Dedication

TO MOM AND DAD

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March

PROLOGUE

“WHEN CAN I DANCE?” My voice came out quiet in the small, sterile recovery room. The doctor kept messing with his charts, so I didn’t know if he’d heard me. I was about to ask again, but I got distracted by the steel rods rooted into my bones and extending out, attached to a frame outside my leg. Ever since I woke up from surgery, I couldn’t stop staring at it. After ten years at the Kira Dobrow Ballet School, I’d seen my share of bodily horrors: weeping toe blisters, a ruptured Achilles tendon, but nothing like this. It was called an external fixator, and it wasn’t messing around.

Colleen was staring at it, too—her fingers tapping out the melody of the Kitri variation from Don Quixote on the metal post of my hospital bed. I caught her eye, and we had one of our silent conversations.

It’s not that bad, right?

Totally not that bad.

I let out a breath and glanced behind Colleen to my parents. Dad’s eyes were steadily on the floor so he wouldn’t accidentally look at the external fixator and need to sit with his head between his legs again. Mom gave me a smile I knew she meant to be reassuring but was 100 percent not.

“When can I dance?” I repeated loudly. The doctor startled, put down the charts, and sat on the stool next to my bed.

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” he said, looking at my leg and chuckling. “Pun not intended.” When no one reacted, he cleared his throat. “You’ll be bed to chair for a couple of weeks until we get you out of that external fixator and into a cast. A few months after that, you can start learning to walk again.”

If he wasn’t going to answer my question, I’d figure it out myself. I did some mental calculations. The American Ballet Theatre summer intensive in New York was in July. Four months from now. If I was walking in a couple of months, I could dance in four. “That means I can still do the ballet intensive in July,” I said. “I can still go.”

My parents shifted and the doctor sighed. “Alina,” he said carefully. “If it was a clean break, your bones could have healed naturally. You might have been able to dance on pointe in four months. But it wasn’t a clean break.”

He stopped talking, like that explained everything. When I kept staring at him, he sighed again. “We needed to put in sixteen screws and two plates to keep your bones together. That hardware is meant to stay in there forever. It means your leg won’t be as strong or flexible as—”