Brandy Colbert - Pointe

She looks around vaguely, but she’s obviously looking for Hosea. I don’t take the bait. Instead, I take my bag from her and I say, “Thanks, Ruthie,” and when she offers me a ride I say yes right away.

Ruthie lives in River Forest, the next town over from Ashland Hills, so I’m not that far out of her way. Besides, the walk to the station would be brutal—I’ve only been outside for a few minutes and my toes are already going numb.

Ruthie and I start walking across the lot and down the street toward her car. I expect the first question out of her mouth to be about Hosea, but she surprises me when she says, “Do you ever think about giving up on this? All of it?”

I stare at her in stunned silence for a second. “Ballet?”

“Well, I don’t mean soccer.” Ruthie retrieves a pair of red wool gloves from her coat. “Yes, ballet. The summer intensives, the hours in the studio . . . What would you do if you didn’t dance?”

I give her a funny look. “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Me either.” Ruthie clicks the remote on her car and we get in after it beeps at us. Then she turns on the heater and buckles her seat belt. “Is that weird? That we don’t know how to do anything else?”

I shrug, reach behind me to pull my own seat belt across my chest. “I don’t think so.”

“It just seems like everyone else has been involved in, like, a million things since we were kids,” she says, waving her hands in front of the vents as she waits for the car to warm up. “Sports and music and clubs.”

“Yeah, but they always end up dropping them to focus on something,” I say. “We just knew what we wanted to do a long time ago.”

“But what if we were meant to do something else? We’ll never know.” She pauses, runs a hand through her golden curls as she looks at me. “Don’t you ever wonder if you should have been . . . I don’t know, a gymnast or a volleyball player or something?”

“Is this about summer intensives?” I look at the key chain dangling from Ruthie’s rearview mirror. A single, miniature satin pointe shoe, as perfectly sculpted as the ones we wear in class.

Ruthie checks her mirrors, turns on her lights, and pulls out of the metered space on the street. “No. I don’t know. I want it. I really do. But what if I fail? Or what if I make it and I’m the worst one in my program? Everyone will think it’s a pity spot and no one will ever take me seriously.”

“Ruthie.” I roll my eyes. “You’d never be a pity spot. I don’t even think they give out pity spots. Tons of people audition every year. They don’t have the room.”

“I’m not sure how much that means, coming from the teacher’s pet.”

I say nothing and she’s silent for a while. Pulling her curls out in a straight line and letting them spring back to her head. Flipping through songs on the radio for so long I want to slap her hand away from the dial. I’ve started to think she’s forgotten I’m in the car at all when she says, “At least ballet will get me out of this place. I don’t care if I have to dance for a company in the fucking Appalachian Mountains. I’m leaving.”

“What happened now?”

“Nothing new,” she sighs. “I’m just tired of always being on everyone’s bad side. I need a fresh start.”

“Just one more year of high school,” I say. “Unless you make it into preprofessional and then you can leave even sooner.”

“But what if I don’t?” Ruthie’s eyes are on the road ahead, but I can see the fear behind them and the thought of Ruthie being scared scares me. I didn’t think she was afraid of anyone or anything in the world. “What if I don’t get in anywhere? Not even a summer program? Then what? I stick around here and go to DePaul and meet even more people I hate? I can’t do that, Cartwright. I can’t.”

“I’m scared, too.” I flick my index finger against the pointe shoe hanging from the mirror, watch it bob back and forth as we travel along the dark expressway. “Really scared.”

I catch a glimpse of her narrowed blue eyes as she glances at me. “Of what?”

“Everything you just said. And . . . making the wrong decisions. Fucking everything up.”

I pinch myself. Above the elbow this time. Hard. My mouth is moving faster than my brain.

“Making the wrong decisions. Hello, vague city. Aren’t we all afraid of that?”

I ignore her smirk and ask, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

I slide my hand up my throat to make sure I’m the one talking. Tiny vibrations pulse beneath my fingertips, so I guess it is me. Ruthie is saying something back, so it had to be me.

“If this is a blackmail scheme, Cartwright, you’re being pretty transparent right now.” She moves to turn down the heat and I wish she could also turn back this conversation so I never asked that question.

“I wouldn’t do that.” I look at a champagne-colored mini-

van in the lane next to me on the expressway. The interior is lit up by a rectangle hanging between the front and back seats. A DVD player, but I can’t tell what it’s playing or who’s watching. “I just want to know. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Ruthie tilts her head to the side, sucks in her bottom lip, and pushes it back out. “If you tell anyone this, I will murder you. That’s not a figure of speech. I will track you down wherever you’re dancing and pretend to care how you’re doing, but I’ll really be there to poison you.”

“Poisoning?” That seems tame for Ruthie.

“Let’s just pretend the anger management sessions will be working by then.” She clears her throat. “But I’m serious, Cartwright—”

I twist my body in the seat so I can face her. “I’m not going to tell anyone, okay?”

She speaks very, very slowly, so I can’t miss a word even if I tried. “In sixth grade, I got in a fight with Skye Richardson. It was bad. She pulled out a chunk of my hair, and I bit her arm so hard, it broke the skin.”

I shudder.

“My parents grounded me, but it was right before school let out, so part of my punishment was that I couldn’t go to summer camp that year.” She throws me a glance. “Look, I know a lot of people think camp is lame, but I was twelve and I really liked it. I felt like the people who came back every year . . . they were the people who really got me, you know? And I wouldn’t be able to see them for another twelve months because of my parents. It’s not like they would have let me fly across the country to visit.”

I can’t imagine Ruthie at summer camp, let alone enjoying it and making friends. She barely keeps it together at the studio.

“It was my mom, mostly. I know my dad would have given in, but she was really pissed.” Ruthie sighs. “They were calling me Cannibal Girl at school and it got back to her and . . . there’s one thing you need to know about my mom: she has bipolar disorder.”

Oh, shit. I have a bad feeling I know where this is going and Ruthie must sense it, too, because she pauses before she says the next part.

“She was really open about me knowing, though. They told me when I was little. I wanted to be helpful, so she made up this routine where she’d start the coffee in the morning and I’d get her pills from the bathroom. Set them next to her mug. It’s just what we did and she always trusted me and . . . I started messing with her pills. I switched them out.” Ruthie pauses again, never takes her eyes off the road. “I was so mad at her. I’d actually watch her take the medicine, knowing it was the wrong pill, and I didn’t feel a thing. It’s like I was in a fog.”

She stops for a minute and I want to ask her what happened next, but I don’t dare speak before she does. She’s going to finish. Ruthie is nothing if not thorough.