Page 27 of Canadian Boyfriend

It was pie that first lured me to Sarah’s diner—it was famous for its dozens of homemade varieties. It was interesting that Icould think back without the stab of pain that used to accompany those sorts of memories.

Aurora:I don’t know. I’ve only ever had apple. So I guess it’s apple?

Mike:How is that possible?

Aurora:My mom wasn’t into pie.

Aurora:Or dessert.

Aurora:Or food in general.

I was starting to get a picture of Aurora’s mom, based on a few comments she’d made. I wanted to ask Aurora why no pie in the years since she’d lived with her mom, though. She’d called herself a failed ballerina. Even if she’d been on a strict regimen back then, why did that translate into no pie in the intervening years?

Also, why did these all feel like such burning questions?

Aurora:I should go to bed. I open tomorrow at five.

That was one question thathadbeen answered. Her second job was as a barista at a Starbucks near her place.

Mike:Do they have pie at Starbucks? You should treat yourself tomorrow.

Aurora:They have apple fritters—is that close enough?

Mike:No, that’s more like a donut. We need to expand your pie horizons.

Wait. Was it weird that I’d saidwe?

Aurora:What’s your favorite kind?

Mike:I’m partial to the cream pie family, probably because coconut cream pie is a specialty of my mom’s. But chocolate cream, banana cream. It’s all good. Totally different from the fruit category. Which is also good. Just maybe not quite as good.

There was a long pause while the dot things that indicated she was typing appeared, disappeared, and reappeared.

Aurora:I haven’t had much pie because I spent the first twenty years of my life thinking I was going to be a professional ballet dancer, and ballet dancers can’t eat pie.

Wow. I had not been expecting that.

Yet also I had? Or at least I was not surprised. Whatdidsurprise me was the realization that I knew Aurora better than I should, given how little we had interacted in real life.

I had no idea what to say. I was tempted to tell her I understood. Keeping in shape was harder the older I got, and I couldn’t eat as much pie as I had back in my Chicago diner days. But I sensed this was a different sort of thing from her avoidance of pie. Still, I wanted to acknowledge that she’d told me something real. I thought about Dr. Mursal, who always said that when you don’t know what to say, you usually can’tgo wrong with the truth, even if it makes you or other people uncomfortable. In this case I was interpreting the truth to be the question that was at the tip of my tongue.

Mike:Does this have something to do with your mother?

Aurora:Yes. And honestly, I don’t want to sound like I have an eating disorder. I mean, I think I did, when I was younger. You kind of have to, to be in ballet.

Mike:That’s kind of screwed up.

Aurora:Right?

Mike:I get it, though. I think any athlete understands that your sport rewards a certain type of physicality. You can only get so far on discipline and practice, then you’re kind of screwed if you don’t have the particular kind of build your sport demands. Not all wannabe swimmers have Michael Phelps’s wingspan.

That had turned into a bit of a monologue. I worried it sounded preachy. But thinking of young Aurora starving herself—it hurt me.

It was a strange sensation, to have something hurt me that had nothing to do with Sarah’s death, those damn birth control pills, the abyss, or Olivia’s calling me Mike.

Aurora:To be fair, some people tend more toward the ballet body type naturally, so I can’t say everyone has to have an eating disorder to succeed. I don’t mean to condemnballet as a whole. It just wasn’t good for me. At that level, anyway.

Aurora:And I’m better now. I’ve pretty much broken myself of my food issues on the savory side. I’ll eat pizza and chips. But I still have this block about sugar. My mother used to call it poison. She used to say you might as well inject arsenic directly into your bloodstream. She never touched the stuff, even though she didn’t have a professional reason to avoid it. I know with my rational brain that she was wrong, but…

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