Various Positions (27 page)

“Chantal’s been admitted into the eating disorder clinic here. She’s quite sick, I’m afraid.”

I don’t know what to say. I fumble with the zipper of my ballet bag, but my fingers have gone clumsy. I mime a pen at Sixty and she pulls one out of the front pocket of her knapsack. She takes off her glove and offers me her palm. I bring the nib to the fleshiest part so that I don’t hurt her and take down the room number. I thank Chantal’s mother and hang up.

Sixty looks at her hand. “What’s that?”

“She’s in the hospital.”

Sixty’s eyes widen. “Let’s go.” She hooks her arm through mine and pulls me in the direction of Church Street.

We walk up Church, retracing the steps I’d taken only half an hour earlier on my way to school. I remember the feeling I’d had then, cold head and empty stomach, like the blood wouldn’t flow. I hadn’t eaten dinner or breakfast and my sleep had been a membrane of worry. I could only think of Roderick, of what I was going to do.

Now, if it’s possible, I feel worse. The squares of sidewalk are sinister. I see splotches of ancient gum like malignant moles and the background grayness is flat and mean. Sixty is speaking to me but my stomach twists. How sick could Chantal be? How angry is Roderick? I imagine the phone ringing in my kitchen. My mom is at the table, elbows planted on either side of the newspaper, but she gets up, drifts sleepily to the telephone nook. Roderick introduces himself and tells her I’ve done something horrible. She must come down to the academy at once. I see a pale fear wash over her expression, the baby quiver of her bottom lip. I scan the traffic for my mom’s white Toyota. It’s not in front of us so I stop dead in my tracks and turn around. It’s only a little after nine and the cars are bumper to bumper. Then I see it, the back of it, hugging the curb to turn right onto Alexander Street.

“What are you doing?” Sixty asks.

I drop my ballet bag and run toward the car. I’ll stop my mom before she gets to the academy. I catch a clear glimpse of the car’s rear just as it completes the turn and read the license plate. It’s all wrong. I stop, breathless. My pulse unwinds a notch. My eyes are hot and damp.

“Hey.” Sixty has picked up my ballet bag and met up with me. She clocks my tears but doesn’t question them, helps hoist the knapsack onto my back. She squeezes my hand. We resume our walk up Church Street.

We take the subway all the way to the hospital district at Queen’s Park. Sixty talks and I drift in and out of listening, like she’s a movie I’m not enjoying. My head feels heavy on the inside, a shimmering thickness I can’t clear. I look at the faces in front of me and only after several minutes do I realize I’m looking without seeing, that one is a woman with heavy eyeliner, one an old man with a cane. I try to compensate by focusing intently on the man’s features, noticing the fleshiness of his nose, the way his glasses magnify his eyes. But my brain swims elsewhere. Roderick’s eyes. I had waited in his office for an hour, thinking, or just hoping, he might return. I’d picked up his pen and poked it against his desk, rotated it from top to bottom, poked it against the desk again. I had opened his desk drawer and checked on my underwear. I had stared at the doorway till my heart felt like it was falling and my eyelids felt coated in lead.

Sixty pulls me up an escalator and onto the street. She tolerates my silence, probably thinks she understands it. We walk into the lobby of the hospital. Everything has the industrial sheen of the newly renovated, sharp edges and uncluttered spaces, pearly floors illuminated by skylights. We find the elevators and go up to the eighth floor. The nursing station is empty. We walk past it and turn down the first hallway, following the numbers to Chantal’s room. Sixty knocks on Chantal’s door and a voice tells us to come in.

We step into pale green curtains, turn right to avoid them. A woman is sitting at the far end of the room and she motions us toward her. I catch a glimpse of a sleeping girl as we pass between the wall and the drapes. She is so small. The lump of her body ends only a meter from her head and in the crook of her arm lies a doll with yellow hair and retractable eyelids. The girl’s head lolls sideways onto the pillow and I see the tube branching up into her nostrils, a mustache of glass. It scares me. What if Chantal has tubes too?

But Chantal is sitting upright. She greets Sixty and me with something close to a smile and her face has the look it normally does, like she’s hiding a rare secret. She doesn’t have much in the way of cheeks left; they sink into the cavities of her skull and her eyes glide above the way ice cream floats in soft drinks. Her arms are even stranger, tiny cylinders that look painted with blue threads. Sixty shoves into me intentionally, waits to meet my gaze. She’s trying to tell me she’s grossed out. I turn back to Chantal and wait to be appalled by the look of her. I scan her up and down and try to muster some disgust but instead have a thought that surprises me: Chantal doesn’t look that terrible. She’s underweight, sure, but when I picture her before, the bulge of tummy in her bodysuit, I realize something I can never tell anyone. She looks more like a ballerina now.

There’s an open book in her lap that she lifts from the spine to show me. It’s a collection of photos from the New York City Ballet.

“I rented movies, bought a convenience store out of magazines.” Her mom gestures to a pile of them on the windowsill. “But it’s got to be ballet.”

I pretend to find this amusing and move to the top of the bed, sit down beside Chantal. I look over at the DVDs. They’re all blockbuster stuff and the magazines are what I expected,
Seventeen
,
Cosmo Girl
, and
Teen Vogue.
I look down at the black-and-white image of a dancer in a
penchée
, her legs splitting into a perfect vertical line, and want to laugh at how clueless her mom is. Sixty stands beside the bed, fiddles with the movable table.

“Why don’t you tell your friends about how well your treatment’s going?”

“It’s going well,” Chantal says.

“The doctors think she’ll be better soon,” her mom adds.

Chantal catches my eye like she’s trying to tell me something. “
Mostly
better,” she corrects.

I look over at her mom, worried that she’s seen this. But her mom is straightening a vase of flowers under the TV.

“I’m going to pop downstairs for a moment. Do you girls want anything from the cafeteria?”

We say no thanks and Chantal’s mom grabs a tan-colored purse from the armchair beside her. I feel very awkward as soon as she’s left the room. Chantal keeps shooting looks at me and it feels like I’m dodging bullets. But Sixty isn’t paying attention. Her eyes move over Chantal’s body like she can’t make sense of it, doesn’t want to believe it’s real, the way a kid looks at a dead cat by the side of the road.

“Why did you do this to yourself?” Her voice is strange to me, whispery.

“Do what?” Chantal says.

“This.”
Sixty gestures to Chantal’s body and her face gets choked with feeling.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You
did
.” Sixty shakes her head and there’s so much swirling in her eyes that I wonder if she’ll cry. “It’s not right. It’s terrible.”

“It’s no big deal,” Chantal says. “Right, Georgia?”

They both look at me now. I’ve never seen Sixty like this before, the panicked muddle of her face. I warn Chantal with my eyes, hope to god she’ll keep her mouth shut.

“She’ll get better,” I tell Sixty. “That’s why she’s here.”

Chantal blinks then gives me that look again, like we share a thousand terrible truths. I’m so relieved when her mom comes back into the room. She thanks us for coming and I hug Chantal to say goodbye. Her arms stay clasped around me longer than I want them to and I even jostle my shoulders a bit, try to shrug off her bones. I check to make sure Sixty hasn’t noticed, but her eyes are glued to the twiglike shapes under the blanket, what’s left of Chantal’s legs.

Outside the hospital on University Avenue, the sun makes gleaming marble of the statue in the middle of the road while cars curve around either side of it like they’re magnetically repelled. I stare at it, breathe in heaps of cool air. I want to find the exact spot where light waves start distorting the statue’s appearance, infecting the matte stone with particles that twinkle. Sixty is saying a lot of stuff about Chantal that I don’t want to hear.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I don’t feel well.”

The instant I say this, I feel worse. The gleaming particles fill my vision and I feel the blood leave my head. I hunch over football-style, hands on my thighs.

“Georgia?” Sixty’s hand is on my back, her voice distressed. “What’s wrong?”

For a second, I can’t answer. The particles swirl in mangled figure eights. I feel doomed to watch them or pass out. I close my eyes. Slowly, I straighten myself up, take a minute to let the air settle in my lungs. I tell Sixty I feel well enough to walk but that I want to go home. She takes my arm on our way to the subway, probably thinks I’m just upset about Chantal too.

When I get home, my mom is sitting at the kitchen table. There’s an open book in front of her but she seems to be reading the silt in her coffee mug instead, staring into it as if it might tell the future. She looks up at me without surprise.

“Your school just called me.”

Blood saps from my face. “Who?”

“One of the secretaries. Didn’t catch her name.” She takes a sip of coffee and then looks back into the mug as though the image might have changed.

I move to the door that leads to the backyard, face the glass, and wait. If it’s coming, it’s coming now. I’m anticipating the awkward way she’ll bang her mug on the table, tell me we need to talk. What word will define what I’ve done?

“Are you friends with her?”

“Who?”

“This poor girl in your class.”

I’ve been holding my breath. I realize this as the air leaves me in a warm pant. I turn around. My mom’s eyes shine with worry.

“It sounds like your teacher was involved in it.” She shakes her head. “Terrible.”

I mutter a sound of agreement.

“You don’t worry about your weight, do you?”

The concern on her face is touching and ridiculous simultaneously. If only my weight were my problem. I shake my head.

“The secretary said your academics resume tomorrow,” she adds. “But ballet is canceled all week.”

I go up to my room and sit on my bed. I focus on the actual sitting, my folded legs in front of me, because that’s all I can do. When I stop concentrating on my body I see Roderick. It’s Friday night and he’s driving home in a panic. What is he thinking? I try to read his feelings on the image of his face. Is he mad or sorry or disgusted or upset? Each possibility scares me more than the one before and then they’re multiplying out of control. I flip onto my stomach and try to make it stop. I push my fist into the tender spot between my ribs. Something is wrong with me. I sit up again and think of my spine, my legs, but the nausea is back. I grab for the wastepaper basket and open my mouth to vomit. But the feeling has moved to my heart. It’s racing so fast it hurts. If it gets any worse, my body won’t handle it, can’t handle it.
Stop
, I whisper,
stop, stop, stop, stop, stop
. I want to cry but my eyes feel hard as golf balls. I put my head on the pillow and watch the ceiling. I try to breathe and breathe and breathe.

I open my eyes to sunlight. For a moment I think it’s morning, but I turn on my side and see the steely pallor of late afternoon. I look down at my clock radio; it’s just after five. Above the radio sits a glass of water, and I have a dim memory of my mom’s hand on my forehead, her slipping in to check on me. I lift the phone off my bedside table and dial.

“Hello?”

“Isabel?”

“Hi, George. What’s up?”

The sweetness of Isabel’s voice, the familiarity, is too nice. I start to cry.

“George? What’s wrong?”

I don’t say anything. I can’t.

“Georgia?”

“Something’s wrong,” I manage.

“I can hear that,” she chuckles. “Tell me.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh?”

“I think something’s really wrong with me right now.”

“What? What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Well. I think you can. I think that’s why you called.”

“I … uh … I did something … I did something really bad.”

“Okay. That’s okay. You can tell me.”

“Ballet’s canceled all week.”

“What happened?”

I try to control my sobs. “I … I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Canceled it.”

There’s a single, sharp laugh. “You canceled your ballet classes, George?”

“No.” I say it slowly. “I made them—I
caused
them to be canceled.”

Isabel pauses. “How did you do that?”

“I … I went to his office.”

“Whose office?”

My molars are grinding into each other. I swallow hard. “Roderick’s.”

“Okay. Your teacher.” She pauses. “Yeah?”

“You don’t understand. We … there’s something with us. Something between us.”

“I don’t understand.” Her tone is still gentle, but I hear a difference this time, a twinge of concern.

“We … I mean … it’s been building up forever.”

“What has?”

“Something happened with us. In his office.”

“What happened in his office, Georgia?”

“Something. I did something.”

“Georgia, I think you better tell me what’s going on.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Right now.”

I’m crying again. “You can’t tell Dad. Or anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Like really promise for sure?”

“Georgia. This is serious. Take a deep breath and tell me exactly what happened.”

“I … I kissed him.”

“What?”

“But it didn’t go right.”

“What do you mean you
kissed
him? Like on the mouth?”

I sniff hard. “Yeah. I thought he wanted to.”

“Oh my god,” she mutters. “Why did you think that?”

“Because, it’s hard to explain. I thought he’d done things before.”