Chapter Twenty-Eight Allegra
Twenty-Eight
Allegra
I don’t let myself fall apart on the walk to the subway or on the train or during the trek up the stairs to my apartment.
I don’t cry as I unlock the door and kick off my shoes and make myself a reheated leftovers dinner.
I don’t pick up the phone and call my sister to complain about Cord and the terrible position he put me in.
Maybe ballet has taught me to mask my feelings a little too well, because I don’t cry at all.
I move through the next few days in a haze of indifference, a state of numbness unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.
There’s three weeks until tech rehearsal, a month until the premiere of La Courtesan, and the excitement should be building.
I should be looking forward to my first starring role, the promotion that might follow.
But I feel nothing.
And maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s better to lock up all the emotions and shove them to the back of my mind, where they can stay forever as far as I’m concerned.
Maybe if I pretend hard enough, for long enough, this numbness will become my permanent state and nothing will hurt me ever again.
Bethany comes over for monthly sister night the Saturday before we are set to start tech rehearsal.
I’ve been giving vague, one-word responses to her texts and ignoring her calls, all under the guise of being too busy with rehearsals.
It’s not the first time, and probably won’t be the last, so I’m assuming she doesn’t suspect anything beyond the ordinary.
But I can’t hide from her forever, not when she lets herself into my apartment and takes one single look at me, standing in my tiny kitchen pouring two glasses of wine.
“Oh, honey.”
Apparently, all it takes is those two words and I dissolve into the puddle of tears I’ve been holding back for two weeks. I drown in them, choke on them, let them consume me. I sink to the floor and let Bethany cradle me like I used to do to her when we were little and she got hurt.
She strokes my hair and whispers calming platitudes that mean nothing. But most importantly, she lets me cry.
When the tears finally subside, she leads me into the bathroom, taking a makeup wipe to my skin, clearing me of snot and tears and mascara remnants. She holds a tissue to my face like I’m a little kid, forcing me to blow my nose.
Then she guides me back into the main room, depositing me on the bed before grabbing the two glasses of wine from the kitchen counter. She hands me one and sits facing me on the bed, both of us with our legs folded up like pretzels.
“Is this about the ballet or the boy?” she finally asks.
Fresh tears replace the ones I just wiped away. “Both I guess. But mainly the boy.”
She nods, sipping her wine. “Want to fill me in or is it what I think?”
“He asked me to choose.” I take a tiny sip from my own glass of wine. It burns a little on the way down, my throat raw from all the crying, but it warms my belly and so I take another drink.
She keeps nodding. “Right. So as I expected.”
I pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt over my hand, using it to dab at the tears that seem to keep on coming. “You really thought he would do something like this?”
Bethany sighs, leaning back on the pillows.
“Look, I don’t know the whole story and I don’t know everything about Cord’s past, but Mom sent me that article about him getting fired, and clearly there’s some underlying explanation, but also clearly the guy has some deep-seated resentment about ballet. ”
“And you think he’s right. About ballet I mean.” I stare into the depths of my wine as if it can solve this problem for me. It can’t, but it can bring back my numbness, so I keep drinking.
“I’ve never hidden my feelings about ballet.
It has a lot of problems, despite also making a lot of progress.
But it doesn’t really matter how I feel about it, or even how Cord feels about it.
” She pats my knee. “You are the one who has devoted your life to this, and you are many things, Allegra Hart, but you are not stupid. And if this is what you want to do with your life, then you know I support you.”
I wait for her to finish.
She only hesitates a second before tacking on, “And he should’ve supported you, too.”
“I get it, though. I told him we couldn’t be seen in public together or David would fire me.”
Her eyebrows shoot up to the top of her forehead. “Fuck, I hate that guy.”
“I get that I was asking a lot of Cord.”
“But you expected him to go with it?”
“I expected him to put our relationship first.”
She purses her lips, and I know exactly what she’s thinking.
“I know I didn’t put him first, but you can’t sit here and tell me you think I should give up my job, my entire life’s greatest passion, for a man I’ve known a couple of months.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” she grumbles.
I finish the rest of my wine and cross the three steps to the kitchen to refill my glass. “There is no way for me to win here, B. Either I give up Cord and keep dancing or I keep Cord and quit ballet.”
“Neither of them should have forced you to make that choice.”
“But they did. And I did.” I plop back down on the bed. “And here we are.”
“Want to drink so much wine you forget about all your problems?”
“Yes. Obviously.”
I am, as we have established, not a drinker, so it doesn’t take much. Three glasses of wine and two episodes of Summer House later, I crash into blissful oblivion, the dulcet tones of a Paige DeSorbo takedown echoing in the background.