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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.

Katherine whirls down the hallway, towing me through the crowd of warm, half-naked bodies. I’m leaving wet footprints and I want to protest, but I am swept up and swept along, the energy in the house enough to blast out the walls. Lakeshore Academy is one of the toughest prep schools in the US. Our arts program is a feeder for Juilliard, RISD, Tisch—all the top arts colleges—and the academic-track kids end up at Ivies and similar. After an endless school week of classwork and homework and rehearsal and then more rehearsal and, hey, maybe more rehearsal, even those of us who can handle the pressure need places to explode.

We’re slipping around the flailing limbs of theater kids and gliding past the sudden smiles and shouts of glee when I’m spotted. Pausing to hug Halim, my partner in last semester’s pas de deux, I accept quick kisses on my icy-cold cheeks from the girls in ensemble and that cute girl Grace I bonded with in repertory (the only other full-scholarship arts kid at Lakeshore, as far as I know). My freshmen girls, the clever, quick, intense dancers I mentor, squeal my name as I pass, and I’m waving at them and blowing kisses as Katherine tugs me on, and we dance through the great room and the kitchen and into the den, where the hard-core dancing happens with the chairs pushed against the walls, and the music floods the room, crashes into your chest, and sinks under your skin until you can’t tell the difference between the beat and your body. The feeling is good in rehearsal, and the best onstage. But when it’s all yours and you can do anything you want with it, that’s when the adrenaline fizzes like champagne.

My hips are already moving, and the urge is building to strip off all my winter gear and just dance, no choreography, no counting time, just my body pounding with the boom of the bass and everything falling into place.

I go up on my toes, searching the den for Nevaeh and Taylor. The chandelier overhead is dimmed all the way down, the dark wood paneling on the walls gleaming and the crowd a great pulsing mass of joy. Everyone’s in dancewear or less, which always feels defiant—students aren’t allowed to show up at academic classes with bare shoulders or collarbones or scandalous leggings—too distracting, we’re told. Spaghetti straps once got me sent back to my room to change, feeling vaguely ashamed and angry, the way everyone turned to stare at me. Saturday detention because of my shoulders, as if girls’ bodies are against the rules and our skin is a sex crime, and cracking down on that is more important than our actual education. (And no one ever mentions that our performance costumes show way more than shoulders.)

But we’re free of that, all of us together here. The room is swaying, hopping, spinning, twirling, all of us hot and alive, and no one’s caring if our skin is distracting or if our behavior is appropriate. And is it possible to smile even harder than this? Because there are my sweethearts, Nevaeh and Taylor.

Nevaeh—she’s serenity, ribbon-curling grace, heartbreaking precision, Instagram eyebrows, volcano heart. She’s your nuclear safe house. She has tampons. And she’s vulnerable, sentimental. Tenderhearted, if she loves you, if she trusts you. Now she’s glowing, a sheen of sweat and sparkle on her dark shoulders and neck and cheekbones, glittering lips, a mass of tiny braids threaded with gold and blue wrapped up like a bow on her head. She’s spinning pale, freckled, blushing Zoe, my first-year mentee who has a crush on her, in swooping circles.

Taylor is close to the center of the floor, surrounded by his usual selection of swooners and admirers.

He’s take-no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners, leave-no-heart-unturned, rule-the-world. Popping out to crush your enemies and steal their significant others, no big. Weight lifting, red lipstick, outrageous flirting, and burning across the stage. First-generation Korean American, a dancer like his mom was. Making me laugh always and right now when he gleams at me.

And then I glance behind him, and my own smile teeters right on the edge of fizzling out.

Gavin.

Crap.

Dark curls, dimples, beautiful face against the long, slim neck of a tall, elegant girl, copper skin against her gold. His lips moving up to her jaw; his hand tracing down her spine. She spins away, her black hair flying out like a flag, then moves back against him. His fingers grip her hips tight. His eyes close, but she catches my gaze. She smiles that cat smile of hers. Ellory. Of course Ellory. Of course my audition competition. Of course they’re a couple now. I mean, they’ve both already dated everyone else in this tiny-ass school. Nevaeh and Ellory were even a thing sophomore year.

I wonder—for only a second, the tiniest wallow of self-pity—why did he date me first? She’s got that it-factor and the kind of body I keep hearing that dancers are supposed to have, slim and ethereal, while my body is considered exactly the opposite of that. I can move. I am graceful. I am a powerhouse. Fat and fierce. Delicate, I am not.

All that jumbled in the longest split second in the world, before I remember to wrench my eyes away.

I keep up my performer’s smile, the one I’ve got a lock on, my bulletproof shield that says I’ve got nothing to prove to you. I’m trying hard to be nonchalant, but I fumble with the zipper of my coat, old and always sticking.

Katherine leans into my shoulder, because she can always tell when I’m faking it. “Right?” she says, rolling her eyes. “Nevaeh was like Oh my gosh, just get a room already.”

I snerk at that and then murmur in Katherine’s ear. “Is ‘man slut’ a thing? Because if it isn’t, that’s sexist.”

She laughs, the big braying cackle that carries, and that is maybe the only not-dignified thing about her. Taylor’s and Nevaeh’s heads both whip around, and when they see us, their faces are the best thing in the world, knocking Gavin and Ellory and that tiny bit of self-doubt out, out, out of my head.

I wave at them and then give up on my coat with a huff of disgust to kick off my clunky, stiff boots and yank off my itchy, woolly socks. I stuff it all into a pile near the couch and sigh, flexing toes that are red and aching. My focus is contemporary dance, but classical ballet is my first love, and it’s the foundation of my ensemble piece this term. I’ve been en pointe since after dinner, because the winter showcase is less than a month away. But there’s no taking a break, because Taylor is skidding up to me, taking me by the shoulders.

“Oh my god, it’s you!” he shouts, ridiculous, so good at making a scene. “It’s really you! You made it!” I love the drama of his face, impossible to ignore. The broad cheekbones and the thick, swept-back black hair, his shoulders wide in his white tank. He likes boys more than girls, and he’s got a superhot Damien back home in Queens, but he knows that smile tempts everyone.

“I did!” I shout back. “I made it! Everyone keeps telling me that!” I press my cheek against his and breathe in his good, comforting, so familiar clean-sweat smell.

Then the music stops for a split second, just a breath—and it comes back with a boom that makes him whoop, grab my hand, and yank me through the crowd. I’m laughing, protesting, when he slides across the floor on his socks, clearing a space around us in the mass of bodies. I don’t recognize this song—lush, weird midtempo, heavy bass, irresistible—but I realize that my body is so ready to play, aching for it, sinking into the music as my muscles respond to the beat. We’ve already got an audience circling up, because performing-arts kids, they have an instinct for drama.

“Let me take off my coat, for god’s sake, Taylor!” I shout, fumbling again with the half-undone zipper, feeling it finally give. But I still my hand. Because Taylor’s dropped bang to his knees with the most wicked smile.

“Take it all off, girl!” he calls. He is just daring me.

A long breath where I’m motionless, staring right back at him. Inside I feel a waiting all around us. A curtain’s-just-gone-up kind of moment, an indrawn breath, the rich thumping beat and the croon of that song saying do it, do it, do it.

I lift my eyebrow. His smile is so good and so dangerous and so full of pure, delighted confidence in me—and suddenly, I let myself go. I’m drunk on yes, let’s do this thing.

On the beat, I cock my hand on my hip, whip off my scarf, and swing it above my head to the sudden shouts and cheers around me. My heart zings, sharp and clear like a bell, with that glorious adrenaline I’m addicted to.

Taylor leans all the way back, cups his hands around his mouth, and howls.

“Aaaaaa-DEEE!”

Katherine is cracking up, and Nevaeh is going to tease me about this for weeks, and the crowd is mine, and I love it.

To the boom, I snap the scarf over my shoulder, and to the downbeat I trail it down the front of my body, over the ridiculous puffy coat, let my knees bend and my hips sway and my shoulders roll as I trace my hand slowly up the curve of my thigh. With a flourish I fling the scarf at Taylor, who catches it against his chest, laughing. I hear my name, over and over, a heartbeat under the music, and it’s inside me now, in that breathless moment when everything in the world stops when you step onstage. My body is singing, and I’m about to perform an aria.

That sublime place where I’m not locked in my head. Not worried about perfect. Pure joy. All eyes on me.

Arching my back and moving like I’m the beat and the bass, delighted by the ridiculousness of the puffy coat and the sexy dance, I tug the zipper of my coat down the rest of the way and shrug it off my shoulders. Let it slide down my back and arms until it drapes over my elbows, slides off my fingertips until I catch it, swing it in a graceful arc around my head, and toss it into the laughing, jostling, cheering crowd.

A hand goes up, and—and it’s Gavin, snatching the coat out of the air, but he doesn’t matter. I just blow him a kiss, swing my hips around, and rip off my wool hat to absolute shrieks of glee that reach a fever pitch as I slip my fingers down my neck, down my sides, my hips, then dip to the ground, toss my mass of dark curls, and glide back up in a perfect S-curve, flawless.

Sometimes it’s a slog to push away what other people think my body should look like, but dancing like this—no binder around my chest, no taming my “too big” boobs, just me—I take fierce pride in the strength and size of my body and in the way I can move.

I make a kissy face at Nevaeh when I see her taking a video, grinning at her phone screen, and she blows a huge kiss back.

My dance skirt flutters around my thighs as I stalk toward my still-kneeling Taylor, one bare foot in front of the other, feeling like a panther. He’s grinning like a dope, and I can’t stop grinning back.

With a single fingertip on the top of Taylor’s head, I prowl around to his broad back, sliding my hands down his shoulders and chest, tossing my mass of hair into his lap and flinging it back. I press my lips to his cheek, and when I straighten, he slaps a hand over that lipstick print, pretending he is swooning.

Gavin is watching as I slither back to the center of the circle, and now I want to know if he’s remembering us. I ruthlessly crush the flare of anxiety. I want him to. Catching his gaze again for a long, slow moment, I smooth my hand across my waist, bite my bottom lip, and tug at the wrap tie of my sweater. Another toss of my hair and I strip the wrap off in one silky movement, sending it fluttering into Zoe’s hands, and I laugh. It feels so good. The crowd is cheering the appearance of naked shoulders in a leotard. I roll them, along with my hips, a slow circle. Stretch my arms above my head, throw my head back, admire the arched curve of my naked arms. No more naked than I’d be performing, but it’s different. There’s a flutter in my stomach.

A senior boy shoves his way forward, waving a twenty at me, hooting. Christopher, pale-and-splotchy pink with a red-cheeked face, captain of the soccer team, in the academic program. The type that doesn’t hang out with the arts-program kids. Owner of a bright blue Tesla convertible. Twenty bucks doesn’t mean anything to him, but it’s plenty to me.

With graceful hands and a graceful neck, I sweep my fingertips along the curve of my leotard’s neckline. (Is it too low?) He takes the hint, his grin getting even wider. But then I spin away when he reaches for me, not letting his hands touch my body, even for his twenty. I hear his shout, but not what he says, and shrug it off.

I catch Taylor’s eye and slide my palms down the arc of my body to loosen the tie of my wrap skirt, let it slip down my thighs, down to the floor, and then I’m done, when this song slips into the next. I kick the skirt up with one toe, catch it, and take a long, flourishing bow, breathless in my leotard and tights and leg warmers, and my heart is pounding and I am flushed and swarmed by hoots and cheers and my people.

The adrenaline is wild, like lightning. Different from performing onstage. An audience gathered not to admire my talent, my dancing, but to admire me. It’s a strange kind of head rush, and I feel a little too warm.

I get a big smacking kiss from Zoe and monster squeezes from Taylor and Katherine, and I nestle into Nevaeh’s arms, laughing into her shoulder. Around us the dancing is already heating up again, and they melt back into it.

I duck my head, searching for my sweater, and snatch it up off the floor. Then I feel a hand on my arm, tugging insistently. I turn—Christopher and his smirk, too close to me. I don’t want to talk to him, but he follows me to the edge of the dance floor, and I can hear his friends calling and hooting behind him.

“You like to be a tease!” he shouts, too loud. “I can get into that.”

His eyes are pale blue, and he’s squinting down at my cleavage, standing so close.

“Yeah, not interested,” I tell him. I shrug into my sweater and tug it closed over my chest, but he’s still looking at my boobs, leaning closer.

“You know,” he says, pitching his voice under the music. I hate sentences that start with the words you know … and I’m right, because he finishes with “You’re pretty hot for a big girl.”

I stop for a second. It doesn’t matter if I don’t care. There’s always that split second where you’re just startled, when someone just makes a remark like that. I shake it off.

“Great!” I say, pulling my arm out of his hand, looking back at my friends on the dance floor. “Cool!” And you’re an ass, I don’t say out loud, because you’re not supposed to say that kind of thing out loud. I swear I could have invented the cure for cancer if I didn’t have to spend so much energy being grossed out by dudes fetishizing fat bodies, reminding me how hard I have worked to stop caring what people are thinking about mine.

“That doesn’t mean you’re hot enough to jerk me around, though,” he adds.

“I have a boyfriend,” I say, interrupting him. I try to move around him, back into the crowd, but he doesn’t want to let me go. His hand snakes out to catch mine, and his voice cuts through the music.

“I thought fat girls didn’t like to play hard to—”

I lunge forward when I see Taylor slipping out of the room, but Christopher is right behind me still.

“This is my boyfriend,” I announce abruptly, flinging my arms around Taylor’s waist. Christopher looks back and forth between us. I hate myself for resorting to this, but I need to make him stop. Fat isn’t a dirty word, and I proudly claim it—still, it’s shitty to hear it used like a weapon.

Taylor rests his arm around my shoulders.

“Oh yeah,” he says, raising his voice over the music. “We’re a thing.”

Christopher pauses, and then he says, “I thought you were a—” to Taylor. He waves his hand in a vague circle.

“A what?” Taylor says, tilting his head. His voice bright and curious.

Christopher sputters before he says, “Into dudes. Or whatever.” Hand wave again.

“Nah, man,” Taylor says very solemnly. “It’s a spectrum.”

I turn my laugh into a cough.

“Cool,” Christopher says. “Right.” A glance for each of us, and then an extra glance for my boobs. Up and down my body, and I get the skeeves. “See ya,” he says. He bumps Taylor’s shoulder when he pushes past us.

“Nice,” Taylor says, and then looks down at me. “What was that?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, collapsing against Taylor’s side. “I needed him to leave me alone.”

It feels terrible to hide from one guy behind another, like I can’t just speak for myself. It feels terrible, the way Christopher talked about my body as if he’s allowed to. I feel like I have ants crawling all over my skin.

“He has a crappy reputation,” Taylor says. He rests his cheek on the top of my head, and I sigh. “I’m sorry, Addiebear,” he says.

“Me too.”

“If we’re eloping, I have to tell Damien first.”

I laugh, straightening up.

“Dance now,” he says. “Okay?”

I nod and let him tug me down the hall, back into the crowd, and I stomp Christopher off like snow from my boots.

2

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