The Rhythm of Our Feelings novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lift

Their first partnering rehearsal is all hands and hatred, while Lydia watches. Margo finds a pointe shoe in her bag sliced through the shank, and Sutton goes white at the sight.

Sutton set the rules at eight o'clock sharp, standing in the middle of her basement with her arms folded.

"No talking unless it's about the work."

"Fine."

"No touching except the choreography."

"Fine."

"And you will not look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you know something I don't."

"Sutton," I said. "I know nothing you don't."

She turned on the music.

Tidewater opened with two women walking toward each other from opposite ends of a stage, and a score that sounded like ocean pulling back over stones.

Philippa had made it hard on purpose.

Every phrase was a lift or a catch or a fall into the other woman's hands.

The first time Sutton put her hands on my waist, she gripped.

"Softer," I said.

"I said no talking."

"It's about the work. You're going to bruise me."

Her grip loosened a fraction.

I felt her fingers spread over my ribs, hot through the thin cotton.

I went up into the first overhead lift, and for a few seconds I hung above her with my arms wide and my whole weight in her hands.

The mirror gave me back the sight of her, face tipped up, jaw clenched, holding me.

She was strong.

She was far stronger than the thin girl in the hallway had let anyone believe.

"Down," she said.

I came down slowly, sliding the length of her.

My hips met hers.

Neither of us moved for a breath.

"The count was eight," she said. Her voice had gone rough. "You were early."

"You were late."

"Again."

We ran it fourteen times.

By the fifteenth I'd stopped hating her, and I hated that more than anything.

On the sixteenth, her left foot landed wrong.

It was small, a tiny wobble of the ankle, and her whole face went white.

She caught herself on my shoulders.

"Sit," I said.

"I'm fine."

"You're not. Sit. Which side?"

"Margo."

It was the first time she had said my name in two years.

I stopped.

"It's old," she said, very quietly. "It just does that."

I knelt anyway and took her heel in my palm.

She went still.

The scar on the outside of her ankle was white and puckered, a hand's width long, and the whole joint felt hot under my thumbs.

"Mom's an ER nurse," I said. "Ice and elevation. Humor me."

She let me.

I do not know why.

I sat on her basement floor holding her bare foot in my lap for ten minutes with a bag of frozen peas on it.

She watched my face the whole time, and I had no idea what she saw.

"You're better than I thought," she said finally.

"At holding an ankle?"

"At all of it."

It was the nicest sentence she'd ever said to me.

It also sounded like it cost her a tooth.

The next morning at the academy Lydia limped into Studio A with her cane hooked over her arm.

She sat in the front row, bright and relaxed, and watched us run the opening.

Her hip appeared to hurt her very little.

"Looks lovely," she said when we finished. "Like sisters."

Sutton's jaw flexed.

I put my bag down by the barre and unzipped it for my shoes.

The shoes were on top, ribbons neatly folded.

I took out the left one and my hand stopped.

The satin ribbon was tied correctly, the way I always tied it.

But the shank, the stiff sole inside the shoe, hung down loose when I lifted it.

Someone had cut straight across it, clean, from the inside.

I turned the shoe over in my hands.

On the inside heel, in my own blue marker, I had written my initials.

M.F.

The shoes were mine, and the cut was not.

My bag had sat alone in the hallway outside Studio A for ten minutes while I warmed up.

"Margo?" Lydia said, sweetly. "Everything all right?"

I could not make a sound.

I was holding the shoe at chest height when I felt someone beside me.

Sutton had come across the room.

She was looking at the shoe, and every drop of color had left her face.

She looked at the cut, then at the initials, then at me.

"Where did you get that?" she said.

"It was in my bag."

Her lips were bloodless.

"The same cut," she whispered, and she was shaking.

She turned and walked out of the studio, and the door swung shut behind her.

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