How It Feels to Fly (14 page)

“And are you two . . . you know . . .”

“No.” I think about tiny, goofy Theo and can't help but laugh. “No.”

We sit there, talking about random stuff, for another few minutes. We learn important facts such as Dominic's favorite color—orange—and how old Jenna was when she broke her first bone: three, and it was her pinky finger, and it happened when she was jumping on the bed after her parents told her not to.

Then we hear a creak in the hallway.

“Shh!” Zoe hisses. Like any of us was going to make another noise in that moment. When we're not busted, Zoe
says, “All right, losers. Back to bed.” She gathers up the bottles and walks out of the room without another word.

Jenna and I look at each other. “That was weird,” she says in a low voice, motioning toward Zoe's departing back.

I nod.

“But also not terrible.”

I nod again.

Jenna brushes some imaginary dirt from her pajama top. “Well, good night, Sam.”

“Night.” I wave at the others and follow Zoe down the hall.

ANDREW HAS A MUG OF BLACK COFFEE WAITING FOR me on the kitchen island at seven thirty Saturday morning. “Just the way you like it,” he says with a smile.

I actually am starting to like it this way. You can taste the richness of the coffee, without the sugar and cream masking it. Or maybe I just like that this is something between me and Andrew. He knows how I take my coffee. Sort of.

I help him cut up fruit for the fruit salad. I eat my daily clementine, thinking that if nothing else, by the end of Perform at Your Peak, I'll be caught up on my vitamin C. And then I ask Andrew some of the questions from last night's Secret Society meeting.

“What's your favorite color?”

“Green,” he says, rinsing out the fruit bowl. “What's yours?”

“Blue. Like a deep teal.”

“Nice.” He pours in the sliced strawberries and the clementine segments and the halved grapes. “Like, after-sunset blue?”

I nod fast. “Yeah, exactly.” He gets it. He gets
me
. I need to know more. “Do you have a favorite number?”

“Forty-two,” he answers without hesitating.

“That's, um, random.”

He leans in close, putting on a solemn face. “It's not random. It's the answer to life, the universe, and everything.”

“Okay . . .”

He steps back, and I miss him right away. “It's from a book,” he says. “
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I take it you haven't read it?”

“No.”

“You should pick it up.”

“I will.” I don't read much for pleasure, but if Andrew recommends it, I'll find it.

“Good morning!” Zoe saunters into the kitchen and throws open the fridge door. “I need a Bloody Mary. Hair of the dog, and all that . . .”

Andrew laughs. “Party too hard last night?”

“You know it.”

I laugh weakly. Because no, she didn't party too hard last night. Obviously. But those stolen beers are still under her bed, in our shared bedroom.

“Here.” Andrew hands her a mug. I'm jealous—until he
says, “Let me know how you take it.” Then I sip my black coffee and let myself smile for real.

DR. LANCASTER ASSEMBLES
us in the Dogwood Room after breakfast. “You are not your talent,” she says to start the session. “You are so much more. So today, you're each going to teach a fellow camper a new skill. But”—she holds up a finger—“not your primary skill.”

“What do you mean?” Omar asks. He already looks anxious. He's doing the fidgeting thing again.

“You could be considered experts in your respective fields—but you're beginners at other activities. And that's okay. You can still have fun regardless of your skill level.”

She breaks us into pairs: Jenna and Dominic, Zoe and Katie, and me and Omar.

“Jenna, you'll be teaching Dominic to tie a balloon animal. Dominic, you'll be teaching Jenna to jump double Dutch—with assistance from Andrew and Yasmin on the jump ropes.”

Jenna's mouth drops open and Dominic laughs out loud.

Dr. Lancaster continues, “Zoe, you'll be teaching Katie how to construct an Ikea side table. Katie, you'll teach Zoe to program an old VCR.”

Zoe shakes her head. “Oh, Katie, you are in for it.”

“And finally, Omar, you'll teach Sam how to build a house of cards, and Sam, you'll teach Omar how to fold an origami flower.”

I look at Omar. “I've never done origami in my life.”

“How hard can building a house of cards be?”

It turns out: pretty hard. Especially with all the other activities going on. Yasmin and Andrew bring a folding table into the Dogwood Room for us. I'm given a new deck of cards and Omar's given a sheet of instructions. I'm not allowed to look at his paper, and he's not allowed to touch the cards.

“Lean a pair of cards against each other to create an apex,” Omar reads. “That's an upside-down V. Like a tent.” He raises his voice to be heard over Zoe, who's already barking at Katie about separating different-sized screws and finding the Allen wrench.

I follow his instructions. “Done.”

“Make five more like that, in a row, touching one another.”

I set up tents two and three and am carefully pulling my hands away from tent four when Dominic pops a balloon and curses loudly. I jump and my cards scatter.

Zoe curses back at him. “Can you not do that?”

“Sorry,” Dominic says, and blows up another balloon.

I start building my house of cards again. I focus on my hands. On not breathing too hard. I tune out Katie's hammering and the teeth-grinding squeaks of Dominic's balloon twisting.

This time, I'm on the second level when everything comes tumbling down.

“Um, it says that if you use glossy cards, they can slip against one another. Maybe these cards are too glossy?”
Omar is tapping his hand against the table. When I start rebuilding, he moves the tapping to his thigh.

“Maybe,” I murmur, dropping a pair of cards into place.

“I don't like watching you do this,” he confesses. “It's making me anxious.”

I glance at him. “Can you try to breathe, like we practiced yesterday?”

He nods at me. “Yeah. Okay.”

“But don't breathe at the cards.”

“Right.” He turns sideways.

I keep building. Card after card, each set gently against its neighbor. While Omar is taking in gulps of air, I'm holding my breath. When my hands start to tremble, I rub them together to make the trembling stop.

All of a sudden, it's really important for me to finish this tower. Such a delicate thing. So hard to construct, and so easy to topple.

I lay a card flat across the top of two tents and sit back, taking in a ragged breath.

“Are you okay?” Omar asks.

I nod. “Mm-hmm.”

“You look upset.”

“I'm fine.” I look at his worried face. “Okay, yes, I'm upset. And it's stupid. This—” I gesture at the half-finished tower. My hand moves the air, and the structure wavers. I gasp. But it stays up. “It's a metaphor, right?”

Dr. Lancaster is walking over, looking interested.

“You did this on purpose,” I tell her.

“What's that?”

“The house of cards—it's a metaphor. It's me.”

“How so?”

I glare at her, and then at the tower. “Isn't it obvious? Everything about me is shaky. I'm barely holding together. Breathe too hard, and I fall apart.”

As if on cue, Dominic accidentally pops another balloon. Katie shrieks in surprise, and I jump and bump the table, and my tower collapses.

I put my head in my hands. “You couldn't at least let us work somewhere quiet and calm?” I say to Dr. Lancaster, through gritted teeth.

“We don't always get to choose where we build our towers,” she says.

More metaphors. Great.

“Sometimes there are distractions. There are setbacks. How do you proceed?”

“I can build it again,” I say. “Start from scratch. But . . . it's just going to keep falling down. It's the same tower. The same cards.”

“So how can you improve your chances of having it stand?”

I know we're not really talking about the house of cards anymore, but I can't resist saying, “I don't know. Glue?”

She smiles. “Interesting. I'll get some.” She leaves the room.

That's when I realize no one else is doing anything. They've been watching. Listening. Having their attention on
me brings back the skin-crawling feeling I hate. “Can you all not look at me right now?” I ask, mortified.

“Sure,” Dominic says. “Back to my balloons. My baby sister's gonna flip when she finds out I can do this.”

“I don't think
that
”—Jenna points at the squiggle in his hands—“counts as a balloon animal.”

He waves it at her. “This is totally a poodle. Use your imagination.”

“Okay, break's over, back to work,” Zoe tells Katie. “You need to find eight screws that look like this.” She points at a tiny metal piece.

Omar and I sit, not looking at each other. But by the way he's wiggling in his chair, I can tell he has something to say. “What is it?” I finally ask.

“How can you not like people looking at you?” His eyes are wide behind his round glasses. “You and me—we're performers. We do what we do to be seen, right?”

“I guess.”

“Is it because you gained weight?” He says it without malice, just repeating what I told the group a few days ago. Still, I flinch. “I know a little bit about the dance world,” he goes on. “The musical-theater side of it, but still. It must suck.”

“It does, yeah.”

“Type matters for me, too. People don't want an actor with my skin color, or they want a brown kid, but it has to be a guy who's more conventionally hot. And sometimes it feels like it doesn't matter whether I'm any good. You know?”

“I know.”

“Is that why you're anxious? Because you feel like it doesn't matter how good you are?”

It's so simple. So true. “That's part of it.”

“Do your parents support you?”

“My dad's not around. My parents are divorced. But my mom . . . yeah, you could say she's supportive.”

“My parents were supportive of me acting when I was little. But my dad's a physicist and my mom's an anesthesiologist, so you can imagine how well it went over when their only son told them he wanted to be on Broadway, like, as a career.”

“My mom used to dance, so she gets it.”

“Wow. Lucky.”

“Yeah. Lucky,” I echo.

A minute later, Dr. Lancaster returns with a bottle of Elmer's. “What does the glue represent?” she asks, handing it to me.

I unscrew the cap. “Maybe . . . new coping mechanisms for anxiety? Like, what I was doing before wasn't working, so let's try something new?”

“That makes sense. Anything else?”

I think for a moment. “We talked on Thursday about my support system. That's kind of like glue, holding me together when I can't do it myself. Right?”

“Right.” Dr. Lancaster looks like she wants to be smiling even bigger than she's letting herself smile. It's embarrassing. I'm glad when she says, “Well, knock yourself out. We have fifteen minutes before we trade partners.”

I think about holding the cards in place while the glue
dries. “I know Omar's not supposed to help me,” I say, “but I'm going to need more hands.”

“Okay,” Dr. Lancaster says, nodding. “Omar can assist you. Yasmin too.” She beckons her over.

It doesn't take long to find our rhythm. Yasmin holds a pair of cards while I run a seam of glue between them. Meanwhile, Omar preps the next apex, so that Yasmin doesn't have to let go of her upside-down V until it's dry enough to stand on its own. And then they switch.

“When we did this activity my year,” Yasmin tells us, “I had to teach my partner how to line-dance, and he had to teach me how to ride a unicycle.”

“A unicycle?” Omar asks. “What's that a metaphor for?”

“Balance, I suppose.” Yasmin carefully lets go of the cards she's holding. They stay up. “I wasn't really thinking about it that way. I was more worried about looking like an idiot in front of my partner. He was this super-cute soccer player from Florida. I had the biggest crush on him.”

I run a line of glue along Omar's cards. “Did you two keep in touch?”

“For a few months. I never said anything about the crush, though. Performing onstage wasn't the only thing I was afraid of in high school.” She sets up the next pair of cards and waits for me to glue them into place.

When Dr. Lancaster calls for us to switch activities, Yasmin gets to her feet. “I'm on double-Dutch duty now,” she says. “It was nice to chat with you, Sam. Maybe we can talk more this week?”

“Sure,” I say, but I'm already distracted: Andrew's walking over.

“That looks like a solid metaphor,” he says.

“Ha, ha.”

“Want me to take it upstairs for you?”

“Maybe later.” For now, I want to keep looking at it. I have to admit that I like seeing it standing there. Finished. Not falling.

“Just let me know when. In the meantime,” Andrew says, holding up the jump rope, “you get to witness something no one has ever seen before.”

“Speaking of things no one has ever seen before . . . ,” Zoe says. She and Katie are looking at the VCR from all angles. “How old is this thing, Dr. Lancaster?”

“It's from 1989. Have fun with those instructions.”

I turn to Omar. He's picked a piece of origami paper. It's teal, and it makes me think about my conversation with Andrew over breakfast. The sky at sunset.

“Good choice,” I say. “That's my favorite color.”

He smiles, but it's more like a grimace. His nerves are back. “Let's do this.”

“Fold the page in half horizontally,” I say.

He does.

Three folds in, I know we're in trouble. “I—I need to start over,” Omar says. He crumples the sheet of paper and throws it aside. “I didn't fold it right.”

“Okay.” I hand him another sheet of teal paper.

He pushes it away. “Not teal. Maybe red will work.”

“Okay.” We start again. This time, we do five folds before he's backtracking.

“The creases have to be sharper,” he says, almost to himself, as he does it again.

“What you're doing looks just like the picture on my instructions—” I start, trying to encourage him, but he makes a frustrated noise and wads the paper up.

“Green,” he says, sounding a little frantic. “We'll try green.”

“Okay.” I hand him a sheet that's like fresh-cut grass.

He folds and folds, tongue sticking out of his mouth. He starts humming.

The jump ropes make a repetitive
slap-slap-slap
on the carpet. The double Dutch-ers laugh when Jenna gets tangled and has to hop in a circle. Katie says, loudly, to Zoe, “No, not
that
button! The one with the square on it!”