Damage (2 page)

She had always planned to kill me. I felt that truth in the eager fingers she used to pry my hands away from the stone I’d been lucky enough to latch on to. She shook with excitement as her nails bit into my flesh. I clung and screamed, long and hard and loud, the sound a celebration of my newfound health. I would never have been able to scream like that before.

I believe that scream saved my life. That scream made a woman two floors down open her window and look out, and up, just in time. Even though she was sick—cancer that later killed her—she reached for me. And when her arms closed around my waist, she didn’t let go, even when the momentum of my fall nearly pulled her out the window.

The newspaper called it a miracle. My mother called it attempted suicide. My father called it a horrible side effect of an overdose of experimental medication. My doctors altered my treatment, my mother brought in a shrink, and I learned to say that Rachel was a product of my own imagination who didn’t come around anymore.

I lied.

For days, weeks—a second eternity of lying awake in my bed praying I wouldn’t hear her shoes tapping down the hallway—I lied. But she always came.

At first with friendly, dancing eyes, trying to lure me in as she’d done before, and then with knives she’d stolen from the cafeteria and syringes of fluid she tried to slip into my IV. She devoted her imaginary existence to my death, and with each attempt she got closer and closer to killing me. I lived in fear that, sooner or later, she would catch me unaware and our terrifying game would be done.

Then one day, she was just … gone.

By the time Rachel stopped coming to visit, I weighed less than the five-year-old girl down the hall. I looked like a monster, a haunted thing that prowled the children’s floor of the hospital with sunken eyes and fingers that worried at the scabs on my skin until they bled.

It took months for me to trust that Rachel was really gone, years to convince myself I’d just been a sick, crazy kid with an overactive imagination. But I finally did it. I pulled it together, I got well, I got out of the hospital and I never looked back.

On the day before the crash I was a determinedly average kid. I got A’s and B’s and the occasional C, I was obsessed with becoming a professional dancer, I wrote angry things about my stepmother in my journal, and dreamed of the day I’d be free to be all the things I was going to be.

I didn’t dream of death, but it seemed death had been dreaming of me.

Dani

The bus smells of diesel, old sandwiches, the ghosts of sweaty soccer players, and opportunity. Sweet, shiny opportunity.

I suck in a deep breath and almost smile, but don’t. Even on a day like this one, with the winter sun shining through the smeary bus windows and an entire twelve hours of freedom and New York City exploration spreading out before me like brightly colored beads on a wire, there’s no reason to let my guard down.

I don’t smile when people are watching. I don’t frown, either. I strive for neutrality and balance.

Every winter morning, I pull on khaki pants, a white collared shirt, and a navy sweater. Every day, I brush my long, reddish-brown hair into a low ponytail and sweep on mascara and a touch of lip gloss. I look tidy and pretty enough not to be teased, plain and unassuming enough not to be threatening.

Pleasant. Invisible. Just the way I like it.

“So did you give your stepmom the note?” Mina asks. I don’t miss the predatory excitement in her voice.

Mina is rarely pleasant, and never invisible.

Today, she wears her blue-and-white-plaid uniform skirt rolled up at the waist to show off more of her strong, dancer’s legs, paired with scarred, black motorcycle boots. Her chin-length black hair is flat-ironed into aggressive points and her eyeliner is thick and hostile.

If she weren’t five inches shorter than my five eight, I would never have been brave enough to say “hello” to her on her first day of ballet class two years ago. Mina was even scarier then, before she brought up her grades enough to get into Madisonville Prep and was forced to remove her numerous piercings and adhere to the private school dress code.

“Was she crushed that you don’t think of her as your BFF?” Mina asks, in a perfect imitation of my stepmother’s perky, upbeat tone. “Did she weep that the past four years of stepmotherly love and dedication haven’t won your heart?” She clasps her hands to her chest and fakes a sob.

Mina thrives on the noxious air that lingers above an emotional battlefield. Sometimes I do, too. Last night, after two hours of
Nutcracker
rehearsal with Ivon the Destroyer of feet and souls—the guest director Madisonville City Ballet brought in for this year’s production—I was ready to create some drama of my own. I tasted the metallic flavor of trouble on my tongue as Mina and I drafted the blackmail letter, and I enjoyed it.

I strive for neutrality and balance in most things, but where the mothers in my life are concerned, I mostly try not to give in to the urge to poison their non-dairy creamer.

Both my mom and stepmom, Penelope, are lactose intolerant. It’s the only thing they have in common aside from marrying my dad. Both make my life difficult—Mom because she can’t be bothered, Penny because she bothers too much.

“I didn’t give it to her. I decided to wait,” I tell Mina. “See how it goes.”

“What!”

“It’s almost Christmas break. I’ll be stuck in the house alone with her for days while Dad’s at work. If she’s upset, she’ll mope around acting pathetic and I’ll feel awful.”

“She’s going to convince your dad you’re too young to go, and you’ll lose your spot if you wait much longer to pay the deposit.” Mina ambles deeper into the bus, standing on tiptoe to hunt for two empty seats next to each other. But the senior boys in front of us are tall and wide and taking their sweet time. She turns back to me. “You’ve got to show her you’re not going to let her ruin your life.”

I sigh. Missing the eight-week resident dance camp at the New York City College of Arts next summer probably won’t ruin my life, but it won’t help my career either. Mina and I are still just sophomores, but dancers need to be ready to go to work straight out of high school, or sooner. There are sixteen-year-olds working in professional ballet companies across the country.

Not that I want to be a ballet dancer. I have different goals, goals I will never tell Mina. Our supposed mutual desire to bleed into our toe shoes for a living is the glue that holds our friendship together.

My only friendship. I don’t feel the need for more, but I don’t want to lose Mina. Despite her flaws, she’s a good friend. Loyal, but lacking that craving for extreme intimacy I’ve noticed in other best friend relationships. We tell each other many things, but not everything. I like that. It feels … safe.

“You know she’s the one calling the shots, not your dad, right? I mean, that’s not cool. She’s not even really related to you.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ll think of something. I just … I didn’t feel right about it after I got home.”

Bitching to Mina about Penny secretly slipping her loser brother hundreds of dollars every month is one thing. Threatening Penny with exposure is another. Penny is a pain, but she looks out for me in her control-freak kind of way. And she can’t help lying to my dad. He doesn’t believe in charity for family members. My stepmom is just trying to do what she feels she has to do for her brother while keeping her husband happy. No matter how much I resent her constantly sticking her nose into the business of “parenting” me—from her psychotic attention to my nutrition to the forced-fun family hiking trips—I still feel a certain amount of sympathy for her.

After all, haven’t I told my share of lies in the name of keeping Dad happy?

“You’re too good,” Mina says. “It’s a problem.”

My lips thin, crooking at the edges. “I’ll work on finding my inner evil.”

“You do that.” She gives the boys dawdling in the aisle in front of us another nasty look and flicks the ballet-shoe key chain hanging from my backpack zipper. “I hear Christmas spectaculars are great places to connect with inner evil.”

“Probably. Santa’s pretty scary when you think about it.”

“Totally scary. Do we really have to go? Haven’t you seen the Rockettes’ crotches enough by now?”

Anxiety tightens the skin at my neck, making me regret buttoning the top button of my shirt. “I like the Rockettes.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

No, not really. I don’t like the Rockettes, I
love
the Rockettes. It’s a shameful secret I’ll never tell anyone in my snobby dancer world, but I
love
them. Love them so much I want to be one. Forget toe shoes; give me tap shoes and high kicks.

Mina would die if she knew. So would my dad. Ballet as a career choice is bad enough, but at least it’s “culturally relevant.”

“Aren’t we a little old for Radio City?”

I shrug. “Maybe, but we already signed up for the Christmas show. You know how Mrs. Martin is about changing things. She’ll never let us switch.”

“Fine.” Mina rolls her eyes and my throat unclenches. “But next year we’re going to the Met.” She turns around and stomps one boot on the floor. The boy in front of her—a senior with super-wavy brown hair, but the kind of face that can pull off Shirley Temple curls—glances over his shoulder and grins.

Despite her scary factor, Mina is very, very pretty.

“What’s the problem, Nate?” Mina asks, a perfect mix of flirtation and annoyance in her tone.

I’m not surprised that she knows the guy’s name. Madisonville Prep is divided into a girls’ campus and a boys’ campus, but we all get together for field trips and dances and charity stuff. In the past two years, Mina has made it her business to know the names of every decent-looking guy at Madisonville and dated more than a handful of them.

She dragged me along only once. The double date ended less than an hour after it began. I was too nervous to say a word to the boy her date had brought along for me. He bailed after coffee, before we even made it to the all-ages ’80s night at the Den.

I think his name was Shane, but I can’t really remember. I’ve tried to block his name and face from my memory, the better to not blush bright red the next time I see him.

He isn’t on the trip today, I know that much.

“Krista and her minions are taking forever.” Nate nods toward the rear of the bus, where a clutch of senior girls are arranging pillows and blankets and tiny portable televisions all connected to one laptop via a web of cords. The drive into the city only takes two hours, but they look like they’re settling in for a transatlantic flight.

“Fabulous. Wonder what we’re watching this time?
Twilight
,
New Moon,
or
Eclipse
?” Mina rolls her eyes again. Her eyeliner makes them look even more intensely blue. Really pretty. I can tell Nate notices, but doesn’t notice me noticing him. People usually don’t.

“I’m not watching anything.” He slides into the seat on his left. “I’m going to sleep. You can sit with me if you want.” He nods to the empty space beside him.

He’s trying to keep it casual, but I can tell he’s interested in Mina. I wonder if it’s just because she’s pretty or if he’s heard the stories. According to legend, Mina is “great in bed.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. Mina and I don’t talk about things like that.

I think she can tell that sex mystifies me and that I prefer to stay mystified. It doesn’t matter that I’ll be sixteen in June. Sex is an adult thing to me. Maybe it’s because I’m so thin and flat-chested that I still feel like a kid despite my height. Maybe it’s because imagining being naked, skin to skin, with another human being makes my flesh crawl.

As far as I can tell, touching, hugging—closeness in general—is overrated. I prefer to be inviolate, alone in my body, without anyone trying to bridge the gap between one person and another. Skin was created for a reason, to keep us from getting too close. I don’t see a reason to force something that seems unnatural.

I had enough forced closeness when I was little, when dozens of doctors and nurses with their cold tools and colder hands took for granted the fact that they could touch me however they liked.

“Oh really?” Mina leans a hip against the seat. Her skirt inches up, revealing even more of her thigh. “So I get to watch you sleep all the way to New York? Sounds fun.”