Page 36 of Barre Fight
“I don’t, I was hoping it would help me fall asleep.”
“And did it work?”
“Well, no, because the Nazis showed up, and things got pretty tense.”
“Nazis’ll do that,” Ivy allowed. They reached the lifts, and this time she made sure to press the button right away.
“I haven’t seen that movie since I was really little,” Justin said with another yawn, as they traveled down to the lobby. “I think I don’t really get musicals, though.”
“What don’t you get?” Ivy frowned.
“The bit where they burst into song and dance instead of just saying things,” Justin said, as though it should have been obvious.
Ivy cocked her head. “You’re a professional dancer. You don’t understand the bits where people dance their feelings?”
“That’s different,” he frowned. They stepped out of the lift and into the bustling lobby, and Ivy checked the map on her phone before wrapping Em's scarf tightly around her neck. A minute later, she stepped out of the hotel and there she was, on the street in New York City in the dim morning sun, for the first time in her life. She would not sing “New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town,” she would not. Not out loud, anyway.
“Fuck,” Justin breathed, as the frigid winter air bit into their uncovered faces. “Might not need that coffee after all.”
“Well, I do,” Ivy said, leading him up the street, her hands shoved in her pockets. “I found a place up the street that’s meant to have the third best bagels in the city.”
“Whatever you say, Kurt.”
“That’s going to stick, isn’t it?”
“I’d say there’s a good chance, Kurt.”
“Now who’s incorrigible?” she retorted, dodging an oncoming pedestrian. Right, right. They walked on the right here. “And if I’m Kurt, who does that make you?”
Justin didn’t miss a beat. “I’m Liesl,” he said. “I’m sixteen years old and Idon’tneed a governess.”
Ivy laughed despite herself. “Don’t you, though?”
“Certainly not one who plays guitar and makes clothing out of curtains.”
“Just one who knows where to find the third best bagels in the city?” Ivy said, pointing at a shop front half a block ahead.
“As long as this place has heat, I don’t care what the bagels are like,” Justin grumbled, but he followed her inside.
They ate their bagels at a counter looking out onto thestreet, and Ivy couldn’t stop watching the people. Construction workers and suits and school kids and artfully tousled creative types, all of them New Yorkers, all of them walking past her with purpose, hurrying to wherever it was they needed to. Even the dogs seemed to move quicker here, like they had somewhere important and interesting to be. Ivy leaned forward on the counter and followed a laughing clutch of high school age girls with her eyes, watching as they disappeared down into the subway, brushing shoulders with the people coming up the stairs and spilling onto the street.
“What are you looking at?” Justin asked beside her.
“All of it,” Ivy smiled, not taking her eyes off the street. “It’s incredible. I love it already. Don’t you love it?”
“Not really. What’s to love? It’s crowded and expensive, and fucking freezing by the way. And too noisy to think straight, and there’s nowhere to go to escape it all.”
“I think it’s perfect,” Ivy sighed, popping the last bite of her bagel into her mouth. She wiped her hands and stood, then smiled at him. “On to our next stop, Liesl.”
As she led him out of the shop and back into the biting cold, she was sure she heard him mutter something that sounded likethat’s going to stick, isn’t it?
Justin strode into company class, very nearly late. After the bagel shop, Ivy had dragged him along several long crosstown blocks until they’d reached Central Park. It was drab and leafless, but she’d waxed rhapsodic about it anyway, about how it looked just as she’d imagined it. At one point, a pair of fellow tourists had stopped them and asked if they knew how to get to Battery Park, and Ivy had blurted out, “the subway’s up and the Battery’s down!” The tourists—German, Justin thought—hadlooked at her like they had questions about her sanity, and she’d tucked her hair behind one ear and said, “I mean, I think it’s downtown. South.”
She’d insisted on wandering for so long around the park that he had to rush back to the hotel, frozen to the bone, shove all his stuff in his dance bag, and half-jog down to the theater to make it in time.
When they’d arrived at 64th Street, she’d stopped dead, staring at the soaring white-pillared buildings that flanked the wide plaza on three sides. Justin headed for what he knew was the stage door of New York Ballet’s theater, down a flight of stairs on the side of the hulking white marble building. But when he arrived at the top of the stairs, he realized she was still thirty paces behind him, standing and looking at the theater with wide eyes, her mouth slightly agape.
He let out a little groan of frustration and hustled back to her. “Come on, I’m going to be late, and I can’t go in there without you.”
