Page 61 of The Perfect Mistake

“Elena,” he whines, sounding like he’s been gravely injured.

“I need it more than you,” she says. She leans back in her chair and looks at me. She has my dad’s eyes, almond-shaped and more green than brown. “How did you do this? Every night for years?”

“Performing?”

“Yes,” she says. “I know my set inside and out, and I still feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

I smile at her. “You do it anyway… you live with the feeling because there’s nothing else you’d rather do than perform. Even if it means getting stage-fright.”

“You’re crazy.”

“We’ve always known that, though,” Seb says with a crooked smile. “The only person I know whose parents tried to get her to sleep in when you insisted on seven in the morning workouts.”

“On Saturdays,” Ellie says. “God, you make it easy to hate you.”

That makes me laugh. I’ve missed hanging out with them both, and the gentle—and sometimes not so gentle—ribbing they always know how to deliver. “You’re going to do great,” I say. “And if you don’t… you’ll survive that, too. It’s okay to fail sometimes.”

“You do hear the irony, right?” Ellie asks, her smile widening. In moments like this, she and Seb look so similar, even though they’re different in almost every other way. “You have never been okay with failure.”

I raise my glass. “Maybe I’m okay with learning.”

“Maybe you’re okay with giving advice you can’t follow,” she says, but she touches Seb’s empty beer glass to mine. There’s only a soft bite to her words, and if anyone knows me, it’s the two of them. They’ve seen the sweat, blood, and tears I poured into ballet.

The sheer number of performances they’ve sat through. I owe Elena a lifetime supply of butt-in-the-seats if she continues pursuing her dream of comedy.

She goes on after the open mic session. Seb moves his chair closer to mine and we watch with bated breath as Elena comes out on stage.

She looks effortlessly cool, my baby sister. Baggy cargo pants and a tight T-shirt, a nod to the androgynous fashion of the nineties that’s so popular now. She’s never followed the norm. Gone against everything our parents once planned for us when we were three little children, blank pages ready to be filled. Our father doesn’t understand her passion for comedy rather than college, but not once has Elena let that faze her.

Beside me, Sebastian leans in closer. “Ten bucks she brings the house down.”

“Twenty bucks she brings down the entire block,” I say.

She does.

She’s disarmingly funny, in the way that creeps up on you. Sarcastic, and a bit dry and earnest, and she charms the motley crew of people in the club. She jokes about herself, about dating as a queer young woman in New York, and about the norms she loves to challenge. By the end, she gets a roaring applause and wolf whistles from someone in the back.

“I wish Mom and Dad could see this,” I whisper to Seb. They’re mildly supportive, but it’s in a questioning, Are you really sure? kind of way. I’m convinced they both think it’s a phase.

“Elena probably doesn’t,” he murmurs back, “considering that joke about vibrators.”

I chuckle. “Good point.”

I stay longer than I would’ve in the past. Both my siblings seem delighted when I drink my third beer.

“Who are you,” Seb asks at one point, his eyes alight with humor, “and what have you done with our big sister?”

I feel warm and happy, and I’ve missed them. Missed us hanging out together. As adults. When did they become these people? Still young adults, but grown. Not teenagers anymore.

I’ve always known I missed out on things while in pursuit of my own dream. The price had felt worth it to me, week after week, year after year. But maybe I’ve never realized just how steep it was.

“She’s on sabbatical,” I say, and hold up my beer glass in a toast. “Let’s see if she ever returns.”

It’s late when we leave the comedy club. I grab a taxi, just as Alec instructed me to. Ordered. He is so bossy. I’d always known that, and not just from Connie’s descriptions. Every interaction with him I’ve ever had, made that perfectly clear. It wafted off him, the scent of power and control. I wonder how many employees are directly under him.

Of which I’m one.

The city passes by outside the car’s window, a blur of lights, partygoers, and closed shops. Heading back toward the Upper East Side, the area of New York that has, somehow, in some way, become my home.

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