Here's something else I want to get off my chest: Everybody thinks pink when they think of ballet. Pink and soft. Pretty white girls. Well I don't know what ballet is, but it's not white, it's not brown or black or whatever you are, it's not any color anybody wants to be.
It's a dark red, deep red, almost black. If it was on a paint palette at Home Depot, it would be called Heart Attack, or Rabid Dog. The color of pooling blood under skin. To me, that's like some Stephen King shit, straight out of a horror movie, so don't come to me with this bull about innocence, and fragility, and pink.
"I had a thought in there," I say to Violet while we're in the changing rooms, peeling sweaty fabric off our skin, "Pointes are kind of like Rottweilers, I think. Like they bite you, and drag you all around with their teeth even though you own them."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well I think we should name them. Like they're pets," I say, "Some sturdy German names. Like Fritz, and Hans."
She stares at me deadpan.
"Ok you don't like that one. How about Spitz and--"
"I know what you're doing and I want you to stop."
Her voice is cracking like old wallpaper. I look up to see her eyes are averted, and glassy in the fuzzy yellow light.
"Are you crying?" I ask incredulously. She shakes her head, but her eyes betray her brain and tears edge over. She curses at herself softly.
"Vi, oh my God," I mumble with an eye roll, "This isn't the first time. I'm used to it by now."
"You sh-shouldn't have to be," she sputters, "You're such an amazing dancer, you're better than half the girls in there, and she knows it, yet she strategically i-ignores--"
She pauses, closes her eyes, steadies her erratic gasps for breath. I can tell she hates the fact that I'm witnessing this.
"I know I'm being silly. She just makes me so m-mad. And you always let her get away with it, Ava. You just let her walk all over you."
"Well, I don't know about walk, I think she kind of just hobbles all over me. Cause, y'know, she's really fucking old."
I slump back against the wall, in the middle of pushing my tights down my thighs. Vi stands in front of me with arms crossed, completely clothed.
She ties her pointes funny. That's the first thing I noticed about her when we met. After that was her ginger hair, then her technique, and by then I couldn't stop staring.
She winds her ribbons around, under her ankle bone. Everybody else just tucks them in.
I chuckle to myself.
"Why am I always the naked one in this relationship?"
"Why am I always the one who's crying?"
I've had an answer to this question probably since I met her, so raise an eyebrow and start to open my mouth.
"Can you please say something that doesn't skirt around the subject of this conversation?"
She's like a crosswalk guard sometimes, you know? She's waving her arms in neon green, puffing her whistle in my face when I scale the curb, move too fast, when I cheat. All sly, no honesty. Cause somehow she knows I'm better then that. It's a major pain, to be honest.
"I know, ok, she's racist. She picks on me because I'm black, I know this, I've known it since the third class I took with her. But what do you want me to do about it Vi?"
"Say something to her!"
"You can't just 'say something' to people like that, it's an entire learning process. If I want someone to be fluent in French I have to teach them a lot more than just how to say 'bonjour'."
"Then say something to Mrs. Young."
"She won't understand."
"You don't know that--"
"No, actually I do know that, Vi, because I'm the one who has to deal with it everyday."
She gets quiet after that, and looks up at the ceiling in what looks like an attempt to stop her tears for a second.
"It doesn't work how you think it does. I'd be going into Mrs. Young's office, and accusing one of the most well respected, renowned teachers at the academy of misconduct, without any concrete proof. How exactly are you expecting her to be reprimanded? There's no way they'd suspend or fire her, and that's the only way they'd be able to get her to stop. All that work just to appease one person. And simultaneously piss off one thousand others. There's just...nothing I can do. If I take it too seriously it's just gonna distract me in class, and hold me back."
"Like she's not doing a catch all job of that already."
She's still staring at the ceiling. The wallpaper on it is some renaissance painting of rosy cherubs in the middle of a lush forest dropping flower petals with delicate fingers. I think it's beautiful, but I lie and say, "I don't know why you're staring at ceiling, that wallpaper is hideous."
And she squeezes her eye shut even though the tears roll out in fat drops, and she laughs, and it was worth it to lie. She sits next to me with a heavy sigh, and deflates against the wall with me.
"She'd be appeasing two people."
I scoff, "Yeah, who? Me and Dr. King?"
"No, me. And yeah sure, maybe Dr. King too."
"And Carlos Acosta, and Misty Copeland, and Raven Wilkinson, and Martha Graham, and the whole sand lot of my black ballet guardian angels. I know. But I've got this, Vi."
She nods solemnly, seeming satisfied, but her knuckles are in tight knots around her thighs. I'm not sure if she's loosening the tightness in the muscles out of pain, or leftover anger. She starts pulling her sweaty dance clothes off again, and I follow suit. I pull the wet material off still warm with body heat, and it feels like freedom.
"It's first day back, still," Vi suggests from behind the hair pins between her teeth as she takes down her bun, waiting for me in the doorway. She's dressed in her usual black sweatpants, and her dads Penn State t-shirt, "We could get chili fries on the way back to the dorms and not feel guilty about it."
"Sylvie would eat us alive," I chuckle. Sylvie's our other roommate, another boarder. She's an alien from Venus, and on Venus, they detest food that tastes good, and only eat strange substances, such as salad, buckwheat tea, and brussel sprouts. She can practically smell the brand of canola oil on our breath when we make a stop at the chili fry stand on the way back to the dorms.
"She'd probably be too scared of putting on weight."
"Hey, see? You're already back to normal. Craving junk food, and roasting Sylvie," I cackle with approval at the foxlike little smirk on her face, and shut off the light switch as we leave.
That was where I met her, in that musky little room. Two years ago I was fourteen, and I hated my legs. They were gangly and weak, and I had these fleshy elephant ears, and floppy frog feet, and tall giraffe legs that buckled and snapped, covered in bruises like spots, and hips and tits like a sanded down surf board. Everything was stuck out in all the wrong places. Still looks like that, too.
I was always tripping over myself. I tripped all the way off the airplane, out the airport, and all through my first class at the Royal Ballet Academy, where, lost out of my mind in the corridors, the off kilter sound the Spice Girls started getting louder from behind a crumbling brown door, inside a lonely room. Vi was singing off key with a red hurricane for hair, Silvie was cackling and clutching her stomach on the floor.
And I was home. For a second, I liked my tangled legs just fine.
