As I slipped my feet under the elastic and wrapped the ribbons around my ankles, a feeling of power zipped through me. I’d cleaned the rods sticking out of my bones every day so they didn’t get infected. I’d injected myself with blood thinner so I didn’t get clots. I’d done all Birdie’s exercises. I’d done everything I was supposed to, all so I could dance on pointe again.

I went to the basement and dragged my plywood practice board away from the wall, lowering it carefully to the floor. I stepped onto pointe with my left leg, wobbling from rustiness but getting a good balance after a few tries. I inhaled and transferred my weight gently to my right leg.

The pain was unnatural. Like a sharp metal claw scraping against my bones. I fell to the floor in shock, landing hard on my left knee.

I tried again. Another burst of metallic pain. Another fall. Again. And again. And again. Until my knees were red and raw and my face dripped with sweat and snot and tears. It wasn’t the pain that made me cry. It was the doctor’s words all those months ago in the hospital. The ones that seemed so impossible.

When something breaks like that, you can’t put it back together so easily. And when you do, it won’t be the same.

That was when I knew, for absolute certain, that the bizarre, beautiful magic of ballet was gone forever.

It took me a second to register that Jude was still kneeling in front of me, staring at my ankle. “Does it still hurt?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

Yes. It hurt all over, it hurt everywhere. I opened my mouth to yell that at him, but before I could take a breath, the anger seeped out of me, and I got a new urge. To tell him about that night in the basement. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I bent forward, grasped the cuff of my jeans, and rolled it up, revealing my scars.

The one on the outside of my leg was king. Eight inches long, framed by little dots where the staples had held my skin together. The one in front was tiny in comparison, just four inches of raised, jagged skin. The last two were indentations in my shin, where the metal rods of the external fixator had been rooted into my bones.

Jude’s eyes grew as he took it all in. Then they turned gentle, like they usually were, and he finally looked back up at me.

I felt my cheeks warm. No one besides my family and Birdie and the doctors had seen my scars. And I’d shown Jude. Jude.