Page 43 of Barre Fight
“Most of them?”
“Most of them,” Justin repeated grimly. “A couple of them decided I needed to be punished for running to the principal on top of being a faggy little ballet freak.”
He spat the words out, and Ivy sucked in a breath, realization dawning.
“Oh god, my review.”
“Yeah,” he said dully, and the resignation and pain in his voice made her cringe with shame. “Now you understand why that review hurt so much.”
“Of course I do. I had no idea when I wrote it… I mean even if I had known, I should have written it differently. God, Justin, I’m so sorry. Truly.”
“I know you are,” he said, reaching a hand across the comforter. She glanced down at his long, elegant fingers and the corded muscle of his extended forearm. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad about it again, I promise. I’m just trying to explain what happened that night.”
“Ok. Go on.”
“Those kids kept on me, and as we got bigger and stronger, the bullying got more physical.” Justin swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “One kid, in particular, had it in for me and never let me forget it. Kyle Kavanaugh,” Justin said, his voice darkening. “He liked to play a game he called ‘Boxer Versus Ballerina.’ I was never much for boxing, so I ended up with a bloody nose more than once.”
“What did your parents do?” Ivy said, horrified. She tried to imagine what her mum and dad, or her opa, would have done if she’d come home from school having been punched in the face by a classmate. They would have unleashed hell.
“They didn’t do anything,” he said, and when she opened her mouth to object, he added, “because they never found out. I hid it from them. From the teachers, too. From everyone except Missy. I swore her to secrecy, because I knew that if my parents went back to the principal, it would only make things worse.”
“Justin… that’s so awful. You were just a kid. She was just a kid.”
“I know. I should have told someone, some other adult. We both should have, but we thought we were doing the right thing at the time. It was that or quit ballet, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
“Good,” Ivy said softly. She couldn’t help but wonder how many boys didn’t get to keep dancing because the tormentbecame too much, or because they didn’t have Justin’s stubborn grit.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling his hand back and squaring his shoulders a little, like he was proud of himself. “They didn’t get to take it away from me. It was where I felt like myself. And the worse things got at school, the more important the ballet studio felt. The more I needed a place to be… safe. To feel special in a good way, not in a freak way.”
Guilt twisted in Ivy’s stomach again at the sound of that word. “I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of that.”
“I know that now. But the messed-up thing is that at the time it just seemed like the price I had to pay for dancing. For doing this girly thing I loved. It took me a long time to understand how wrong that is, and that was when I got angry. And I left that town and never went back.”
“Never?”
“Occasionally for a quick visit, because my parents work a lot and it’s hard for them to get down to Sydney to see me. But I hate being there. I miss the bush and I miss my family, but Missy’s in the city now. I don’t like going back if I can help it.”
“Understandable. And those kids, that one kid, never got in trouble? Never faced any consequences?”
“Never. But by the time I was in high school, I was spending summers in Sydney at an all-boys ballet camp, and it made it easier to get through the school year, knowing there were other boys like me. Some of us were gay, some of us were straight, some of us were still figuring it out, but we all loved ballet and we were all willing to stomach the shit that came with it. The gay kids had it even worse than I did, but we were all just trying to survive whatever we were up against. I knew I just had to survive high school. I could see a way out, if I was willing to keep working hard, so I did. I worked my ass off, and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Ivy agreed, and she smiled at him, somehowproud of the boy she’d never met, and genuinely impressed by the man sitting across the bed from her. Here he was, a principal dancer at the country’s national ballet company, preparing to perform at Lincoln Center tomorrow. Here he was, telling her the truth at last. And finally, she understood it all. No wonder he’d been so desperate to come on this tour, to salvage his career. He’d given up his childhood and his hometown to have it.
Justin watched her for a moment, and one corner of his mouth pulled up into a shy smile and his eyes seemed to brighten a little as they looked at each other in shared understanding.
“So, that night at the Stoned Crow,” Ivy prompted him, and his half smile became a rueful grin.
“Jesus, Kurt. Incorrigible,” he said, but he didn’t sound annoyed, just unsurprised, and Ivy couldn’t stop her eyes from flitting quickly—she hoped imperceptibly—down to his mouth.
“I’d say you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to.” She wanted him to trust her with it. Even if she was pretty sure she could figure it out on her own now.
Justin’s face sobered. “He was saying some pretty vile homophobic shit. And for the first little while, I brushed it off. You can ask Matty and Ricky, they’ll tell you I let it go on for a while. Just told him politely to back off and go home, but he didn’t. And eventually, I just…”
“You snapped,” she concluded.
“Yeah,” he sighed heavily. “I’m not proud of it, and I know it was wrong, and I know it’s causing the company a lot of hassle and it could still get me sued and fired after all this, but?—”
“He deserved it,” Ivy shrugged, and she watched his eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
