Page 52 of Canadian Boyfriend

“What physical things did you have to overcome?” Maybe I was getting too nosy, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easily she was telling this story, and I didn’t want her to stop.

“Weight. I couldn’t stay thin enough. I could get there, but I couldn’t maintain it.”

“What was ‘there’?”

“A hundred and five is what they wanted my so-called ceiling to be.”

Holy shit. “I don’t think it’s physiologically possible for a grown woman of your height to maintain that weight. That’s not an emotional failure.”

“I also kept fracturing my toe. It’s a common thing, so common that that particular break is sometimes called a dancer’s fracture. I think I did it four times in two years. We had a doctor on staff, but he was on vacation that last time, so I went to a walk-in clinic. The doctor there treated me, but she asked all these questions. She told me I was malnourished and said that’s why I kept breaking my toe. She said I was going to keep reinjuring myself if I didn’t eat more.”

Jeez. I understood training regimens, but who were these people?

“I had stopped getting my period. Actually, the really screwed-up part is that when I started school, Iwasgetting it, and Iwantedit to stop because I viewed its absence as a badge of my dedication—lots of the other girls weren’t getting theirs. But when this doctor asked about it, she treated it like a big deal. It freaked me out.Malnourished.That’s quite a word.” She sighed and stopped talking. I wanted to keep prompting her, but I didn’t know if I should. She pulled her legs up and kind of curled in on herself, but she resumed talking. “The next day after class, I was cleaning up my feet—pointe shoes are hard on feet—and I was so hungry I was dizzy. I asked my roommate, ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’ She said, ‘Because we love it.’ I roomed with this girl I’d gone through training with here in Minnesota. She was kind of mean. Well, not kind of. Shewasmean. So then I asked someone else, a girl I was friendly with and who was a decent human being, and she said a variation on the same thing. And then I thought…” She trailed off.

“You didn’t love it like they did,” I said gently, wanting to spare her the telling.

“I didn’t,” she confirmed, her tone infused with sadness. “I loved some parts of it. I still love dancing. I just… didn’t love ballet enough to keep hurting myself. And ithurt. And not only physically.”

“I know,” I whispered. It hurtmeto hear this. It made me want to rage when I thought of all that had been done to Aurora, not just back then with the weight stuff and the broken bones, but today, when she was so clearly still dealing with the fallout. “I’m sorry.”

“I quit about a week later, came home, and had a fight withmy mom. She made this big speech about all the time and money I was wasting by quitting. This all went down on the doorstep of the house I grew up in. She said she was done ‘investing’ in me. She always used that word—like I was a mutual fund or something. She called me a coward.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wanted to go back to Heather Evans’s house and give her a piece of my mind. “It’s the opposite. Turning your back on all that, having the foresight to recognize that what was happening to you was unsustainable, defying your mother… that wasbrave.”

She smiled, a really big one that took my breath away.

We were silent as she finished her burger. I slowed down on my fries so I could offer her some. She waved them away. “Do you think I should try to get a different job, like my mom says? I’m not talking about this job.” She gestured between us. “But Miss Miller’s. In some ways, my mom is right. I’m not exactly killing it on the career achievement front.”

I was both flattered and stressed that she was asking me. Flattered that she thought highly enough of me to ask for my opinion, but stressed because I had no idea how to answer. “Do you like teaching at Miss Miller’s?”

“I do. You probably don’t know this, but it’s much more chill than your average dance studio. I never imagined teaching again. I really owe Gretchen for helping me find my way back to dance. I just don’t know if working for Gretchen the rest of my life is… enough.”

“What would you do if you could do anything?”

“I don’t know,” she said quickly, so quickly it seemed like she was deflecting.

“Don’t overthink it. First answer that comes to mind.”

She answered right away, which made me think I’d beenright about the deflecting. “Well, this is new, but since I started teaching ballet, once I got over my fear of it, I realized I’ve missed it. Lately, I’ve started thinking, you know what would be cool? Teaching ballet to adults. Not because they want to become ballerinas, just because they want to dance. If you get away from the quest for perfection, there are a lot of things ballet can offer.”

I could see this. She was such a good teacher. “What are those things?”

Again, she had answers at the ready. “Balance. Concentration. Strength. Endurance. Plus it’s fun. Well, it hasn’t been fun for me, not historically. But I think it could be?”

“Is that a question?”

She laughed. “No. It could be fun.” She screwed up her face. “I think.”

“Is there a way you can teach ballet that focuses on the things you like and leaves the rest behind?”

“The problem is, I’m not sure how marketable it would be. Isn’t the whole point of ballet—at least nonprofessional ballet—that it’s for little girls who want to do it because of the tutus?”

“Does that have to be bad, though? Olivia always gets excited when it’s time to shop for dance clothes for the next level.”

“Dance clothes are so often tied into all the other garbage, though—body-shaming and, you know, the creation of an army of disordered eaters. Not at Gretchen’s, but you know what I mean. Anyway, it’s a moot point. Who wants to do ballet with no recitals, no thing you’re working toward?”

“You might be surprised. No-contact hockey leagues are cropping up everywhere. A lot of people would have said there’s no point in hockey without checking and fighting, but a lot of people feel differently. Anyway, there has to be somethinginherently of worth in all these sports or pastimes, doesn’t there? Otherwise why would they have been invented in the first place? Strip away all the context, and what do you have?”

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