty icky ten-year-old boy back then—my opinion at that point in my life being based on the cleanliness standards instilled in me by my mother—with holes in his shirt and dirt under his fingernails. Soon I was chasing him down the block because he had the audacity to pull my pigtails while I was watching My Little Pony and then he got magic marker on my perfectly pressed sundress when he bumped into me, working on one of his obnoxious crown drawings. I already had one irritating older brother to deal with. Why, at seven years old, had I been blessed with another?
Because he and my brother were three years my senior, they believed they had the right to do whatever the fuck they wanted to me. There were pranks, name-calling, and all the other typical things boys at that cooties age could do to a little girl. I’ll admit I was just as bad. Everyone around town always praised me for being such a good little girl. But to them, I was annoying. Actually, that was an understatement. Everywhere they went, I went. Everything they did, I did. I was the little tag-along sister that brothers loathed. As my brother’s best friend, he took the opportunity as often as possible to tell me that he despised my presence and that I was a constant headache. Even at a young age he’d already been wise with his words.
A stupid fourteen-year-old. That’s how old I was when I started crushing on him. Up until that point, I never really thought of him as anything other than my brother’s best friend who was always around. Sure, he had stormy ocean eyes and the planes of his face were nothing but sharp angles, but I’d always known him, so he was just him. Conditions changed over the years. Whereas my brother went to the forefront to become a student athlete and class president, he sunk into the background and became a writer and cinephile. What didn’t change was his friendship with my brother; they stayed best friends. Since they spent so much of their time together, it meant that we spent so much of our youth around each other, and we became friends. He had the whole brooding thing going for him at seventeen, which worked for a lot of girls. He was funny (sardonically so), attractive, and actually a lot more sensitive than he wanted to let on. I got to know him better and learned about his turbulent home life, the very reason why he’d built up walls around himself and what exactly he was protecting. I started to see him in a different light. I became one of those girls. I fell for him. I fell hard.
Although he remained best friends with my brother, I didn’t see much of him past fourteen. I moved an entire time zone away to fuel my own ambitions. Whenever I was home in our small town, I ignored him. Whenever he was at the house with my brother, I would hide away in my room or go for a long run. Because I had the kind of crush on him that meant I couldn’t utter a single word normally without overthinking it or mentally berating myself. He had some kind of power over my head and my heart merely by existing. Everything about him was intimidating to me. I should have stopped liking him then, on those long weekends and school breaks that I was home, because I saw how girls acted around him once he got his leather jacket that put him in a fortress of self. In spite of his sensitivity, or maybe because of it, he was like other teenage boys in high school: bad at managing feelings and relationships.
Things did get better around him, eventually, over the years. As my confidence grew in my life away from home, my confidence grew around him. I could send smiles his way and form complete sentences again as I was coming into my own. Relatively, things were once again normal. But we weren’t friends anymore like we’d grown up to be. Mostly because I’d gotten out of town, and stayed out, but also because I never did stop liking him.
I left Riverdale at fourteen to further my dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Ten years before I left home, I did my first plié and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve been blessed with the right body type and work ethic of a dancer. So when I nailed an audition to study at a highly regarded program in a big city, and when my parents realized that it was where I would excel (we were the Coopers, after all, it was expected that we could achieve success based on the sheer power of will alone), I went. Forget scholarships and Juilliard, I put myself on track to a dance career before I even knew what my classes for freshman year of high school would be.
I lived in dorms all through high school so I could attend the pre-professional conservatory program at the Joffrey Academy of Dance in Chicago. I never had anything less than a soloist’s role in all of the student showcases and galas, and I had the principal female role in the academy’s spring production all before graduating high school. I’d even heard whispers that I had been considered for the same role a year earlier but was ultimately passed over because I’d missed a few months of dancing due to injury. I worked at my craft with everything I had, because it was what I loved the most, so I thrived under the pressure of my life as a burgeoning young dancer. I moved up from the academy’s conservatory program to its trainee program, then graduated to the fully-funded studio company program where I was offered an apprentice position with the actual company that the school was affiliated with, The Joffrey Ballet. It was beyond thrilling to see my dreams begin to come to fruition.
A running quip between my brother, his best friend, and me is that role reversal happened somewhere in our lives. Whereas I had followed them around as a little girl, it was almost like they were following me since I moved. My brother moved to Chicago (Evanston, to be precise) a year after me to attend college at Northwestern. His best friend opted for the University of Michigan, in order to be closer to his own younger sister. So when he wound up in Ann Arbor, we were all reunited by Midwestern geography. But he and my brother only saw each other once in a while as college students in different states (hell, my brother had lived literally less than 20 miles from me then, and we hardly ever saw each other during that four-year stretch of time), which meant that I rarely saw him. The three of us never had a full-fledged reunion despite them following me to the Midwest.
My first year in the corps de ballet with the company was their last year of college. I was getting used to progressive success with my dance life, but that year belonged to him and my brother. There’s a hierarchy in ballet that is rarely, if ever, broken. In big companies, you have to work your way up. Being a star as a student and an apprentice might get you into the corps, but then it’s a whole new battle. At that level, everyone is so good and so motivated. So uniform. Dancing in the corps is dancing with the group, highlighting the soloists and principals. Being part of the corps also gets comfortable. There are a lot of dancers that spend their entire careers in the corps without promotion—sometimes because they never seek it. That first year in the corps for me, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It was a big enough deal for me to be part of the company because a dance career was what I had been working toward every day since I was a little girl. But not to be outdone, my brother graduated from college and went straight to business school to get his MBA. And his best friend? Well, he got a writing job as a digital content producer for a local news station in Toledo.
A concerned 21-year-old. That’s what I am now. It’s my third year with the company. In the last two years I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to be a principal dancer. But I also don’t just want to be in the corps. I do want solo roles. I do want the spotlight on my pas de deux partner and me for a portion of the amazing shows our company puts on. This upcoming season, I have my biggest solo role so far. I’m still in the corps de ballet, but I have a part as big as one of the second soloists. So I shouldn’t be this concerned. You don’t choose a life in dance for the money. I’m fine with the fact that I have to live with my brother to maintain a healthy lifestyle and my sanity because it means that I get to keep living my dream. All in all, things in my life are pretty good. Maybe I should even be describing them as good, without the prefacing word. But maybe I’m concerned because I’m smart enough to know that nothing gold can stay for too long. And there is a problem looming on the horizon. Because that full-fledged reunion that never happened with my brother’s best friend? It’s about to happen.
After honing his skills as a staff member of the student-run literary magazine at Michigan, and after a few years working in new media after that, he came to the decision that graduate school was his next step and applied for MFA programs in Creative Writing. He got into a few of the programs he applied to and after deliberately weighing out his options, and his financial situation, he chose one. In Chicago. Of course.
So, yeah, I’m concerned about living in the same city—in the same building—as him. It’s easy enough to brush my crush on him under the rug when I’m seven years removed from being fourteen and when I’ve rarely seen him in that time frame. And it’s not like I was holding out for a schoolgirl crush; I’ve dated and been in relationships with other guys. But all it took was seeing him in our hometown at my parents’ annual Fourth of July barbecue to remind me why I ever secretly had a thing for him. He’s even more of a catch now than he was as a teenager. It all came rushing back. I found myself ignoring him and hiding in my room all over again, really trying to avoid acting like a trainwreck around him.
It’s pathetic that I have trouble being around him because we have so much in common. We’re both on career paths that can be described as labors of love. We both know the grind of trying to make it, chasing the flickers of light at the end of the tunnel. We both know what it is to believe in a dream so much, for its taste to be on the tip of the tongue, but still just barely out of reach. Honestly, I have so many more similarities to him than he has with my brother at this point. I also see parts of myself in all the girls he’s ever paid attention to. I’m a great listener. I have girl-next-door charm. I actually appreciate his sense of sarcasm and wit that can be off-putting. I have a fucking dancer’s body. I’m even a natural blonde.
And Jughead Jones still doesn’t like me.