Beautiful Americans Page 3

  Located on the outskirts of Paris, the Paris Opera Ballet School houses the best young dancers in the world. They live and breathe ballet and have to be absolutely committed to a life of dance.

  Today I’m trying out for the non-residential program of the Paris Opera Ballet School, the program that allows the students to go to regular school but also get top-notch ballet training. Best of all, classes are at the Opéra Garnier, right in the center of Paris.

  “Pour les danseuses avancées,” the young teacher’s assistant guides me toward a group of ballerinas gathered to one side of the basement studio.

  I should be a shoo-in, but when I see the other girls, I’m nervous. They are teeny—the size of twelve-year-olds—and each of them wears a simple, long-sleeved leotard with pink tights and pink toe shoes. Since I abhor pink (I always have) and hate the way bright colors take away from the technique I’m cultivating as I practice, I always go to ballet class in all black. And being from California, long sleeves feel binding and hot. I immediately see, however, that my cute halter leotard, my black leggings, and black pointe shoes make me stand out, even before I’ve had a chance to show off my dancing.

  I smooth my bun and take a place in the front of the group. I relax my face so that I’m smiling—just a little—and cock my head to the right, and to the left, so that my body draws a clean line through space. I keep my fingers soft and never let my face show how tightly I’m hanging on to keep my center.

  The ballet matron’s face is stern while she watches my dancing. She finally breaks into a grin when I leap into my final grand jeté, my legs doing a full split in the air before I land softly onto the wooden floor of the studio, chalky with ballet resin.

  When the music ends, I mop my forehead and wait for the matron’s decision. Long ago, in my auditions for everything from The Nutcracker to the avant-garde student productions at San Diego State (my mom never lets me miss an opportunity to perform), I learned to keep still while waiting to see if you’re in. One tiny movement, the tiniest bit of fidgeting, and the other girls know how badly you want it, how unsure you are that you really deserve it. Let them crack into your insecurity once, and it takes forever to get it back. I wait, frozen, my face impassive.

  “Oui!” she calls as she points to me and has her assistant check off my name on her master list. Mme Rouille, fanning herself on the sidelines of the hot studio, gives me the first smile I’ve seen yet from her. Happy to have pleased her, I finally let myself beam back. A huge flood of relief and elation warms my whole body.

  I can’t wait to tell Vince how I nailed it. Two years from now, I’ll be at UCLA right alongside him, just like we’ve always planned. It’s real now. It’s happening!

  Back at the apartment, the first thing I do (after stretching and cooling down my muscles, of course) is adjust the time on my travel clock. As soon as the numbers change to 5:00 P.M.—8:00 A.M. in California—I want to run out and call Vince from one of the payphones on the Champs Elysées. Driving down the famous boulevard on the way to the Opera earlier, I saw a large block of France Telecom phone booths just across from the Arc de Triomphe, and as far as I can gauge, that’s a quick walk from Ternes. I’m not yet comfortable enough with my host mother to ask if I can use her phone, even if I’m using a calling card. Besides, I want to talk to Vince in private.

  The second thing I do is hang my Martha Graham Dance Company poster on one of the bare walls in my new room. It’s an old black-and-white photo of Martha Graham herself, her skirt swirling around her, her face lit up with exhilaration. Then I hang up all the photos I brought with me, until my little bedroom is covered with images of Vince, my mom, my dad, and my little brother, Brian.

  There’s only one photo I don’t hang up—a close-up of Vince taken on the Fourth of July this year. I put this photo in my purse so I can look at it whenever I want to.

  It takes a few tries for Vince to answer his phone. I impatiently stand up on my toes, then down again as it rings, looking through the smudged glass of the phone booth at the bustling, crowded Champs Elysées. The wide avenue, with busy traffic lanes going either direction, is flanked on either side with every major retailer (Gap, Sephora, Prada, and dozens upon dozens of others) and large cafes with tables and crowds spilling onto the sidewalk. It’s oddly comforting to be here, despite how hectic it is. I can hear plenty of English being spoken by the tourists ambling across the roundabout toward the Arc de Triomphe and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. As the sun starts to go down, the tourists unwrap the wind breakers tied around their waists and slip them on to avoid the chilly September evening breeze. They look out of place, just the way I feel.

  “Ugh, baby, what time is it?” Vince groans when he finally picks up. The gravelly sound of his voice makes me feel like I’m curled up in bed next to him and not thousands of miles away.

  “I rocked my audition today!” I shout. “I made it into the advanced class!”

  “The what?” Vince asks groggily. “You went to dance class? Hold on.”

  In the background, I hear Vince grunt and then a door closing. “Hey, I’m back,” he says. “My roommate looked pissed about me waking him up so early. I’m in the bathroom now.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I say. “I guess I thought you’d be awake by now. Don’t you have class today?”

  “Yeah,” Vince says. “I do. But we were out late at some athletes’ meet and greet. Got pretty wild. You know, hazing for the new guys and all that.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s cool.” Vince is starting to sound more awake. “I’m really glad you called. How are you?”

  “I’m good.” I smile to myself. All I want to do is snuggle into his arms, wrap myself in his morning boy smell, which always makes me instantly calm. “Tired. I can’t believe I’m really here.”

  “I can’t either,” Vince sighs. “I wish we could rewind to last weekend.”

  My spine tingles when he says that. Last weekend, I’d gone to visit Vince at UCLA. As a prospective student, I was supposed to stay in the dorm room of a sophomore dance major, but it had been easy to talk her into letting me stay in Vince’s room after my mom had called the dorm to say goodnight. While Vince’s roommate partied with some of the other guys from their basketball team, Vince and I had stayed up all night making out in his twin bed.

  Inevitably, what with Vince being in college now, and me about to leave for a year, we’d discussed having sex for the first time, but in the end I told him I wanted to wait. Now, talking on the phone to him from so far away and him sounding so sad, I kind of wish I hadn’t left without doing it with him. Vince might start to think I didn’t want to, which I did. I was just scared. And I didn’t want to risk his oaf roommate walking in on us! But God, I miss him so badly right now, I feel like I’d risk anything. . . .

  “Oh, me too,” I breathe. “I miss you so much.”

  I can hear Vince peeing over the phone, the steady stream echoing in his empty dorm bathroom. I’m glad he feels so close to me, but ew. He lets out a deep breath. “Much better. So tell me what Paris is like.”

  I’m about to describe it to him when I see a familiar face in the crowd of passing tourists on the Champs Elysées. It’s PJ from the program! That’s weird. I hope she doesn’t see me. I don’t feel like making small talk right now. I feel like gloating with Vince about my victory today.

  “It’s okay,” I say distractedly. “How’s school?”

  Vince starts telling me how hard one of his classes is while I watch PJ walk into an adjacent café. Mme Cuchon did say she lives near here, too. But shouldn’t she be eating dinner with her host family? Besides, the cafés on the Champs Elysées are a total rip-off. Even Alex wouldn’t eat in them, I’m sure. The pricey food they are bringing out to the tourist families is dripping with cheap grease.

  “Uh-huh,” I murmur as Vince continues. PJ walks out of the café with a despairing look on her face. Looks like she realized how much that place cost. It feels like she is looking straight at
me with those big, haunted eyes! I turn around and face the other direction so she won’t recognize me from the drive over to the Lycée.

  “Yeah, totally,” I say to Vince as PJ goes into the next phone booth over.

  “Well,” I say when Vince’s story is over, “I think my phone card is almost out. I should let you get to class.”

  “Okay,” Vince says. “I love you. Call me tomorrow if you can.”

  “Okay, babe, love you too.”

  I hang up and lean against the glass partition of the phone booth, overcome with weariness and homesickness. It’s physical, like a rock in my gut. I didn’t want to say goodbye, but talking to Vince like this isn’t the same as talking to him from my bedroom at home, being able to flirt with him and tell him how much I miss him and having him say all the right things back to me. It’s uncomfortable in here, leaned up against the dirty glass, watching unfriendly-looking strangers, trying to avoid people from my program and feeling guilty about it. Not exactly the best setting for sweet nothings.

  “Oh, my God!” I blurt out. Out of the corner of my eye, I see PJ through the partition—she’s slumped on the floor of the next phone booth over, passed out. I pop out of my own phone booth and pull the door to hers open with a loud bang. Passersby slow down and stare at us.

  “PJ! It’s Olivia. I’m in your program. We met today, remember?” I shake her awake. I’m reminded of my brother, Brian, of all the times I can’t get through to him.

  PJ rubs her eyes exhaustedly and looks up at me. “Oh, hey.”

  “Are you okay?” I literally thought that my heart was, like, going to fly out of my chest.

  “Um, yeah,” PJ says, looking around, embarrassed. She pulls her brown cardigan tightly around her thin frame. “I don’t really know what just happened. . . . I was so tired. . . . I need to make a phone call. . . .”

  “Why aren’t you at your host family’s house?”

  PJ opens her mouth to speak, then clasps her lips shut without saying anything. She shakes her head, her chin trembling.

  “What?” I prompt her. “What is it? You can tell me.”

  She closes her eyes. “They never showed. They never came to the Lycée to get me.”

  “I don’t understand. What did Mme Cuchon say?”

  “She doesn’t know. There was so much going on with everyone that I just decided to go to the address she had me listed under in the orientation packets she handed out today. But no one was home. When I went back to the Lycée, Mme Cuchon was gone, too.” PJ readjusts herself so that she’s more upright and combs through her blonde hair with her grubby fingers. Her voice might sound brave and resigned to her fate, but her glassy blue eyes betray deep fear.

  “Are you kidding? Mme Cuchon doesn’t know that you’re homeless?”

  PJ nods. “I couldn’t find her.”

  “Give me your orientation packet,” I instruct her. “We’re calling Madame right now. What were you going to do? Sleep in the phone booth?”

  “I was just so tired from the flight,” PJ mutters. “And all the hotels around here cost so much money. . . . I tried to get some coffee to stay awake, but that costs too much money, too. . . .” Her blonde head bobs forward as she nods off again. I reach toward her backpack so that I can get out Mme Cuchon’s number.

  With a start, she yanks her head back up straight. “Don’t call Madame. I really don’t want to cause any trouble. Please don’t call her. Please.” PJ’s bright blue eyes start to well up with tears.

  I have to say that of all the homeless people I’ve ever seen trying to sleep in a phone booth, PJ has got to be the most stunningly beautiful.

  “Alright, alright,” I say, shaking my head and taking my hand off the closure of the backpack. “But you’re definitely coming with me back to my homestay. You’re crazy if you think you’re sleeping here all night. Let’s go.”

  I pull her up—she’s shockingly light for being so tall—and hoist her oversize canvas pack onto my back. “You look like you’ve been dragging this thing around for long enough. Let’s just get you to my apartment.” I smile around confidently at the onlookers and lead PJ toward Ternes. “Everything’s going to be alright, I promise.”

  “Okay,” PJ says, probably too exhausted to protest any longer.

  3. PJ

  Broken Homes, Broken Hearts

  It’s too early in the fall to wear my dad’s old brown wool cardigan, my favorite of his with the elbow patches, leather-covered buttons, and the dusty smell. I think it belonged to his dad, ages ago. I pull the cardigan out of my shoulder bag and put it on anyway, even if it does look weird, since I can’t seem to escape the chill in the classroom where we’re all gathered at the Lycée on Monday morning. I wonder if I have a minute to call Dave. If not now, when will I get the chance? I feel like there’s no possible way I’m going to get through the rest of the morning if I can’t at least duck out for a minute.

  “So, how’s your homestay?” Olivia asks Alex as she points and flexes her tiny bare feet stretched out in front of her in the aisle between their desks. Point, flex. Point, flex. Alex fixes her gaze at Olivia’s weathered feet, then back at her own perfectly buffed and polished ones, the purple nail polish contrasting against her gold Greek sandals. Flushed, Olivia curls her legs under her chair.

  It’s our very first day of school at the Lycée. I’m sitting with Alex and Olivia in the back of Room 102, the room at the school designated to the Programme Americaine, eating the gooey French pastries the school provided as a chance for all the twenty-five students to mingle before our real classes begin later on this morning. Alex and Olivia are the only people I’ve actually met so far, and neither of them probably has the greatest impression of me. After all, Alex had to loan me money to get here, and Olivia found me asleep in a phone booth last night.

  The flaky chausson aux pommes is the first food I’ve had since the reheated breakfast they served on the flight yesterday morning. I should be ravenous, but the buttery pastry tastes like ash in my mouth. When I set it back down after one bite, Alex looks at me curiously.

  “You don’t want it?” she asks. When I shake my head no, she reaches out and pops a piece into her mouth.

  “Hmmm,” Alex says, chewing happily. “You’re missing out, PJ—this chausson is incredible!”

  I sip my bitter coffee out of the paper cup, giving her a thin smile.

  Olivia reaches into her light blue Jansport backpack and pulls out the two bananas she got on our way from her apartment to school this morning. “They’re a little bruised, but they still look okay to me. Would you rather have one of these, PJ?”

  I force myself to choke down Olivia’s pasty banana, just because she’s so nice and I have a feeling she’ll pester me to eat something until I do.

  “Are you on a diet, Olivia?” Alex asks, wiping her greasy, buttery fingers onto a paper napkin. “Is that why you are so thin?”

  I can’t help wondering the same thing. When everyone rushed toward the bakery platter a few minutes ago, Olivia held back. She didn’t even take any tea or coffee, even though I know she tossed and turned in the bed we slept in together last night. We both did. That’s why I keep going up for refills.

  That and because I can’t seem to sit still. I can’t shake the feeling that the other girls can already tell how different from them I am.

  Olivia looks embarrassed. “No! No way,” she insists. “I just try to keep my diet as pure as possible. No carbs, no refined sugar. I don’t really like to eat anything heavy. It makes dance class that much harder.” Olivia is petite, about a foot shorter than me, with every inch of her small shape covered in tanned, freckly skin. Her blonde ponytail bounces as she talks to us.

  “Not me,” Alex pipes in cheerfully. “Butter and salt are my favorite foods. French women never diet. They believe in moderated indulgence.” She pops another bite of chausson into her mouth.

  “So you’re a dancer? A ballerina? Quelle surprise. No wonder you’re always bending all your bones
everywhere.” Alex raises her eyebrows at Olivia, who is indeed folded into a mini-pretzel in her chair.

  “I can’t help it!” she says. “I know it’s nasty. Everyone tells me that.”

  Last night I couldn’t tear my eyes off Olivia as she stretched in her pajamas before bed—it was like being at the circus. Olivia has got to be the freakiest, most flexible, double-jointed person I have ever seen in my life, let alone shared a room with.

  “I’m so sore,” she laughed, spread out on the floor in an old UCLA T-shirt and an oversize pair of plaid boxers I assumed belonged to the boy in all the pictures on her walls. Her nose touched the Persian rug as she leaned over her split. “These Parisian ballet teachers are brutal! I better watch it before I get injured.”

  “How can you keep dancing when it hurts your body so much?” I asked her.

  Her response was muffled by the rug. “Oh, I could never stop,” she said, then considered for a moment. “Well, I mean, one day, I guess I’ll have to.” She looked up at her Martha Graham poster. “All I know is that it’s the only thing I’m good at, and right now, dancing is key to getting everything else that I want in life.”

  Olivia twisted her hips around, contortionist-style, so that she was doing the splits in the other direction. I nearly gagged at how excruciating it looked. Olivia seemed used to it, though.

  “It seems like you’re good at speaking French,” I contested, though I hadn’t at that point heard her speak any French at all.

  Olivia lifted her head and looked at me. “I don’t mean to sound conceited,” she said. The blood drained from her face. “But I’m really good at ballet. Scholarship good. If it weren’t for my brother . . .” she trailed off.

  “What?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “I mean, maybe I am good at other things. But I wouldn’t know—I’ve never really done other things,” Olivia explained. “It’s not like I have stage parents—it’s just that we’re all really counting on me getting this scholarship to UCLA. I’m really close to my family. I can’t wait to go home for the three-week break at Christmas.” She looks wistfully at a photo of herself with her family at the beach.