The Ballet Academy

In the few minutes between classes, the dancers linger in the tight open-air space between the classrooms, suck on cheap sugar in different forms, and mindlessly look at their phones. With different shades of skin and wildly malleable, they dangle from the steps like girly spiders, changing from their jazz tights to their ballet tights, from their black slippers to their pink.

“Ugh, he’s so beautiful.”

Along with the common folk, he too changes here–rushed and clearly busy with errands if not teaching, but still prioritizing small talk with the girlies: “How is your hip feeling this week?” “How was your trip to Cuernavaca?”

Sometimes I linger there before or after a class so I can see him. We both strip off our street clothing and pretend it’s the only occasion it happens, while we reveal the underwear we will sport for the day, not breaking eye contact as we make small talk. He takes his shirt off to reveal suspenders.

There are many gadgets for protecting the penis while dancing, I’ve learned. He has a layer of what appears like baby fat over his muscles. Soft. Which means he’s not cut; instead, he’s raw and dense. He stands up tall and puffs out his chest in a feminine way that tells you that he’s aware, he’s soft while hard and tall while short and is working on it constantly. Many hours, every day, working on being a breath-taking contradiction.

A fatal attraction.

I marvel at him, thinking about how much I love to sink my fingers into his fat, multiple layers of flesh and nerves and blood, coating like sugar the organs working hard underneath. What an amazing story a body tells. Of both a lifetime and a week. In fact, I know about something he did this week that nobody else does, or does he tell her everything? How many things does she know about his week that nobody else knows about? I swat away the thought and try to return to the butteriness of the daydream, but it’s gone. When will I see him again?

“Have you seen that he has a fan page?”

“Whaaa--t?” I finally realize the voices are coming from outside my own head.

“God, he’s so BEAUTIFUL!!... ” I hear the voice shriek this time. It’s the new girl, Lianna. She is quite young, seventeen or eighteen. I caught myself once thinking about how she and he are closer in age than he and I are, remembering warmly the limitations of love and lust as a teenager.

“Have you seen Emma in our ballet classes? She practically gets hypnotized while he talks. We can never get the choreography right for anything.”

Three girls surrounding Lianna giggle airily like the petals of a pansy, plopping out nuggets of gossip like droplets of morning dew, all peering into Lianna’s phone as if into a crystal ball. I see Tessa pluck herself off as the rest of the girls shrivel dramatically, his beauty literally taking their breath away.

“Of course he has a fan page… ” she groans as she plops back down and returns to laboring on her pointe shoes, “He’s how the Miss recruits newbies.”

The matrix twitched and we all pretended not to notice.

As part of the more advanced group of students, Tessa spends way more time around both him and the Miss, more than anyone else here. She knows firsthand how weird their relationship is.

While at first it seems like he gets special treatment just for being a babe, which is annoying but nothing too exceptional, over time you realize it’s all an illusion; he’s her babe. The Miss has cast him as the protagonist of our lives. The girly spider pansies and I are the myriad of swans doing infinite passés en el fondo, each one hoping the prince notices us among the rest.

I include my head into the pansy formation. I was wondering why they were calling it a “fan page,” which to me feels an outdated term, but it’s literally part of the handle: Chad’sFanPage. A space dedicated to sharing his sheer beauty and talent with the world, Hashtag Male Ballerina. Hashtag Beautiful.

The page displays a bizarre mix of photos of him over a timeline of a few years: In one, he’s wearing a dark blue velvet blouse with lace dangling off the sleeves, one hand upon his heart and his other hand unimportant to the story arc, his lips seem to be carrying the weight of his entire head up to the sky. In another, he’s wearing a COVID mask, amicably squinting his eyes so you can tell he is smiling at us from underneath, despite everything, with the caption “Your health is the number one priority!” It gives off… civic labor? Public good? Why is this kid giving off fatherly vibes? Like, actually, why? Further down, he’s dressed and painted like Rama and has contorted his half-naked body into the form of a pretzel. Clearly not of his free will, but not opposed to it either. Nevertheless, someone’s brilliant idea. A seventeen-year-old exudes the wisdom of an ancient prince.

“What is this?” I think, truly baffled. It’s not the fan page that irks me so much as the confusing feeling it gives off. Between each professional photo are blurry lazy ones, used as mere vehicles for the corny captions tacked to them. I read the captions again, looking for a sign: “If your path is difficult, it is because your mission is more purposeful than you thought”... "We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret"...

The letters are moving. My heart sinks. He trusts her way too much. You can see in his eyes a force that is blunt and malleable. So, so malleable. I want to save him so badly.

The Academy doors burst open. It’s the Miss, her nose dragging the rest of herself inside like a freak dragging roadkill into a home. “Where the fuck is everyone?” she screams and demands simultaneously.

See, It’s an annoying question because where we are is in the indulgent world she’s curated for us in this “fan page”: Chad’s flesh, spirit and soul bent into different fantastic figures just so that she could get our panties in a bunch, or hers--frankly I don’t really know anymore, but I’m tired of being yelled at by a grown ass woman.

The girls spring up from their centers and stutter into the classroom like seagulls. No, I don’t blame them. I have lived eight more lives. That’s why I can see things that only she, too, can. There is a logic to their scattering; the panic they apparently exude is mostly an emotional display of an apology. That’s how much fear permeates the air, and spirit—which, by the way, is made of air.

The girls scramble into their designated spots. The Miss has curated our default formation with precise knowledge and measurements of each girls’ body.

I was in the back right side of the formation that day she asked me, “What’s wrong with you today, my Warrior?” “I have an infection rising from my urinary tract through my kidneys and up to my heart, and I don’t fucking know you,” is what I would have said had I not been too afraid to go to the doctor to find out what was wrong with me, and had I not been afraid of upsetting my secret boy’s ting… Or was it because I wanted her to like me? Maybe it felt good to hear her call me that. Or maybe I just wanted to be part of his world, no matter what I needed to do.

Whatever. I sling my bag over my right shoulder, determined to leave. I don’t come here to do ballet. I come here to see Chad. And that’s the most honest I’ve been all day.

I don’t plan to look into the classroom as I pass by but I do, and of course I will. Gazes are intense like that. Hers, especially. Time slows down as she addresses the girls and maintains eye contact with me: “Chad could not make it to teach class today. He is busy doing me a favor.” Faces betray their truth by showing no sign of betrayal. Just like good little faces do. “Now, who is going to show me the first exercise?”

I do not release my gaze until I absolutely must, until the old asbestos-ridden walls of the Academy violently pierce into my view, as with a pirouette. I push the Academy doors open and step out defiantly onto the rainy bustling street. Vloop. That’s my umbrella.

It’s settled then. I must take her down.

_______________

Ballet pink is one of those traditions we kept up as a society, despite having forgotten completely what the point was: Ballet dancers only look naked in Europe. Everywhere else, they look like they’re wearing skin.

The technique taught at my Ballet Academy is Cuban, alleges the Miss. Extra skin-ny. Not skinny. There’s a fine line.

The uncharacteristically-tall-and-dapper-for-these-parts vendor at my local ballet store tries to sell me pink ballet slippers over the black ones again, “ooh”ing and “ahh”ing at what a precious color it is.

“Mmmhm, it sure is, but I’m going to take the black ones. Gracias.” The pink ones become black in a week if you actually use them anyway, but skin color covered in dirt is not ballet black. Ballet Black must be bought in its blackness, and Ballet Pink must remain pink, albeit an impossible task. Ballet is black and white, Miss says. It’s not philosophy. It’s physics that requires that you also believe.

Something in my world is rupturing. This is Ballet Pink in Cuba, too? Why can’t it pop more? Like an echinacea flower. Or the vagina of another. No, I really want the black. I want to train and train and train and train in black. I want the elegance of a ninja in lieu of the lie of flesh. I’m obsessed with the grimy truth, and I hate lies like I hate death.

Why does this all seem so big?

________________________

“I love his eyes. I want to lick his gigantic almond eyes… ” is what I am thinking as I watch him delicately tuck and prod each girl in class through the corner of my eye: He grabs each side of Janet’s torso from the side and lifts her high to the sky from the waist line, “Do you feel that?” Drool. “Now you need to continue doing this on your own. I’m gonna let go… ” a feather... He gets down on his knees and applies pressure to the outer borders of Susie’s feet, while encouraging her to also dig her heels into the ground.

“Use your toes! Your feet are hands! Your toes are fingers!”

In Spanish, the word for toes and fingers is the same. De-dos, De-dos. The translation could have gone as follows:

“May the digits of your feet resemble the dexterity of your hands!”

That’s beautiful, and I’m sweating. I’m always sweating here. There’s no A/C. The rooms are tiny and dusty. There’s a fan blowing in the corner, but half the population is afraid of fans. And most of all, ballet is hard. Bursts of sheer energy until you’re vibrating while being still, it’s the closest we’ve come to flying… You can’t let go. No falling or you have to start over. Only upon a Miss or Mister’s “Gracias” to the collective may we loosen our muscles and return to our bodies for a moment before the next divine and physically challenging exercise.

I feel him smile softly behind me. I don’t know if he smiles slightly upon appearing behind everybody. Maybe.

“Las pompis, Fatima.” Your butt cheeks.

It’s our inside joke. My thick juicy ass is not the most conducive to ballet, given the objective is to make your body look like one straight line. Yet it is beauty and, despite its rotundness, it too is grace. Cognitive dissonance for many-a-soul, but I believe he is one of few who actually has what it takes.

I quickly correct my form and immediately wish I had acted with more grace than to rush, but never mind. It’s not as simple as tucking the pelvis in. It’s about counterbalance. I create a ball in my pelvis and push down with my legs as I gear the other end of my spine towards the sky. He admires the corrections I make on my own. I’ve learned a lot from him.

What’s difficult about ballet is implementing all the techniques for all the different body parts at the same time. You see it in photos all the time: Everything is absolutely perfect about your arabesque, but your hands look like the Hamburger Monster’s. Your turnout is amazing, but your face looks like when a baby waddles to the corner of the room, holds onto something, crouches down, and takes a shit. A surreal and frightening combination, really.

“Don’t forget…” he grabs my ponytail and pulls it up, “...to lift up from the crown of your head.”

I nod without nodding, since I can’t, and he lingers there, pulling my crown up to the heavens, maintaining that height as he makes a half circle around me. We tango for a second and..

He’s gone.

I hate her.

After class, I linger a bit so I can at least walk him to her house. He has a huge bag filled to the brim, bursting at the seams. With what? Toilet paper? Art supplies? Are they making costumes with glue guns all night? When I ask, he makes a face, as if to say, “You’re asking too many questions again. I don’t need to tell everyone everything, but I do want you to understand–my work is more than work. I’m walking a path. I need to put in the work.”

“Okay, but to what end, seniorito?” I ask, feeling desperate, sincerely. I watch his beautiful, big almond eyes become a cursor blinking back at me, a calculator communicating its nothingness, animated yet only with potential, like I’d clicked Clear instead of having asked a powerful and important question. I cry and continue to walk home after I drop off my princeso–the princeso.

The swans en el fondo are actually tiny baby stars. I am a shooting star. The first one is always pretty cool, but after a while–meh. Having shot through, water pierces my lungs and spills out of my mouth as I pull myself out of the quicksand of time, have a short rest before I embark on another odyssey to another backdrop. My life is exhausting.

________________________________________________

Before we let our souls dance, we talk.

“Today, I heard Tessa say that you go out with the girls at the Academy so that you can wring them into the Academy and the Miss can pay her bills. Did you do that with me?”

“Fatima–of course not. How could you even ask me that?” he says.

“Why wouldn’t I ask you? Why can’t I ask you?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean it. Sure, you can ask me.” He unbuttons my blouse and traces my abs. He tugs on my lacey red bra strap, as if to say, “Hey. What’s wrong? Isn’t this what we do?”

“Why should I believe you?” I ask. Determined. Like a kid, I feel the blood in my face.

“You don’t have to. Everyone is allowed to believe what they wish to believe.”

“Ah-ha” I nod skeptically.

Afterwards, I watch him get dressed in a hurry while he looks at the notifications on his dumb watch. “I’m late getting back,” he says, insinuating he let himself go. It’s 10:45pm. What is he late getting back to? He is already a cheating husband, and yet he’s just a kid.

I wish they were fucking. This is some much darker shit.

“Isn’t it kind of funny to make slippers that are the same color as feet?” I say, giddy with oxytocin.

He looks at me with his mouth slightly ajar. He looks like a cartoon. I remember he’s just a boy.

“Never mind,” I smile… “You can let yourself out, right?” He kisses me on the cheek and scatters off like one of the girlies.

I listen for the pitter-patter of his feet quickly sprinting down those cheesy laminate wood steps and the bang of the front door–It’s not personal–the door is a gate is a door. I reach over and turn off the light. You win, I think, and wonder if she can hear me. Honestly, who the fuck knows.