Balance

I should have hated Nick Mercer.

Standing beside his grave, I tried.

The rain tapped softly against the black umbrellas gathered around the cemetery. Pastor Mercer stood at the head of his son's casket and spoke about hope, and heaven, and the kind of peace that didn't make any sense when you were staring at a hole in the ground.

I heard none of it.

All I could think about was the boy in the casket. The boy who had broken my heart, and saved my life, and then taken it apart.

My left hand tightened around the handle of my cane. My right hand pressed against the side of my dress, where the hem brushed the carbon fiber curve of my prosthetic leg.

Nick would have noticed. He noticed everything.

He would have leaned close and whispered, "You're locking your knee again."

I would have rolled my eyes and said, "You're annoying."

And he would have smiled like annoying me was his favorite thing in the world.

But he was gone.

Pastor Mercer's voice cracked on the final prayer.

That was what nearly broke me. Not the casket. Not the rain. Not even Nick's mother folding into herself like someone had cut the strings holding her upright.

It was his father, the man who had preached at half the funerals in Grace, Georgia, losing the words at his own son's.

"Goodbye, Nick," I whispered.

Then I turned and walked away before they lowered him into the ground.

Three days later, the letter came.

My mother brought it to my room and stood in the doorway like she was holding something fragile.

"Ellie," she said, "this came for you."

I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my prosthetic leg unstrapped beside me. My old pointe shoes hung from the mirror across the room, their ribbons faded, the toes scuffed from a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

I took the envelope.

Brown University.

For a second, my chest forgot how to rise.

Before the accident, Brown had been everything. It meant leaving Grace, a dance program with studios whose windows ran floor to ceiling, teachers whose names mattered. It meant I was more than the girl from a small town where everybody knew what church you went to and whether your daddy paid the water bill on time. Brown meant escape.

There was a girl at Mrs. Theresa's studio, six or seven, who used to wait by the barre while I rehearsed. One Saturday she asked if I would show her how to do the turn I'd just done. I remember saying I would, later, when I had a minute. I remember the minute never coming, and how good it felt to be the one other people waited on. I didn't think about her again until much later.

I slid my finger beneath the flap.

They had heard about my recovery. They had reviewed my previous scholarship application. They wanted to invite me to audition again.

Again. As if the first version of me might still be waiting somewhere. As if she had only stepped out of the room for a minute.

Mom smiled carefully. "That's wonderful, baby."

I stared at the words until they blurred. Audition date: Saturday.

My mother sat beside me. "You don't have to decide now."

"I'm not going."

She flinched, but only a little. She had become good at that since the accident. She set a glass of water on my nightstand I hadn't asked for and left her hand there.

"Okay," she said.

That made me angrier. Okay. As if anything about this was okay.

I crumpled the letter and threw it toward the trash can. It missed and landed beside my old dance bag.

"I'm not her anymore," I said.

Mom followed my gaze to the pointe shoes.

"No," she said softly. "You're not."

I hated her for agreeing. Then I hated myself for hating her.

After she left, I stared at the letter on the floor. Five months earlier, I would have given anything for that envelope. I would have skipped dinner. Rehearsed until my toes bled.

Then a car crossed the center line on a wet road. Metal folded around me. I woke up in a hospital bed and screamed at the empty space beneath the blanket where my right leg should have been.

Everyone said I was lucky to be alive.

I wanted to ask them what part of me was supposed to feel lucky.

The first time I met Nick Mercer, he was leaning on a walker in the rehab gym, wearing a cast on his left arm and smiling like physical therapy was a church picnic.

"You're Ellie Woods," he said.

I kept both hands on the parallel bars and glared at the floor. "Congratulations. You can read the schedule."

"I'm Nick."

"I know who you are."

Everyone knew Nick Mercer. Pastor's son. Honor roll. The kind of boy adults pointed to when they wanted you to feel like you had not lived up to your full potential.

He glanced down at my leg, then immediately looked back at my face.

I appreciated that.

"I heard you dance," he said.

"Danced."

He tilted his head. "That sounds like past tense."

"That's because I understand grammar."

He laughed. Actually laughed.

My therapist told me to take another step. My hands tightened around the bars. The prosthetic felt wrong. Heavy. Foreign. Like I had strapped someone else's idea of a leg onto the end of my grief.

I tried to move. My knee buckled. I fell hard.

The whole gym went quiet. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me before anyone could say something kind.

Nick moved first. Not fast. He couldn't move fast then. But he got to me, awkward and determined, and lowered himself beside me.

"You okay?" he asked.

"No."

"Fair."

I looked at him then. He wasn't smiling anymore.

That was the first time I liked him. A little.

Over the next few weeks, Nick became impossible to avoid. He was there when I learned stairs, there when I threw a towel across the gym because I couldn't get my balance right and a little girl with two working legs skipped past me without knowing she had just ruined my entire morning.

Nick never told me things happened for a reason. He never said I was inspiring. He never called me brave.

He just stayed.

One afternoon, I asked him why he wasn't angry.

He was working through a set of exercises, his face pale, his hand shaking slightly around the grip of his cane.

"Who says I'm not?" he said.

"You don't act like it."

He looked across the gym toward the windows, where sunlight stretched over the polished floor.

"My dad says anger is like a houseguest," Nick said. "You can let it visit. You just can't let it move in and rearrange the furniture."

"That is the most pastor's kid answer I've ever heard."

"Probably."

I waited for him to laugh. He didn't. Instead, he looked at me and said, "Some days I'm furious."

I didn't know what to do with that. Nick Mercer, furious. It made him real.

I fell in love with him slowly, then all at once. He did not crash into my life. He unfolded in it. A water bottle placed beside me before therapy. A hand hovering near my elbow but never touching unless I asked. The way he looked away when I adjusted my prosthetic, not because he was embarrassed, but because he knew I was. Once, when I mentioned the rain the night of my accident, he went quiet for a long time, and I thought it was because he was being careful with me.

The first time he watched me dance again, it was barely dancing. I stood in the rehab gym after hours with one hand on the barre and one foot that was not a foot trying to remember what music felt like.

"I look ridiculous," I said.

"You look like Ellie."

I froze. Because for the first time since the accident, I almost believed him.

The day I found out the truth, it was raining again.

Nick had forgotten his journal in the therapy room. I picked it up to return it.

It fell open. I saw my name.

I should have closed it. I didn't.

The words were pressed into the page until the ink bled through.

I caused Ellie's accident.

My hand went numb. Below it, another line.

How do I tell her I'm the reason she lost everything?

The room tilted.

Nick walked in a moment later and stopped when he saw the journal in my hands. All the color left his face.

"Ellie."

"You?" I said. It came out so small.

His eyes filled. "I didn't know how to tell you."

I looked at the boy I loved and saw the rain again, the headlights, the glass, and then the long nothing before the hospital. The missing leg. My future cut away from me while I slept.

"You hit me?"

"I blacked out," he said. "I didn't know there was anything wrong yet. I swear, Ellie, I didn't know."

"What does that even mean?"

He pressed both hands to his head like he could hold himself together. "The doctors found something after the crash. A tumor. In my brain. They think that's why I lost consciousness."

A tumor. The word should have changed something. It didn't. Not then.

All I could think was that he had known. He had sat beside me. Helped me stand. Watched me cry. Let me fall in love with him. And he had known.

The rain. He had gone quiet about the rain.

"You should have told me."

"I know."

"You don't get to say that."

"I know."

"Stop saying that!"

My voice echoed through the empty room. Nick looked like he wanted me to hit him. I almost wished I could.

Instead, I threw the journal at his chest. "I hate you," I said.

He closed his eyes.

I wanted the words to feel true. They didn't. That made me hate him more.

For three days, I refused therapy, refused calls, refused Nick.

On the fourth day, Pastor Mercer came to see me. He looked older than he had the week before. Tired in a way that made me think tired was not enough of a word.

He sat in the chair by my window. "I'm not here to defend him," he said.

"Good."

"And I'm not here to ask you to forgive him."

That surprised me.

He folded his hands. "Forgiveness that gets dragged out of you isn't forgiveness. It's just another wound."

I stared at the rain sliding down the glass. "He ruined my life."

Pastor Mercer was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Yes."

I looked at him. He did not soften it. He did not explain it away. He did not tell me Nick was a good boy, though he was. He did not tell me God had a plan, which was the sort of sentence people used when they were tired of sitting with pain.

He just let the truth be true.

"Yes," he said again. "He did."

Something inside me cracked. Not open. Just enough for air.

"I love him," I whispered.

Pastor Mercer nodded, his eyes shining. "I know."

"How can both be true?"

He looked toward the door, like he could see his son through it. "I think most of the hardest things are."

We had six weeks.

I spent them the way you spend money you know is running out. I came to the gym on days I had no therapy. I read to him when the headaches got bad and the words on his own page swam. He got thinner. The cane became a wheelchair. The jokes came slower, but they still came.

One evening, when the gym was empty, he asked me to dance.

"I can't," I said. "Not really. Not yet."

"I didn't ask for really." He nodded at the open floor. "Just badly. I want to see badly."

So I did. One hand on the barre, the prosthetic catching wrong, my balance a guess I kept losing and finding. It was ugly. I laughed in the middle of it because it was so ugly. And he watched me the entire time like I was the only lit window on a dark street.

It did not feel like forgiving him. It felt like there was nothing left to forgive, because hating him would have meant wasting an afternoon, and I was done wasting afternoons.

Then, on an ordinary Tuesday, there was a seizure in the rehab gym. Nurses running. Days of waiting in a room that smelled like nothing.

The last time he woke up, he looked at me like I was something beautiful.

"You're locking your knee," he whispered.

I laughed and cried at the same time. "You're dying and still annoying."

He smiled. "I love watching you dance."

"I don't dance anymore."

"Yes, you do."

His thumb moved weakly against my hand. "Ellie," he said, "don't let me be the last thing that happened to you."

Those were the last words he said to me that made sense.

So when the Brown letter came, I threw it away. Nick was gone, and I was tired, and some part of me was afraid that if I danced again it would mean I was moving on. And if I moved on, what did that say about how much I loved him?

On Friday night, I found the letter where it had landed beside my dance bag. I smoothed it out on my bed.

Audition date: Saturday.

Then I heard Nick's voice. Don't let me be the last thing that happened to you.

The next morning, my father drove me toward the audition.

Grace, Georgia disappeared behind us, then the highway, then buildings taller than anything in our town, then the campus I had once imagined as the beginning of my real life.

Dad parked outside the performing arts center. "You want me to come in?"

Through the windshield, girls in leotards moved through the doors, their hair tight, their bodies whole and graceful in a way that made my throat close.

I didn't answer. My hands gripped the seat belt.

"I thought if I got here, I could do it," I said.

"You did get here."

"That's not the same."

"No," he said. "It's not."

I looked at him, expecting encouragement. Instead, he stared through the windshield at the doors.

"You didn't used to dance for a building," he said. "You danced in the kitchen until you knocked over every chair we owned. You did it because you couldn't stand still."

The words sat between us.

I looked down at my leg. Not the one I lost. The one I had now. Carbon fiber. Metal. Straps. I had hated it because it was not flesh, then needed it anyway.

And I understood, sitting in that car, that Brown had always been the old Ellie's hunger. She had needed those judges. She had needed the windows and the famous names and the leaving, needed them to mean she was somebody.

I didn't need them to mean anything anymore.

"Dad," I said. "I don't want to go in."

He turned. For a moment I thought he'd argue.

"Okay," he said.

This time, the word didn't make me angry.

"There's somewhere else I need to be."

Mrs. Theresa's studio still smelled like rosin and floor wax and the inside of an old piano. She didn't ask why I was there. She just unlocked the small back room and handed me the key like she'd been keeping it for me.

It took a month to fill the class. Flyers at the clinic. A line on the church bulletin. *Dance, for kids who've been told their bodies won't.*

On the first Saturday, four of them came.

A little girl stood near the barre, gripping it with both hands. She had dark curls, pink sneakers, and a new prosthetic leg that she clearly hated.

"I can't!" she snapped.

Her mother knelt nearby, looking helpless in the way parents look when they would gladly take the pain but have not been offered the trade.

I walked over slowly. The girl looked at my leg first. Then my face.

"I know," I said.

She frowned. "You don't know."

"I do."

I lowered myself to the floor in front of her. "Everybody thinks it's about being strong," I said. "It isn't."

She sniffed.

I tapped my prosthetic. "You want to lean away from it. I know. It feels wrong."

The little girl looked down at her leg. "So what do I do?"

I held out my hand. "You lean into it."

She stared at my hand for a long time. Then she took it.

Slowly, shaking with effort, she shifted her weight. The prosthetic held. Her eyes widened. One step, then another, then the smallest smile I had ever seen.

Then she let go of my hand and took a step on her own.