The Year My Sister Got Lucky (4 page)

Michaela drops in a quick curtsy and I manage to mimic her, then follow her blindly out into the hallway. “Let’s change and get out of here,” Michaela whispers, putting an arm around my shoulders as we walk toward the dressing room. “We can talk about everything outside.”

The first tears slip out and run down my cheeks. “What’s to talk about?” I snap, half angry and half grateful. Without waiting for an answer, I yank open the door to the dressing room. The small, windowless room smells of sweat and rosin, and is teeming with girls all in various states of undress, unknotting their buns and brushing out their hair. The sound of post-class chatter fills the air, but when we walk in, there’s a hush. Of course. Michaela has entered. The queen is in our presence.

“Michaela Antoinette,” I like to tease Michaela when we’re at home, and she’s out of Ballet Mode, lounging on the couch in her nightgown and socks, with her hair loose. “That’s how they see you, you know.”
They
being everyone: from the littlest girls learning their first steps, to the most seasoned teachers, to the moms who sit in the waiting room and whisper to each other when Michaela walks past.
“I heard that one was chosen …” “Svetlana says she’s never seen anyone as …” “She’s going to Juilliard …”
As the queen’s sister, I sometimes get the leftovers of those whispers. The mother hens will glance at me, too.
“Do you think the younger one is as good?”

“Michaela Antoinette,” Michaela will echo thoughtfully when we’re at home. “Then let’s hope they don’t behead me.”

Now, Michaela keeps her head down as she walks to her locker, her hands quickly undoing the sash on her pink skirt while two Advanced Beginner
girls clear out of her path. Sofia Pappas, whose back was to the door, turns away from her locker and gasps.

“Katie!” she shrieks, flying toward me, yanking her carrot-red waves loose from her bun. “I was wondering where you were — oh, sweetie, what are we going to do without you?”

I sniff hard, letting Sofia crush me into a hug.

“Michaela told me on the phone last night,” Sofia says, squeezing me so tight I cough. “I lost it immediately. Just started
wailing.
I can’t live without you guys!” Sofia releases me, gripping me by my arms, and gasps again when she sees my tearstained face. “Oh, Katie! You’re crying, too! It’s so hard, isn’t it?”

Sofia beats me in the overdramatic category every time.

I look past Sofia to see that most of the other girls in the room have formed a circle around the two of us. I instantly get that Sofia — whose big mouth is legendary — has filled them in.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Trini asks me, her lips turned at the corners. Trini is starting at LaGuardia in September, like I was supposed to, and I’d already agreed not to wear my Steve Madden zebra-print flats on the first day, because she was going to wear hers.

“I just found out,” I tell her truthfully, blinking back my tears. “And I couldn’t in class …”

“I’ve heard of Fir Lake,” Hanae pipes up, undoing her glossy black plait. “My parents went on vacation
there once. It’s in the Adirondacks — not too far from Canada, I think.”

Great. So now it’s like I’m leaving the country.

“Ugh, what kind of dance must they have up
there
?” Jennifer Golden groans, tugging on the strap of her tote bag.

Trini perks up at this. “Cow ballet!” she giggles, her eyes dancing, and Hanae and Renée Jackson burst into giggles as well. I feel a blush start around my neck.

“Wait, Katie,” Renée cuts in, growing serious. “What about …” She drops her voice. “Your
sister
? I bet Svetlana wants her to stay.”

In unison, we all glance over toward Michaela, who is sitting alone on a bench in the corner, removing her pointe shoes. The lamb’s wool she wrapped around her toes before class is now stained dark red with blood. It’s a sight that always makes me wince, but Michaela looks almost bored as she peels off the gory wool and throws it in the wastebasket. Her feet are blistered and bumpy — ideal dancer’s feet.

“No, she’s coming,” I say with a shrug. “I’m not sure why.”

I know the girls clustered around me are dying to ambush Michaela, too. But even Sofia and Jennifer, who’ve grown up with Michaela, who’ve lent her leotards and braided her hair, even they stand back a little.
I’m
the Wilder sister they can touch and grab
and bombard with questions. I’m on their level, or beneath them — beneath the older ones, anyway.

On cue, Jennifer Golden suddenly cries, “My baby!” and pulls me into her skinny chest. Jennifer is all bones and sharp angles, so when
she
walks by the mothers in the waiting room, they put their heads together and whisper, “
Eating disorder …
” The twisted thing is, a lot of the Advanced dancers look like Jennifer. There are at least two girls in Michaela’s class who I
know
don’t eat anything other than Swedish Fish, which I see them devouring in the dressing room on a regular basis.

“No, she’s
my
baby!” Sofia snaps at Jennifer, tugging me toward her. Normally, I have fun with this kind of banter between the older girls — I’ll even play it up and pretend to choose a favorite (usually it’s Sofia), just to watch the others pretend to be hurt. When I was younger, Sofia and Jennifer would come to our apartment and pinch my cheeks and dress me up in feather boas and lipstick while Michaela howled with laughter. I was their living doll, and I ate up every attention-gobbling minute.

Now, I’m finding it hard to breathe, surrounded so tightly by them all. I mumble something about there still being three weeks left. Then I manage to break free and hurry to my locker. There are sighs of disappointment, but eventually everyone scatters.

“I’ll call you later?” I say to Trini, whose locker is next to mine, as I pull my T-shirt on over my head and kick off my ballet slippers.

“Mmm.” Trini busies herself with something in her quilted tote bag.

My stomach tightens. Trini and I have been attached at the hip since we were tubby little girls in leotards. I can’t stand having her, or any friend, mad at me. But then I hear Michaela’s voice behind me — “Katie? You ready?” — and I forget about Trini. In the end, my sister is the friend who matters, even when I want to kill her for not telling me things.

“IM me tonight, okay, guys?” Sofia cries as Michaela and I leave the dressing room, and I hear the buzz of gossip start up again as soon as we shut the door.

I exhale. The Inquisition is over.

“I saw you,” Michaela says once we’ve walked past the murmuring mothers in the waiting room, and are out on humid, crowded Broadway. Our bags bump against our hips as we walk, and my T-shirt sticks to my back.

I’m still feeling frosty toward my sister about the issue of Svetlana-Claude-Sofia knowing before I did. “Saw me being eaten alive by our friends?” I ask as we cross the avenue in the direction of Jamba Juice. Crushed strawberry shakes with immunity boosts are our post-class tradition. “Thanks for coming over to save me,” I add, shoveling on the sarcasm like sand.

“I meant I saw you peeking in,” Michaela replies as we approach Lincoln Center. “On my class. Why were you spying?” I feel her studying me.

She doesn’t sound angry or annoyed; just curious. I lift one shoulder. “The door was open,” I offer. “And I wasn’t spying. Just watching.” There’s a crucial difference.

The two of us pause in front of the Lincoln Center plaza. Throngs of tourists are posing for pictures on the steps, and girls with their hair in telltale buns and their feet pointed outward — our sisters in dance — scurry by us. The cold spray from the fountain reaches my cheeks. I’m filled with so much missing for this place, even though we haven’t left yet, that my gut hurts.

In her silent, semi-psychic way, Michaela puts her arm across my shoulders. “We’ll be back,” she assures me. “There’s Greyhound, you know. And school breaks. This isn’t good-bye forever.”

I take a deep breath. When
will we be back
? I want to ask. But instead I turn to my sister and ask, “There are buses we can take from this
Furry
Lake?” in my best Svetlana impersonation, with the thickest Russian accent I can muster.

Michaela looks at me, opens and closes her mouth, and then bursts out laughing. I start laughing, too, and I think we’re both relieved that it’s okay to return to the land of jokes.

“I was going to
die
in there!” Michaela says between gasps. “I was so paranoid she was going to
start a fire with her cigarette. I was silently chanting, ‘Put it out, put it out.’”

“And did you see how awkward Claude was?” I giggle, shaking my head. “It was like Svetlana was asking him to do something really abnormal and outrageous, like, I don’t know — take a shower …”

This is my talent: making my sister laugh.

“And I didn’t expect Sofia to foam at the mouth in the dressing room!” Michaela cries.

“The one-two punch of her and Trini was pretty terrifying.”

“They’re
insane
,” Michaela declares, shaking her head. “Our friends are insane.”

“We’re insane,” I snort, and in that moment, we are — just two crazy sisters, standing in the middle of Broadway, holding our sides and shaking with laughter. The city swirls and jitterbugs around us, and I decide that no way am I going to spend the next three weeks moping. I’m going to lap up Manhattan and relish every moment.

I’ll have
plenty
of time to be miserable once we get to the wilderness.

This is a historic moment.

The Wilder family is together …
in a car.

Summer vacations to London or Moscow involved airplanes. Weekend trips to Boston or Philadelphia were all about buses. But now, in the last week of August, my parents, Michaela, and I are scaling the Adirondacks in a brand-new, shiny-blue SUV.

A few days ago, when we were still in the sweaty midst of packing, Dad drove the truck (I’m sorry, but it looks like a truck) home from a dealership in Brooklyn, explaining, “We’ll be dead in Fir Lake without one.” I think we’ll be dead without citronella candles. I’ve been reading up on mosquitoes, and apparently the ones in untamed lands carry fatal diseases.

Michaela and I never even knew our parents had drivers’ licenses. Which might explain why they are the world’s worst drivers.

“I think I made a wrong turn somewhere,” Mom mutters, gripping the steering wheel as we jolt along the highway, passing trees, trees, and more trees (by the way, whoever claims there’s a tree shortage in the world needs to visit upstate New York). Mom has said she’s made a wrong turn approximately twelve times in the five hours we have been out of New York City. If I weren’t so zombie-tired from getting up at dawn to let in the movers, I would laugh. All I can do, though, is roll my eyes at Michaela as I reach for the crumpled sack of Doritos between us. I feel kind of like that bag: stale and wrinkled in my H&M chocolate-brown sundress cinched with a red belt. Michaela, sitting cross-legged in cuffed jean shorts and a striped tank, looks ready to dance
Swan Lake.

“That last road sign said a hundred miles to Montreal,” Dad says distractedly, glancing up from his issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
. The surprisingly cool, crisp wind coming in through his open window ruffles both the magazine’s pages and Dad’s thinning light-brown hair.

Back around Albany, my usually quiet dad sat up straight and announced that we needed to roll down our windows and breathe in “that fresh mountain air.” I don’t think there’s a more irritating phrase in the history of the world. Air is air. Michaela and I looked at each other, a little alarmed. Up until that moment, Dad had been pretty chill about the whole move, not
seeming to care about Fir Lake while Mom drove the crazy train. But he’d clearly joined her on board.

“Are we in Canada?” I ask now around a mouthful of Doritos.

“No, but it could be that we
passed
Fir Lake….” Dad leans forward to turn down the volume on the radio. All that we’ve been able to pick up for the last hour is crackling static and bad country music. Now some song is on about moons and fences. I miss Z100.

“How should I know if we passed it or not?” Mom snaps, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses. “Everything on this godforsaken highway looks the
same
.”

“No joke,” I murmur, pressing my forehead to the cold pane of my window to take in the low white sky and jagged mountains dotted with trees that look like heads of broccoli. As soon as we left the Bronx, that’s all the scenery has been — with the occasional dead racoon lying in the middle of the highway.

If this is nature, I am not a fan.

“We haven’t passed it,” Michaela reports, checking the heavy atlas in her lap. “It’s just a couple more exits.” How my sister is able to read a road map is beyond me. I suspect she’s secretly done more research into Fir Lake. I call Michaela a Googlemaster — she can look online and find answers to the most random stuff. As far as I’m concerned, the Internet was invented for MySpace, IM, and e-mail. The end.

“
Thank
you, Michaela,” Mom sniffs, her tone implying that Dad and I are, once again, useless.

My father shoots me a quick smile over his shoulder, and before I can smile back, the car goes over a huge bump and my ears start popping like the time I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. We’re up high now. I swallow hard, and Michaela looks up from her map.

“License plate game?” she offers in her most supportive voice.

I sigh. We’ve done it all: twenty questions, charades, staring contests, and attempts at three-way calling Sofia (we couldn’t get cell reception). I’ve tried napping with my head in Michaela’s lap, and Michaela has tried finger-combing the tangles out of my hair (we were both unsuccessful). We’ve made four stops to pee, the most recent at a creepy gas station in Lake George, where Michaela and I bought the Doritos and our parents argued over directions with the toothless, bearded guy at the register. There was a deer head mounted on the wall, so I was relieved to get back in the car. Now, though, my butt kind of aches, and I’m ready for a serious leg stretch.

“Are you carsick?” Michaela whispers, inching toward me when most sane people, I think, would move
away.
Michaela has to whisper because our mom would flip out at the notion that someone might throw up in the new SUV.

I’ve never gotten sick in cars before — not even in stop-and-start taxicabs — but there
is
a vague, unpleasant feeling in my gut. I’m not carsick. I’m homesick. Already.

The last three weeks slipped by in a stream of funny-smelling cardboard boxes, mountains of clothes, and thick ribbons of packing tape. Michaela did all my packing for me, sitting on my bed and sorting through my shoes and skirts, and I didn’t bother to help her. Instead, I snuck out of the apartment every night and walked up and down 1
^ST
Avenue, trying to memorize things: the blinking signs of twenty-four-hour diners; the girls in strapless dresses kissing boys in front of the L subway station; the homeless man Michaela and I nicknamed “Cousin Hairy” rattling his change cup on the corner; the smell of refried beans and cilantro coming from the Mexican restaurant across the street.

In between packing, Mom and Dad had their professor and writer friends over for a good-bye dinner, and they all talked loudly about literature and politics over glasses of chilled vodka that Michaela and I weren’t allowed to touch. Michaela and I
were
allowed to have our friends over one night, so we invited Trini, Sofia, and Jennifer for Chinese takeout — our favorite cuisine (even if Jennifer only ate the water chestnuts).

After our final class at Anna Pavlova, Michaela packed our slippers and toe shoes and leotards into a suitcase, her face tight. I didn’t sleep at all that night, holding my breath and listening for the sound
of Michaela’s weeping; it was so obvious that leaving Svetlana was killing her, even if she wasn’t saying it aloud. But if Michaela did cry, she must have hidden her sobs in her pillow.

Two mornings later —
this
morning — big-muscled men in jeans and sweat-stained T-shirts came and whisked that suitcase away, along with all our furniture. Then, while our parents watched the movers load up their truck outside, Michaela and I stood in our empty living room and watched the dust bunnies dance across the hardwood floor. On one wall, I noticed a smear of hot-pink paint that used to be hidden by the piano; that was from when I was ten and Michaela was thirteen and we’d decided to redecorate the apartment. “I don’t want to go,” I burst out, because Michaela was the only person I could say that to who wouldn’t tell me I was being childish. My sister took my hand. “Come on” was all she said, and on cue, our mom honked the horn of our SUV. We walked out of our graffiti-decorated building into the August heat, slid into the car, and soon the city skyline was behind us.

And now we’re here.

“
Here
we are,” Mom murmurs, abruptly swerving the car toward the exit ramp. Someone honks at her, and she honks back. I’m buckled in, but I clutch the seat for good measure.
Family of Four Dies in Car Crash on Way to New Home,
I think.
Fledgling Ballerinas Cut
Down in their Prime.
“Right, Michaela?” Mom asks, even though we’re barreling off the highway.

“I think so,” Michaela answers, checking the map, and it’s the weirdest thing — she sounds almost … excited.

I study my sister, and it could be my imagination, but her eyes are a little bigger and sparklier than usual. I want to poke her arm and ask her if she’s lost her marbles — I like that expression — but then I realize that there’s nothing
really
wrong with getting excited about arriving at a new place. I suppose it’s pretty normal, in fact. I close my eyes and rummage through my emotions, searching for excitement, but all I can find is dread and terror and a general sense of pissiness.

I hate that our parents have decided our fate, I hate that I’m trapped in a truck the size of our old bathroom and I hate that I won’t be able to audition for
The Nutcracker,
or ride the subway uptown to meet Trini for hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya. Fuming, I open my eyes to see an endless stretch of green. Horses — or maybe cows — stand in the tall grass, grazing as their tails swish lazily in the damp afternoon air. My heart jumps.
Seriously
? I’ve been to the Bronx Zoo tons of times, but I’ve never seen animals roaming around out in the open like that. It’s freaky.

But up ahead is something even freakier: a square green sign with white lettering. We’ve seen so many different signs on this trip: ridiculous town names that
cracked me and Michaela up (Poughkeepsie, anyone?); white outlines of leaping deer (I kept imagining one coming out of the woods and diving onto the hood of our car); and a cheery
THE LORD LOVES YOU
banner when we got lost in a small town in the Catskills.
This
sign, though, sends a wave of nausea rolling over me. It could be that I’m carsick after all.

Or it’s just that I now understand that there’s no turning back.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FIR LAKE, NEW YORK
, the sign reads.
POPULATION 2,100

And beneath that, in smaller letters:

HAVE A FIR-TASTIC DAY!

Help. Me.

Michaela reaches over to take my hand. I know that she knows what I’m feeling, and I’m glad, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to bust out of the SUV and sprint back to civilization. I squeeze Michaela’s hand, hard, and she says, “Ouch.”

“Literally two thousand people?” I ask, my voice weak, as we drive into the open arms of Fir Lake. A big gust of wind shoots through the car, blowing my curls up into my face.

“Two thousand, one hundred and four, as of right now,” Michaela says, grinning at me, but I can’t return her smile. Two thousand people. LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, where, in a perfect world, I’d be starting my freshman year in two weeks,
has more students than that. My mind hurts trying to imagine a place that small. At the same time, I’m wondering as I stare out my window where those mysterious two thousand people
are
.

Only a smattering of other cars mosey along beside us, and off the road are rolling green pastures that I guess must be farmland. I spot a handful of lonely houses that look saggy and empty, their front porches crumbling. We drive by a tiny bakery called Bread and Roses, and a couple of farmstands with crooked, hand-painted signs reading,
FRESHEST CORN THIS SIDE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN! AND MILLIE’S MAPLE SYRUP SHACK
.

“Mmm, corn,” Dad sighs from the passenger seat. “And look, girls!” he calls as we pass another farm-stand with a striped awning. “They make their own cheese! We’ll have to buy some for dinner tonight. How awesome is that?”

Dad has, as far as I can remember, never used the word
awesome.
What’s happening to him? It’s like the fresh mountain air that’s seeping in through the window — which, by the way, is now making my arms break out in gooseflesh — has gone to his brain.

Here’s the thing about my dad: Before Michaela and I were born, before Mom even met him (they met at a performance of
The Nutcracker
, actually, when Mom sat behind him and kept asking him to move his big head), he was a super-successful writer. His first novel,
Moon Over Manhattan,
came out when he was twenty-five, sold a bazillion copies, and was made into
a movie (which Michaela and I aren’t allowed to see, because supposedly there are breasts in it).

Sometimes, Michaela and I would go into St. Mark’s Books, scan the shelves for Jeffrey Wilder, find
Moon Over Manhattan,
and stare at the black-and-white photograph on the back: our dad, young and thin, with his hair waving back off his forehead and his hands in the pockets of his corduroys. He did publish lots more books after that first one, but none of them were as famous, and in the last few years — ever since I turned eleven, really — he hasn’t written anything at all. He’s sort of moped around a lot and gotten into arguments with his agent on the phone. Mom says he’s “stuck” and tells Michaela and me that we shouldn’t ever bring up Dad’s stuck-ness to our friends,
or
to him. I guess Mom is now convinced that Fir Lake will magically do wonders for his inspiration.

I’m dubious.

“That
is
awesome,” Michaela says, her ponytail bouncing as she nods at Dad. I can’t tell if she’s just being a good daughter or if she really means it. I let go of her hand, suspicious.

“Jeffrey,” Mom snaps at Dad. “We need to be looking out for Honeycomb Drive.” She puts one cork-wedge espadrille on the brake, slowing down behind a car with a bumper sticker that reads,
MY FAMILY IS 100% ORGANIC. IS YOURS?

Horror hits me. “
Honeycomb Drive
?” I ask Michaela. I remember the rat on the subway, and think:
Bad Omen Number Two.
I can only imagine Trini, Jennifer, and Sofia’s reactions when we tell them our new address.
“What, are you guys living in a beehive?”… “Don’t get stung!”… “Wait, but, what’s the cross avenue?”

“It’s better than Bushberry Way,” Michaela says, pointing to a street sign. We’re out of farm territory now, passing tree-lined sidewalks and snug houses with dogs curled up on front porches. The afternoon is fading and long pink shadows stretch along the ground.

“Or Frog Croak Road,” Dad chimes in, gesturing out his open window.