Page 14 of The Unraveling

Well, when you put it that way. “I guess I do need to find a place. Maybe just for a while?”

“You could live here! I have another room, I never use it. It’s got the best light in the place, sometimes I just go in and lie on the floor. I’ll show you later. But tell me, when are you going back to ballet? Was it that stupid Jordan stopping you? Men can be such boors.”

“No—how did you know I—well, I want to go back to ballet. It’s on my list of things to figure out. Like, as soon as possible.”

“I could probably set up an audition? Not that you need me to. I googled you after the first class. Found you were a principal at NAB. Impresionante.”

“Wait,” I say, practically inhaling my sip of briny gin. “That’s so nice, but I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

I’m unseated by this offer. Ballerinas are a lot of things, but nice to each other isn’t famously one of them. There are so few spots to succeed, we can’t afford to boost each other up.

“Don’t be silly! You’re not asking me. I’m offering.”

“To be honest”—the truth spilling out of me after the draining evening and too much booze—“I find it kind of weird that you’d help me like that. Most ballerinas are not—”

She bursts into laughter. “I love how you say it how it is,” she says. “You can trust me or not. I understand. But listen, it’s because—well, you’ve seen me dance. I’m amazing!” She shrugs her shoulders happily. “I don’t need to be competitive. Helping a girl out who just got stomped on by some asshole is far more my style, cariño. I don’t like to push girls down.”

There’s something so charming about her that keeps the words from seeming like blatantly off-putting narcissism. There’s something about her that I do trust. But I’m still hesitant. I stall.

“Do you all dance at the Royal National Ballet?” I ask the rest of the girls.

“Claro, of course!” answers Arabella.

The girls have started snorting the lines, so they aren’t really listening.

“When I first saw you at open class,” I say, “I did think you were too good to just be freelancing. Why do you go? Aren’t you already busy enough?”

She lights a cigarette. These Europeans.

“I’ll tell you why,” she says. “It’s a deal I have with my donor. He lets me do whatever I want. Doesn’t matter what I eat or drink or who I fuck or don’t fuck. As long as I keep myself in pristine shape. Ariana Kingsley is the best retired ballerina and now the best coach there is, her little weekly class is a tradition in London. Any girl who wishes to advance further faster, she takes Ariana’s class. I just do it to…” She snaps her fingers, hunting for the lost word. “…supplement my other rehearsals so that everyone stays off my back.”

“Got it.”

“So what do you think?” she asks.

I think for a moment. I’m too lost to not accept help. “I would love to take you up on that offer. I should never have left New York. I should never have left ballet.”

“Oh, please, cariño, you did it for love! You did it because you are alive on Earth and you were having some free will! What is so wrong with that?” She shrugs and makes a face like this is the most obvious thing in the world.

And once she does, it makes me realize how badly I want to think like that. To stop putting the weight of the world behind every decision. To allow myself to be young, dumb, and free.

“Let me show you the room!” she says.

And then she jumps up like a flicked potato chip and yanks me up, too.

I down the rest of my drink and follow her.

I pass the bathroom, which has a pink-orange glow from the reflection of more candles bouncing off coral wallpaper. I see her room, and it’s every bit the gauzy, dimly lit mess I thought it might be.

She pushes open the door across the hallway, showing me the spare room, and I gasp when I see it. The warm streetlights outside pour through the rippling old glass windows, casting golden rectangles onto the dusty wood floors. The walls are covered in aesthetically peeling turquoise wallpaper.

“You just let this sit empty?”

“I never wanted to let someone I didn’t like come in to live here,” she says. “But I like you. And I think you need me. You can just pay me what you can afford. Then I’ll get you a new spot at my company and I’ll know you can afford the rent.”

I laugh out loud at the frankness in her words, but I shake my head a little.

She pushes me a little too hard with her cigarette-clamping fingers. “That’s what it is! I know what your problem is, cariño, you don’t let people take care of you! Of course! This is what your problem is, I see it all now. This Jordan, and—yes, I see it all very clearly—what?” she shrieks out into the hall after hearing her name called from the other room. “I’ll be right back, these fucking girls, you want to talk about needing…”

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