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Dedication

For Meagan, my eye in the hurricane,

and

all the beautiful fat girls and femmes
who shape the world to fit them

1

The street is dark, and the sidewalk is ice, and the headline of my obituary is going to read “Dancer’s Bright Future Cut Short by Frostbitten Butt, Embarrassment.”

But I keep slip-sliding along, hood up and shoulders hunched inside my raggedy parka, because I’m so close now. So close to warmth and friends, the two-story brick house glowing like an ember in front of me, the faint thump of bass already reaching my frozen ears.

And when the front door blows out of my iced-over fingers on the downbeat, music and warm light pouring into the cold and sweeping around me, it’s like coming alive. The bass is so much louder than all the half excuses in my head—too wiped from rehearsing, too tired to see Gavin, too worried about Monday and what it means for my entire future—

I let the anxiety rush out of me in a gust of breath. I’m already grinning as I step inside.

“Oh my gosh! Addie!” Katherine screams, appearing in the crowded entryway like magic to fling her arms around me, squeezing all the bulk of my coat, knocking my hood back and dragging me into the house in a flurry of love and long limbs, flushed-pink skin, blond ponytail. “You made it!”

“I didn’t die from frostbite!” I shout, delighted and maybe a little surprised, as always. I’ve still got the Florida-girl constitution, despite three and a half years of boarding school in the frozen wasteland of Michigan.

She grabs my hand and we plunge into the crowd, the house packed, voices and hip-hop music echoing off the high ceilings. “I told them you would make it!” she yells back over her shoulder.

Katherine is happiness and cotton candy spiked with righteous anger, hugs and warm sweaters, a finely tuned sense of justice, a piece of pure sunshine that’s sometimes blinding. She knows me, knows that as much as I like to spend every second I can snatch in the studio, even if it means skipping homework (maybe especially if it means skipping homework), I can’t resist the call of this dance floor when day-student Shannon and her older sister throw a party.