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Lily was a traveler, she kept little notebooks—sometimes—for meetings, numbers, dance auditions. When she moved, she got another. When she moved to New York, she got a big one, a blue one, turning over and over in her fingers because she had to have it.
It’s going to be harder than I could ever guess. Tougher.
It was almost a ledger, and she started with a green pen because why not. She sketched in margins, or made margins of sketches, and New York City would need lots of room for everything it could give her.
Could you be innocent and seductive together? Thomas put this to them off the block in the new season. She remembered her audition, her regret, the shock of the eventual phone call, offering her a soloist place in the company. NYC.
There’s a way to do this. It’s work. Lily always has music going, if she can, or she’s humming or remembering something. Song is easy. She did everything she could, she did it with music, she did it dancing. She was a blossom, Thomas had teased, challenged.
How long do flowers really last (especially ones that aren’t really?)? She laughed without a sound; his smile showed a canine tooth.
What more in a day like that could matter? Dancing in her kitchen, later, in her socks, dark, planning to meet Simon, Maria, Leo.
Lily vacillated, being friendly and antagonistic with Nina. Didn’t think anything of it, sometimes dancers were like that. Nina was just so tempting, so easy, it was a marvel in such a grimy city, seemed impossible. Maybe it was impossible. Nina sure wasn’t stupid or foolish. She was the Swan Queen.
“What’s the monkey on her back?” Lily finally asked Veronica, watching the star stride to her room, the weeks to opening night crawling in.
Smirking, blue eyes ice on Nina’s spine before she shut the black door. “Her mother’s an insane control freak. I think everyone in the company has been run over by her until Thomas banned her from the theater.”
“What an asshole,” Lily murmured, the words swallowed in the heat and glow of the soloists’ dressing room.
Why so dramatic? Because Nina was innocent, and pushed, and broken. It wasn’t fair, she was pretty, she was a grace to watch dancing. And she reached through insanity to portray her role.
Little by little Thomas told her everything, and Lily talked to, and listened, to Beth, which was all she’d wanted for years. Everyone watching, then no one, and no one listening. She talked about Nina like she was alive, a second-tier soloist, a shy, stiff little girl.
Once, a mistake, just before re-opening night, Lily went to see Nina’s mother. She had constructed a shrine to her daughter in the narrow hospital bed and would sleep curled in the visitor’s chair. She drew the curtains around the bed to keep her love private. She moved sharply, a dancer in her bones and in her dreams, but her ankles would never plié or spin.
And Lily remembers Nina, pieces her mysteries together from all these words.
I can’t. I don’t want to. I’m scared.
What Thomas never understood: Nina didn’t lose herself, she gave herself.
Lily was a dancer in the womb. And a fighter, and hungry.
What is it to be totally out of control in yourself?
It was a choice. Thomas didn’t want to kill her, but it crossed his mind that she…He still never dreamed she really would. Lily tried to tell the story after. She had always been a dancer, and after a month to mourn, recoup, recast, she danced the Swan Queen. Nina’s stand-in. She had to reverse the metamorphosis.
She had to rewrite the dance, she realized after a week of agonizing rehearsals. Made choices, carried them through. There had to be someone’s salvation in all this pain.