Page 12 of Barre Fight
At the time, she remembered now, she’d been proud of this review. Alan had liked it; he’d said it had “teeth.” She’d been new to her job and had been trying to find a distinctive voice, a clear point of view, that would make readers enjoy her reviews and trust her insights. Make them want to read more from her. Ivy re-read the story, trying to imagine how she’d feel if someone had written it about her. That was something she’d never done before—Alan had always told her that her job was to review the performances without worrying about the performers. He liked teeth, and she wasn’t supposed to think about who they’d cut. And, well, maybe her bite had been a little too sharp here.
Now it wasn’t hunger making her stomach roil, it was regret. Guilt. No wonder Justin had it in for her. She kind of deserved it.A noble tradition, her opa had called journalism. Was this review noble? Was singling out a dancer, and then singling out parts of his body, a noble thing to do?
Ivy chewed on her bottom lip, trying to argue the case from the other side. Journalism was a business, as well as a public service. She had a responsibility to make the arts engaging, and if that sometimes meant stoking a little controversy, or playing on people’s natural interest in conflict, well, so be it. But, she thought, calling him vapid and empty wasn’t exactly noble.
Ivy closed the browser tab and sighed into the empty living room, letting the sigh turn into a hungry, cranky groan. She had to fix this. If Justin didn’t trust her, he wouldn’t work with her, and if he didn’t work with her, she was going to be out of a job—yet again. She had a lot of complicated feelings about leaving journalism, but she wasn’t 17 anymore, and she couldn’t afford to spend another six months wallowing and floundering. Her opa was gone, and if she told Peter no, Opa wasn’t going to pick up the phone and call him back. She had to take the chance that was being offered to her and make the most of it.
Pushing herself off the couch, she trudged to the kitchen and opened the fridge, pulling out ingredients for a quick and easy pasta. By the time she was dumping spaghetti into the boiling water, she knew what she had to do.
The next day, Ivy waited at the door to Studio B a few minutes before morning class let out and watched through the glass panel next to the door as the dancers worked across the floor in groups of four. It was company day, the one day a week when a dancer taught class instead of a member of the artistic class. Ivy had written a story about the practice a few years ago; it was Peter’s way of letting the dancers build trust and camaraderie, while letting any dancer who was interested in leadership experiment with being at the front of the room and in charge. Heather Hays had told her that she especially looked forward to company day, because the dancers could take more risks—and have more fun—when they were being led by a peer. Alice Ho was known as an especially tough teacher who delighted in setting the most intricate petit allegro combinations she could dream up, and then prompting the accompanist to play ever faster until her fellow dancers were grimacing, laughing, and jumping all at once.
The dancer at the front of the room today was a woman Ivy thought was in the corps de ballet; she looked like she couldn’tbe much older than twenty. But she stood at the front of the room, feet planted wide and one hand on her hip, watching hawk-like as a group of dancers swept across the floor in a grand allegro combination. Through the glass, Ivy watched the woman shout encouragement and corrections, gesturing gracefully to demonstrate the angle at which she wanted the dancers to hold their shoulders as they landed one of the jumps. At the back of the studio, the next group was preparing to take their turn; a woman and three men, one of whom, Ivy saw with a slight jolt in her lower stomach, was Justin.
She watched as he made his way through the combination, his long legs eating up the floor as he leapt high and landed each jump in a deep, controlled plié. His legs looked even longer than they were thanks to those feet—God, they really were something. Truly remarkable. The final element of the combination was a series of pirouettes, which the dancer-teacher at the front of the room seemed to have left up to the dancers to pick for themselves. When Justin’s group had zig-zagged the width of the studio twice, they stopped near one corner and set up for their turns. The woman did a series of fouettés into triple pirouettes, while the men wound up into turns à la seconde, two of them grinning as they spun and spun, apparently competing to see who could do the most turns without falling out.
Justin’s face was neutral as he spotted his own reflection in the mirror. Ivy watched, admiration and envy blooming in her chest as he completed turn after turn, his hip stacked precisely over his working leg, his free leg extended at a ninety-degree angle she could have measured with a protractor, and his arms floating into a wide and rounded high fifth every few rotations. And that working foot, pointed so crisply into a steep, impeccable arch. She’d been wrong to call his technique merely proficient, she realized. This wasn’t proficiency, it was damn nearperfection.
When class ended and a line of sweaty, pink-faced dancers started to straggle out of the studio, Ivy waited, standing up a little straighter when she saw Justin coming. He was chatting jovially with one of the guys from his grand allegro group, but his face turned stony the moment he caught sight of her at the door. She tipped her head and raised a hand in greeting, but he ignored her, his gaze sliding off her face. When he drew level with her, he didn’t stop and didn’t say a word. He walked right past her and headed for the locker rooms.
So she’d be chasing him in heels again, then. She sighed and hurried along behind him, but he was taller and faster and with just a few strides he’d put ten feet of distance between them. But she had something she needed to tell him.
“I’m sorry about that review,” she called down the hallway.
Slowly, he turned to face her, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright in the dimly lit hallway. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“You are, are you?” His voice was low, his tone unforgiving. Ivy swallowed and ventured a step towards him.
“Yes. Clearly it upset you, and I’m sorry your feelings were hurt.” She looked up at him. He wasn’t the tallest man in the company, a few inches shy of six feet, but he seemed to tower over her in that moment.
“That’s not a real apology.”
Ivy frowned. “Yes, it is. I’m very sorry you didn’t like what I wrote.”
“Oh, you’reverysorry? Are you very sorry for calling mefreakish?” The word sounded damning in his mouth, and Ivy’s stomach twisted with guilt.
“I—”
“Are you sorry that the first review my mum ever read of mewas a pan?”
“Listen—” Ivy looked down at her notebook, then looked past it to the floor.
“Are you sorry that my childhood dance teacher back home, who gave me free lessons because of my freakish feet, read it and called me in tears?”
Ivy winced. He sounded absolutely furious, but she could hear the hurt under the rage.
She raised her head but couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “I can imagine how hard that must have been,” she said to his collarbone.
Justin shook his head. “Like I said, that’s not a real apology.”
Ivy sighed and lifted her chin, forcing herself to look him in the eye. “I was just doing my job, okay?”
“Well, it’s not your job anymore, is it?”
She sucked in a breath, surprised at how much his words hurt. He was right. She didn’t write ballet reviews anymore, because she wasn’t a journalist anymore. She stared down at the thick braided leather straps of her shoes. They were her favorite pair, and she’d worn them today for an extra shot of confidence and luck.
Ivy took a deep breath, waiting for the sting to dissipate. She wasn’t an arts journalist anymore, but she did have a job to do. And she couldn’t do it if the man in front of her didn’t cooperate.
