Page 112 of The Unraveling

That’s when the flashes begin. One after the other after the other.

A swarm of paparazzi.

Chapter Thirty

SEVEN YEARS AGO

Iwas just another teenage girl listening to Lana Del Rey, wishing life was different than it was.

I lay in the backyard on an old Barbie beach towel draped over a rubber-strapped pool chair. The sun was blazing and the bugs in the trees would have been deafening if I didn’t have in my AirPod knockoffs, blasting “Brooklyn Baby.” My skin pulsed with the heat, and whenever it got too hot and I needed to cool down, I took the hose from beside me and pulled the trigger on the nozzle, letting a fine mist of water fall over me.

Poor-girl pool party.

I’d been out there every day since school ended. I usually did this during the summer, but that summer was different. It was different because usually I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew that I was whiling away the days until the end of August, when school started back up. But I’d graduated in May, and now I had no idea about my life.

In my mind, I was a ballerina. In practice, I was a ballerina. I had been dancing since I was a kid. I had taken every opportunity I had ever been given. I had succeeded as much as a girl can when she comes from Tristesse, Louisiana. And everything hinged on the audition I’d had for the North American Ballet in April. I had thought I’d have heard by mid-July, but I still hadn’t, and it was driving me crazy.

The platonic ideal of an American summer after graduating from high school was usually that the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old had the summer of their life with their friends. They all wore sweatshirts with their future college scrawled across the chest. They made promises about forever that they could never keep. They put their arms around each other’s shoulders and swayed back and forth to songs that felt like their story and they drank cheap beer at a bonfire or keg party or something cliché like that.

They had a summer of freedom between high school and college, before real life started to slowly let them in.

I knew that that was the graduation story sold to me by American movies, especially the teen movies of the nineties that I had watched on loop ever since I discovered them. I knew it wasn’t real real. But also, I knew that for some people out there, it was.

Just not around there. Not in Tristesse.

The people I graduated with, it didn’t look like that.

My closest friend, Sadie, had a week after graduation where she got to relax and have a vacation with her family where they went to a beachside town in Texas. But when she got home, she had to start working full-time at her dad’s restaurant, which he opened after he left his Hollywood career—after all, one day it’d be hers. She’d heard it her whole life.

Everyone else I knew had a similar story. Sure, a few people went off to school, the majority of them going to Louisiana State University, a few others going somewhere further. But most people I knew started life in Tristesse the way they always knew they would. They picked up a job at the grocery store or started bookkeeping at the local HVAC place. Like, four girls in my graduating class were getting their cosmetology licenses to work at the local hair salons.

No one around me had dreams. No one really talked about getting out of there. They talked about getting married, having babies, starting the whole ugly cycle all over again so that in eighteen years, their own kid graduated from high school only to keep propagating the species.

It freaked me out. I couldn’t even think like that. I never had. I always knew I was destined for more.

Destined for greatness.

Not that I wasn’t willing to work for it. For fuck’s sake, I’d spent my entire life so far training for life onstage. Counting the days, even though I didn’t know the end date. My entire life hinged on a success that came to so, so few people in a generation.

With every passing day of hearing nothing from the company I’d auditioned for, my fear grew. I distracted myself by spending hours and hours a day at the ballet studio. Trying not to regret turning down the offer at the regional ballet company. But I was too driven to settle there. I’d had a part-time job all year to save up for my hopeful move to New York. It was the next thing to happen to me, I just knew it.

At first, I was just dreaming. Happily anticipating the yes I knew I had to receive. It was how I had always looked at my future. Even when I was thirteen years old, I used to fall asleep thinking of it. Thinking of how it would feel to be a famous ballerina. To have my whole job be dance.

If I was accepted by the North American Ballet, then I’d get to move to New York City. I’d get to be around other dancers full-time. My life would be hard, but in the way I was willing to bear. In the way I was eager to be strong and resilient.

But after the first week, then the second, then the third week of hearing absolutely nothing, my anticipation turned to dread. I could not hear no. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay in Tristesse, give up my dream, work at the restaurant with Sadie, and tell my sticky kids one day that I used to be a ballerina and hear them say they couldn’t believe it as they begged for another Lego set from the Costco we’d driven an hour to get to.

Kill me. For real. I could never.

If they weren’t going to accept me, I really had no idea what the hell I would do. I couldn’t stop dancing. I couldn’t stay there. But I also had no money. And how many people like me had gotten a job—just for a while—to save up to get out of their hometown and then, somehow, just gotten stuck?

Despite the heat, chills ran through me.

I thought I heard the phone ring inside and took out one of my not-AirPods to sit up and see if I was imagining it.

No, it was definitely ringing.

I jumped up to run inside to go answer it, but then saw through the window that my mom had already picked up.

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