I move my next piece. “It was nice. It’s forced me to really take a step back and examine my past to try to figure out what my future looks like without ballet.”

He moves. “And what does it look like?”

I hop over one of his pieces. “Still murky, but I’m working on it.”

“Do you want to go to school?” he asks.

LOL, hell no. “I don’t know.”

He jumps two of my pieces. “King me,” he says.

I glare down at the board. “What just happened?”

It’s 11:30 and Mara’s still not home. I played conversation with Papa very Siri: brief responses and silence. We got through two games of checkers, he thoroughly kicked my ass. The man is a checkers savant.

I walk him to the door.

“If Mara’s leaving you alone too often, I can always come over and keep you company.” He makes his way down the front steps and turns to look me in the eye. “Remember that. You can call me if you need someone to talk to.”

The look he gives me is conspiratorial, like he knows I know something we haven’t spoken about knowing. I narrow my eyes at him. “… Okay.”

“Love you,” he says as he waves and turns to walk down the path.

I slam the door shut and call Siri again. She still doesn’t pick up. What the hell is she doing?

I jog back upstairs, hang a right past the school portraits, and finally check out Siri’s room.

The door itself has an artsy picture of ballet shoes nailed to a wall taped to it. When I head inside, I’m met with darkness.

It’s still pretty dark when I flip on the lights. Her comforter is black. The shams are deep blue. The walls are painted a dark bluish-gray. There’s a decent-sized window on the far wall, and on either side of it are framed posters, one of Billie Eilish and one that says SLIPKNOT.

Scattered about the darkness is ballet. There’s a white pillow between her blue shams with black ballet slippers stitched across it. Under her window, lined up neatly along the wall, are at least ten pairs of old worn-out ballet shoes. Black ones, pink ones, tan ones, white pointe shoes dirtied with age, peach ones falling apart at the seams. It’s a little dance shoe graveyard.

The whole room is like a physical manifestation of Black Swan. In the corner near Billie Eilish is a little black desk with a black laptop on it. There’s a mirror over a chest of drawers to the left. Pictures from recitals or competitions throughout the years are stuck into its edges; there are so many unfortunate tutus I missed out on making fun of.