Page 14 of Hypothetical Heart
“I won’t, I won’t.” I smile, almost laughing. “Am I on speaker?”
“Yeah, I’m making my bed.”
I laugh. “Why are you making your bed this late at night? You’re going to get in bed soon, anyway.”
“It’s not about the look of a made bed, Logan. It’s about the feeling of climbing into a made bed,” she counters.
“Look out your window,” I tell her.
When I see her blinds shift, I also hear her sigh through the phone as her eyes peer through the small opening. “You know this is creepy, right?”
She opens the blinds fully, revealing her entirely pink bedroom, her canopy bed perfectly made.
“Good thing your blinds were closed then.” She’s in her pajamas, a pink silk tank top and matching shorts. I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d looked out my window to see Winnie changing. My imagination has run rampant enough with thoughts of her for the entirety of my teenage years, and seeing her naked would only fuel the fire.
I hold up a finger, hanging up the phone before opening my window and climbing out onto the roof. If my mom finds out I did this, she will more than likely be pissed, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
Winnie grabs a blanket off her window seat, laying it out on her own roof so she can sit opposite me.
“How was ballet?” I ask.
Winnie does ballet both for the school and for a professional dance school. Madame Bacri, her teacher, instructs both of them, which is how Winnie got started with classical ballet back in elementary school.
This means she not only has practice as a class during the school day but practically every night afterward as well.
“It was fine. We’re trying to polish our routine for spring performance.” She looks down at her hands, a tell-tale sign that she doesn’t want to talk about it.
I don’t completely change the subject, but I redirect it to myself. “I wish I would have done a sport through high school.”A little late for that realization, Logan.
“What sport?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” When I think back to why I never playedfootball with Luke, or soccer, or basketball, I can never give myself a good enough answer other than I didn’t want to.
I have the athleticism for it. I’ve always been fond of staying in shape, and I very easily could have done it, but I simply didn’t have the interest.
Nothing drew me towards the long hours of practice when in reality, it all means nothing. Plus, my competitive drive would have killed my love for any sport. Every loss would have felt like a knife to my chest.
“The biggest thing that I’ve learned since starting ballet is that if you don’t like it, your body won’t do it,” Winnie replies. “There have been times where I wanted to do anything but ballet, and I was so close to quitting, and those were always the moments that my body gave out on me.”
Ballet has always taken a toll on Winnie. It’s a sport that requires a robust mentality, but a majority of the time, her love of ballet outweighed any doubts she had.
“It has taken a lot from me, physically and mentally. I will probably never look at my body normally, and there is a lot of joint pain that I’ll never live without, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.”
The thought of Winnie struggling with her body image makes me cringe. I’m just glad it’s dark enough that she can’t see it.
Our friend group has always kept a very close eye on her mental well-being. We are well aware of the psychological strain that a sport can have when it heavily focuses on your body image, and we never want it to negatively affect Winnie.
Somehow, though, I think that’s unavoidable.
“I’m not sure I could ever love something enough to let it destroy me,” I admit.
Maybe it makes me weaker than her, never wanting to love something damaging more than I love my well-being.
“That’s okay,” Winnie says. “I know that I shouldn’t love ballet, but it gives me a type of indulgent feeling, one that I’m not sure I could give up.”
“Because you love it?”
“Yeah.” She pauses for a moment. “I don’t always love it when I’m sore and my feet are bleeding, but I love that it’s something I’m good at. I like knowing that people in the ballet world think I’m talented and that acknowledgment of my hard work is the main reason I always go back.”
