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Dedication

For my siblings. Love yous.

PART 1

Rediscovering

1. Angst

SIRI

August 26, Wednesday

New Jersey

I’m almost done living on pause.

Mom and I aren’t pause people. We’re a 1.5-speed household on our least productive day. We’re always moving.

Productivity is an itch, one that most likely stems from Mom and her fervor for the keys to success. She doesn’t reference them in our current day-to-day, but she spouted them incessantly through my preteen years. The keys to success include but are not limited to: goal setting, passion, preparation, discipline, perseverance, and luck. I’ve taken them all to heart. Preparation is my favorite key. The rest are fine. They’re respectable, but preparation soothes my soul. If you don’t regularly prepare to utilize your time efficiently, your goals just get further and further away.

I’ve been preparing for a ballet career my entire life. I’m always en route to the next practice, getting ready for the next performance, training harder, honing my craft. I crave the chasse prep before a leap. I like to be over the floor, not on it. I live for moments of perfect weightlessness—where I’m propelled into flight by nothing but my own strength and will.

I’ve spent the last twelve weeks shackled by gravity. This injury has been an unexpected hiccup. But it’s a hiccup that’s almost over.

I’m restless as the doctor brings us into his office. I stare at a small clock set in a marbled piece of stone on the man’s desk and try not to squirm in his burgundy fabric-covered chairs. It’s slightly painful to squirm.

I’ve written down all the questions I have for him. There’s only one that really matters: When can I get back to work? I need to unpause.

Ballet and I have been in a committed relationship since I could speak in full sentences. She’s been my rock for as long as I can remember. We’ve never spent this much time apart. I’m tired of abstract healing timelines. I need an exact back-to-dance date I can circle on the calendar. I’m counting on it.

Mom sits in the chair next to me with her hands folded carefully over her crossed legs. Watching her continue to run on 1.5 speed while I’ve been stuck on pause has made this experience exponentially more frustrating.

We’ve been at this appointment for an hour now. The doctor ran me through a bunch of tedious movement tests. Bend over, stand up, walk this way, move like that. He asked fifty questions about my daily pain levels. He’s examined the MRI. But he hasn’t shared anything of substance throughout the entirety of the checkup!

I tap my foot against the chair leg as he slowly shuffles through the paperwork on his desk. This suspense is unbearable.

“So when can I get back to work?” I finally blurt.

He takes a breath. “You’re still sleeping on the floor, correct?”

I swallow. “I mean, yes, but it’s helping. I’m healing. It’s not as bad. I can sleep now. The whole night. I’ve been sleeping without interruption for at least a week.”

He breaks eye contact. Clears his throat. Scratches his balding head. Folds his hands together.

My heartbeat ticks up. Longer? How much longer?

“I’m very sorry, Miss Maza. I thought this was clear after our initial appointment. There’s no going back to your previous lifestyle with this injury.”

I scoff, pulling on my first smile of the last ninety-three days. “What? No, I’m healing. Of course I’m going back.”

We sit in silence for ten seconds before he speaks again. “Back injuries are tricky. Something like this doesn’t ever really fully heal. You’re probably going to have to deal with chronic back pain for the rest of your life. What we can do is manage it with the right sort of physical therapy, yoga…”

I shake my head. This is laughable. He’s delusional. This doctor is wrong. So wrong. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know how I’m healing.

I interrupt him. “No. No. I’m going to heal. I’m young, I’m only eighteen!”

He shakes head slowly. “I know this is a big life change for you. Lots of my patients find that swimming is a great replacement sport that won’t put such intense pressure on your injury. I’d recommend giving it a try. Going back to ballet is going to make this worse. You could lose feeling in your f—”

“No.” I’m still shaking my head. Life change? Swimming? I throw up my hands for him to stop because he doesn’t know.

He’s still talking. Intercourse this. He can’t tell me no. He doesn’t understand that I can’t quit. I can’t. This isn’t a big life change—this is my life.

My mother is saying thank you and goodbye. She puts her arm around me, leads me out. I glare at her. Why isn’t she saying anything to him? Why isn’t she fighting this with me?

Tears start down my cheeks as we arrive at the passenger side of Mom’s Toyota.

“You’re going to be okay.” We’ve been driving for five minutes and that’s her opening line.

No. I’m not going to be okay. I have a fifteen-year plan. Prove myself. Join Mom on Broadway. We’re going to be magnificent together. I’ve barely started! I’ve only performed in New York! I’m supposed to go everywhere! Work my way around the world and back!

Nothing is okay. This can’t be a permanent hiatus. I don’t do hiatuses in the first place! I’m consistent. I’m dedicated. I’m all the keys to success! I’m committed to all of them!

“Siri, it could be much worse, and I’m so grateful that for all intents and purposes, you’re going to be fine.”

That comment hurts more than I expect it to. I can’t bring myself to be grateful. How can she say that? I can’t break up with ballet! I’m not good enough at anything else.

My chest is convulsing. I’m trying to stay quiet, but I can’t quite rein in the sound of my pent-up sobs.

“Siri, take a deep breath, get ahold of yourself.”

Mom can’t stand it when I get like this. Sensitive. I watch as her knuckles whiten against the steering wheel.

When I was a kid and emotions got the better of me, Mom would go out of her way to spend time together. We’d cook things. We’d watch one of the many dance shows cramming our DVR. Learn the routines together. I don’t think she was ever comfortable with my tears, but at least she tried to make things better. Now she powers down.

We don’t speak again until we’re home.

“You’re going to find a new dream,” Mom says as she drops her purse on a chair. I still at the edge of the kitchen as she heads toward the stove. The celebratory back-to-dance-date-appointment cranberry granola bars I made earlier are sitting there mocking me now.

“What’d you make today?” Mom says as she pulls away the tinfoil over them.

Why isn’t she more upset about this?

I fell in love with ballet watching Mom soar across stages on invisible wings, watching her spin for eternities. Like she was barely human. I don’t know how many different times I’ve daydreamed about taking the stage with her. About the day she’d ask me to be in one of her shows. To even audition for one.

“You’ve never broken up with your dream, no matter how excrement it made things,” I respond belatedly to her first comment.

Mom twists away from the food, her face pinched, skin pulled taut by her tight ballet bun. “Life throws boulders in your path. It threw them in mine. Not the same ones, but they still fell, and I had to find a way to get around them.”

I try not to sigh dramatically, and fail. We stare at each other.

Mom doesn’t like to share much, but Papa and I are close, and he’s filled me in on her childhood. My nana died when Mom was too young to know her. Papa raised Mom alone. Mom had to put herself through college on part-time jobs, scholarships, and loans because Papa couldn’t afford to send her to the fancy art school she wanted to go to.

But she’s probably referring to my greedy, selfish, abandoning jerk-and-a-half father who left us when I was four.

Unless she means me? Am I a boulder?

I walk past Mom, through the kitchen, and into the living room where I settle flat on my back on the carpet. As of late, I usually spend about thirty minutes per day in this spot, staring up at the fake family portrait hanging above the fireplace.

Mom’s face appears, hovering over me. Her amber eyes sear into mine. “What are you doing?” she says flatly.

I stare past her at the ceiling, opting not to respond. Mom’s not usually here for this part of my post-injury routine. She’s only around right now because she had to take off work early to drive me to that horrible appointment.

Mom takes a step, so she’s standing beside my torso, looking down at me.

“I don’t know if you forgot”—she folds her arms across her chest—“but you leave tomorrow for that Rediscover Yourself retreat we looked at a few weeks ago. I think it’s going to be really good for you, especially now.”

Not this again. I close my eyes, freeing some fresh tears. They slip sideways, toward my ears.

Mom’s been pushing me to sign up for a random forest retreat in Colorado curated for people who feel like they’ve lost their way. We clicked around their website last month. I wasn’t into it, but I humored her by agreeing to consider it.

“I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go,” I say quietly.

Mom shakes her head. “No, this is the whole reason we decided it was a good idea. You need to get out of here. Recenter yourself.”

“We decided it was a good idea because of Bran, Mom, not because of this. I don’t want to go anymore.”

Mom steps back and sits on the living room couch. “It was partly due to what happened with your terrible ex-boyfriend, but we both know it was mostly because of your injury. You said you don’t want to go back to therapy, so you’ll go to the retreat. I’ve already paid and filled out your paperwork.”

I jut up from the floor into a sitting position. “What?! You filled—Mom! I’m eighteen. Don’t do excrement like that without telling me! You’ve mandatorily ultimatum-ed me without even presenting the options! What the underworld?”

“This is going to be a good thing.” Mom’s voice goes monotone. Powering down again. “It’s only seven days.”

“Mom, sitting around a campfire and singing top-forties music with strangers sounds like a literal nightmare right now!”

“I highly doubt you’ll be singing music around a campfire at a Rediscover Yourself retreat. You saw the site. You’ll be chatting with other people who are feeling lost, hurt—the things you’re feeling.”

Heat flashes through me. It takes everything I have not to scream. I yank the AirPods from my sweatshirt pocket, stuff them in my ears, and press play before reassuming my horizontal position along the floor.

My mother leaves the room. Good.

“Bury a Friend” blasts in my ears as I glare up at the portrait over the fireplace. It’s almost six years old now. Mom looks beautiful with her long hair draped over her shoulder. Her handsome now-ex-boyfriend and my ex-kind-of-stepdad George stands next to her smiling. The middle school versions of his son, Gill, and I are sitting in front of the two of them, looking adequately awkward. We look like a perfect, happy family.

I loved envisioning us that way. I loved feeling like I had a family.

Before them, it was just me and Mom, and of course Papa. When George and Gill came into our lives, I thought we were locked in together forever. But Mom and George never married. So, when they broke up a month ago, the tentative family dynamic I’d been clinging to for the last seven years dissolved in a matter of days. This picture is a lie now.

George is wonderful. It’d been … a relief to imagine him as my dad. I can’t keep doing that if he and my mom aren’t together. It’s weird.

My actual dad hasn’t reached out since he left us for California. I google him once a month to keep up with his work; so we have a one-sided, distant, sort of stalkerish relationship.

I switch Billie Eilish’s album out for the fury of my new favorite metal band, White Chapel, close my swollen eyes, and do my very best to disappear into the floor.

2. Angst and the Journey

SIRI

August 27, Thursday

New Jersey

Mom can’t take me to the airport for my Colorado flight because a dancer got sick and she has to go into work early.

I flop the spoon around in my Special K and glare down at the Rediscover Yourself retreat pamphlet she shoved in my face last night. The brochure is covered in pictures of women of all ages participating in various outdoor activities, smiling their faces off. No one is that happy. Would it kill a marketing team to put a pensive person on a pamphlet?

I sit with my butt on the very edge of a plastic subway seat, back ramrod straight, suitcase tucked between my legs, en route to JFK. I’m staring at a partially defaced ad for one of my mom’s favorite plays, Mamma Mia!, and mentally critiquing the irritatingly upbeat-looking actors.

Mom’s “new normal” is blowing me off. It’s why I spent the last five days reminding her about the doctor’s appointment we went to yesterday. The woman’s always, always headed to meet with her dancers. She’s tirelessly rehearsing for the opening of a new musical she’s choreographing called Jean’s Not Green.

It’s great. I’m happy for her.

But also, I’m not. Because I have to do things like bring myself to the airport via subway for a retreat I didn’t sign up for.

A sigh escapes my lips.

I sigh too much probably. I know Mom doesn’t like it.

White Chapel roars through my AirPods as the plane takes off. Metal works like that suction-tube straw thing the dentist sticks in your mouth to funnel out the drool when they’re working on your teeth. You stick it in your ears, and it drains out the rage.

I managed to score a window seat for this flight, but I forgot to pack a book. I’ve been devouring poetry books these last couple of months because melodramatic metaphors about life have proven a worthy injury distraction.

Mom doesn’t like poetry. Too dramatic. Poetry and I have that in common.

I’ve always been dramatic. I used to refuse food when I was upset as a child. I had an infamous imaginary friend from the age of one to five. I went through a phase where I refused to wear anything but white sneakers outside of dance, and I’d cry hysterically when they weren’t immaculate. I was weird. But I wasn’t always mad at everything like I am now. The day everything fell apart three months ago, I tripped into this anger ditch, and I can’t seem to find my way out. I’m already pretty unlikable. I need to be alone too often. I’m too quiet. I’m too rigid. I like to be too early. And now I’ve got this hating-everything-thing happening. I hate it.

It’d be really nice to be chipper, or at least chipperish. It’d be nice if this place could help get me to chipperish. And if the meditation or whatever we’ll be doing jogged a new life path idea, that would be ideal.

Right now, the future feels like a black hole. A dark, costume-less, stale abyss of heaving gravity where Mom can’t help me.

I pull out the dumb brochure again and turn on my little overhead plane light.

It seems that a bunch of other women headed to this retreat and I have coordinated flights to Denver today, so that we can all be shuttled to the grounds together. I’ve positioned myself in the back left corner of the third bench in the Rediscover Yourself van we’re all loaded into.

A cute dark-skinned girl with braids and mesmerizing eyes is sitting next to me. She’s probably around my age. When I feel her look in my direction five minutes into the ride, I nervously pull out my brochure again to avoid speaking. The thing is looking pretty worn now, like I’ve been hoarding it in the top drawer of my nightstand for ten years.

The other girls and women are chatting with the super cheerful lady driving us. She has a ridiculous New York accent.

I tune in to what she’s saying for a moment. “We believe yoga can play a huge part in recovering—” And I tune back out. Yoga. Yoga is for people too damaged to do the activities they actually want to do.

A dull pain throbs in my low back and snakes down both my thighs. Yoga is for me now.

I pull up my hood and turn toward the window. The saddest part of all this is I need this retreat to work. I literally need to rediscover myself. What am I supposed to do now? I had enough trouble with this question during what I thought was a temporary recovery period. Now my goals are obsolete. I’m temporarily stuck … permanently on pause. That doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.

Mom has been little to no help on the issue. Little, because she gifted me a credit card so I can order groceries to the house and make things while I’ve been out of work.

I stick my hands in my sweatshirt pocket and fiddle with my AirPods, debating whether or not to pop them in again. I’ve become fairly dependent on angry music to get me through the day. It’s part of my routine. Wake up, breakfast with Mom, pop in my AirPods as she leaves me in our now George-less house so I don’t fall into a spiral of anguish, flip through the latest of Mom’s old recipe books, and choose my next subject.

Cooking has become my number one distraction during these lonely times. My Instagram has taken a harsh turn. It’s now full of mediocre food photography. There hasn’t been anything else worth posting about. I need this retreat.

I hate that.

I need a new direction and I hate that.

I need all the ridiculous, uplifting clichés to find me and pull me out of this pit.

3. A Girl Is Mildly Traumatized

JAMIE

August 26, Wednesday

California

“Next up tonight, we have a charming young comedian. You’ve seen her around, she works tickets outside the club—James George Federov!”

The crowd cheers mildly as I skip my way to center stage and stop in front of the mic. Ten minutes. I have an entire ten minutes.

I shake out my limbs, feeling more tense than usual.

I’ve got this. I’ve fucking got this. “Hey hey hey, I’m Jamie George Federov!”

Adrenaline spikes through me as I take the mic off the stand. “You’ve definitely never heard of me. I’m but the humble semi-only child of a Hollywood producer.”

The crowd chuckles.

“Yeah, my Dad’s a producer.” I throw on a haughty accent. “He fancies himself an auteur.” I nod to the crowd. “For those of you who are unfamiliar, that’s film slang for pretentious white man.”

I pull on a smug grin. “My father, the auteur. I owe him so much—most notably my charmingly dickish Hollywood nature.” I smile up at the ceiling. “Thanks, Dad.” More mild laughter.

“My dad, he’s a youthful, pretentious soul…” I sigh wistfully. “If I were to guesstimate, I’d say fifteen. He’s a pretentious fifteen-year-old boy in a forty-year-old’s body.” I wander to the right side of the stage. “I’d say I’m like a slightly frumpy forty-year-old in a”—I look down at myself in my red corduroy overalls—“twelve-year-old’s body?”

Laughter.

I wander to the left edge of the stage. “I was carded trying to see the most recent Titanic re-release in theaters a couple weeks back.

“That film is PG-13 for boobs! I’m almost twenty-one, I have two real, physical, grew-them-myself boobs. But apparently”—I point to my head—“this face screams not yet worthy of seeing Kate Winslet naked.” I catch a handful of snorts from the front row and smirk down at them.

“My pretentious dad, of course, has the latest iPhone. What is it, the iPhone 23H or something? It has a face reader. You all probably have it too; you live on Earth.

“And Dad and I, we share a similar facial structure. These knife-edge, scary cheekbones here”—I circle around the area vigorously with my pointer finger—“these are from him. When I have shades on—which is always, we live in LA—and I hold his phone to my face, the thing unlocks.”

Someone in the crowd gasps.

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