Chapter Thirty-Seven
The familiar whisper of ballet slippers against the floor fills the silence that’s permeated my apartment for the last week. My makeshift studio—the spare bedroom that would have been Claire’s if things had turned out differently—welcomes me as I flip on the lights.
It’s not much. A mirror that forces me to confront my own mediocrity, a barre I bought from , and a speaker that maintains a complicated relationship with Bluetooth. But it’s mine, and it has to be enough. The days of sneaking into real ballet studios with real ballet dancers are over.
The pain of losing Petra is beyond emotional. It’s physical. My body learned the language of ballet through her hands adjusting my posture, through her patience at every turn. Now I’m self-teaching in a former storage room, which feels like a metaphor, yet it’s not.
I shake out my legs and press play on a Nutcracker tutorial video as I watch a professional Cavalier move around the stage, commanding it with every turn and leap.
I close my eyes and rehearse the first Cavalier variation in my head. If I want to avoid spiraling back into the injury abyss where I dwelled for all those months, I need this discipline and strength more than ever.
I practice the variation without music first, going through the movements slowly. The preparation for the double cabrioles keeps tripping me up. My body wants to telegraph the jump, to show I’m about to leap. But ballet requires the jump to happen suddenly, without warning.
Next up. Feet in fifth position. My plié needs to be deeper but not so deep that I can’t spring up. I push off, trying to complete two full rotations. The first turn happens without a hitch. The second is incomplete. Work remains.
The mirror shows a man whose arms are in the wrong positions, whose legs aren’t fully extended. Nothing looks right.
Reset. Again. This time I focus only on the arms, letting my legs just go through the basic steps. Port de bras—the carriage of the arms—requires specific positions. First, second, third, fourth, fifth. Each has its exact placement. I’m getting most of them wrong.
The video shows the Cavalier executing pirouettes à la seconde. These require momentum and control. I try one. I rise onto the ball of my foot and push into the turn. One rotation works. On the second attempt, I lose my spot—the focal point I’m supposed to look at—and stumble out of the turn.
Next is barre work to prep for the more intricate combinations.
Grand battements—high kicks that need to reach ninety degrees or higher.
The video shows the leg cutting through the air with precision.
I grip my barre and begin. Front. Side. Back.
Side. The front isn’t terrible. The side reveals how tight my hip flexors are.
Twenty-five on each side. By the fifteenth, my standing leg shakes. By the twentieth, my hamstrings burn. But I make it. All twenty-five. Because repetition builds muscle memory. Each grand battement teaches my body movement. Each turn improves my balance slightly. Each jump gets marginally higher.
The grand jeté en tournant—a turning leap—doesn’t work. You take off facing one direction and land facing another, rotating in the air. I try it. The take-off happens. The turn doesn’t complete. I land on my ass.
Get up. Reset. Again. This time I focus just on the leap height, forgetting the turn.
Then comes the variation’s final sequence: the manège. A circular pattern of jumps around the stage. Coupé jetés, sixteen of them, each one requiring I travel, creating a circle of movement.
I start in the corner. The first coupé jeté is shaky but happens. The second is worse. By the third, I’ve lost the circular pattern, and I’m heading toward the wall. I stop before I crash into it.
The video shows the Cavalier completing all sixteen turns while maintaining perfect spacing, perfect technique, never slowing down. I can barely manage three.
Hours pass. The same sequences, over and over. My legs shake from exhaustion. My feet cramp. Sweat soaks through my shirt. But I keep going.
The turns get cleaner. Not perfect, but both rotations complete. The pirouettes gain consistency—I can manage two without falling. The coupé jetés start to follow an actual circular path instead of random directions.
By the time I stop, my body is spent, but the movements are becoming encoded in my muscles. Tomorrow, I’ll do it again. And the next day. And the next.
Because without Petra here to correct me, repetition is my only teacher. The mirror doesn’t lie, the video doesn’t change, and slowly, incrementally, my body learns what it needs to do.
There’s no room for distraction. So, every night, in this bedroom ballet studio, I practice ballet as if my life depends on it. Because in a way, it really does.
Later in the week, I’m flying down the ice as we face off against the Spartans. My legs feel like they’ve been upgraded, my edges sharper, my lungs burning. All good types of pain.
The game’s been a grind. Primarily defensive battles with little offense. But in the third period, something clicks. Dewey finds me with a long breakout stretch pass.
I explode through the neutral zone, my stride smooth and powerful. Faster than old me, more controlled than young me. The defender tries to angle me off, but I drop my shoulder and cut inside with the kind of body control that came from Cavalier combinations, not from hockey drills.
I cradle the puck on my blade, feeling its weight shift as I draw my stick back, loading my shoulders and core for the shot. My bottom hand slides down the shaft for leverage while my eyes lock onto the top corner of the net, that six-inch gap between the goalie’s glove and the crossbar.
Then, I snap the puck right where I’m looking.
The goal horn screams. The crowd loses its mind as my teammates skate over for facewashes—celebratory gloves in my face—that leave a stench and a smile.
This is what I live for. The game. The battle. The moment when everything works.
And yet—
She’s not here. The person responsible for it all. The person who literally rebuilt my body, who believed in me when I was held together by tape and delusion, who saw something worth saving in my broken self.
After the game, Dewey blasts “Fortunate Son” in the locker room. We’re on the verge of clinching a playoff berth, something no one believed we could do mere months ago and certainly something no one believed I would be able to contribute to.
I take it in, surrounded by teammates, joyous. But the dopamine hit of victory is quickly replaced by an undercurrent of pain. But this isn’t a muscle pain. This is the slow, hollow ache that doesn’t respond to ice packs or ibuprofen.
I rub my face with a towel like I might physically wipe away the feeling. It doesn’t work, but the gesture feels necessary.
I have a playoff push to focus on. A team that needs me.
A career that’s finally back on track. I’ll keep training in my converted studio.
Keep skating with legs that ballet made better.
But underneath the discipline, beneath the determination, past all the compartmentalization that athletes perfect, there’s the undeniable reality: The best thing that ever happened to me didn’t happen on ice.
It happened in a ballet studio with a woman who saw potential where everyone else saw damage.
And I threw it away with both hands, mistaking honesty for cruelty.
Dewey hands me the game puck while my teammates cheer me on as they tap their sticks—hockey’s version of applause—on the locker room’s rubber mats. So, I smile because that’s what you do in these situations. You smile, you celebrate, and you pretend that winning is enough.