Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson Page B

makes her blush.
    He zips up his bag. “I’m sorry.” She can see he means it.
    Now Christopher looks at her. His eyes look darker, deeper set, with the slight smudges beneath them. The old swooning feeling comes back to her. Only it is changed. She feels a vertiginous swell of something for this long-faced counterfeit prince. She knows now though that it is not love. What is it?
    â€œThat guy? Watching you that first day? I know him. I remember him. He comes around David Howard’s.” He begins lacing up his high-top sneakers. “Be careful of him. He’s a creep.” Now he doesn’t smile. He looks at her with his bruised-looking eyes. “There are creeps everywhere. The perverts are the ones who get caught.”
    He pauses in the doorway and turns back around. “Ballet is not about me. It’s about you. You’ll see. Ballet is woman. That’s what Balanchine said.” He reaches in his pocket and holds out the eyeliner pencil. “Here,” he says. “It’s almost finished anyway. Try to get it right under your eye, otherwise it looks lame. It gives your eyes depth. If you burn it first, then let it cool for a minute, it’s even darker.”
    She takes the pencil from him.
    He turns and walks down the hallway to the elevator. She watches him go, her fist clenched around the little hard nub of a pencil.
    She stops by the dressing room on the way out to get her coat. The room is deserted except for Robin, who has stayed after the older girls’ class to practice, no doubt, and is changing into her street clothes. Robin is naked. She has never seen Robin naked before—she usually arrives from school already with leotard and tights on underneath her street clothes. Her body is long and extremely white, more substantive than it appears in leotard and tights. Her nipples, big as raspberries, sit directly on her ribs.
    There are two bright red spots on her pale cheeks.
    Robin nods at Mira and begins pulling on a pair of jeans without any underwear.
    Mira stands awkwardly in the center of the room for a moment. Then she surprises herself by walking up to Robin. “Are you going to audition?” Mira asks. Robin hunches over a bit and peers at Mira as if she is surprised to find her there. Mira realizes she has made a big mistake: she has come too close to Robin. But she doesn’t want to move back. If she moves back it will somehow be admitting she made a mistake to begin with. She and Robin are practically pressed up together. She can smell the certain combination of flowers and salt that she associates with those older than she is, with a next phase of life. She is dizzy with being so close to Robin’s long flat body, milky skin, and raspberry nipples.
    Robin’s face looks beautiful in the weak, dusty light of the space—long and pale, big eyes, and a strange grimace. Her voice—which Mira realizes she has never heard—is a whisper. “In the fall? Sure. But just for SAB this time. I haven’t heard such good things about the ABT school.”
    â€œMe, too,” Mira says. She can’t believe that she’s speaking to Robin. She pictures the old man with the glittering woman on his arm.
    Then another whisper from inside a see-through undershirt Mira has seen men but never women wear: “How many times have you tried before?”
    â€œNone,” Mira says.
    â€œReally? Most girls start auditioning at five or six. When I was your age, I had already auditioned four times.”
    Mira sees what her mother’s lack of vigilance has cost her—all the missed opportunities. At the same time, she’s amazed that Robin, perfect Robin who had played the Flower Princess for two years in a row, didn’t get in. Her face fills with blood. She doesn’t know where to look.
    â€œLook,” Robin says.
    In her palm, Robin holds a purple plastic square the size of a Cracker Jack box prize. Robin is