Chapter 10 #2
She knew exactly what he meant. Ballet had so many rules, and lots of people chafed at them, especially when it meant being forced into a leotard or being asked to move your body in a way that didn’t feel right.
But to Ivy the rules had been a source of power and possibility.
Once she knew the rules, she knew how to succeed.
She always knew how many tendus she was expected to do, and in what order.
When she tendued to the front, she was always supposed to turn her head slightly to the side, and when she tendued to the back, she was always supposed to tilt her head so her gaze met her palm.
It was a bit like learning the alphabet: once you learned all the steps, you could put them together in any order you wanted.
Sometimes she could still touch that sense of possibility, when her fingers were flying over the keyboard, like her thoughts were coming out of her and into the world, clear and precise and just right.
Sometimes writing could feel like dancing, or the other way around.
Maybe there was a reason a fragment of choreography was called a phrase.
“It makes sense,” she said, because it did, completely. Justin kept looking at her searchingly for a moment, and she gave him a small nod of encouragement. He went on.
“I didn’t want anyone at school to know I was doing ballet, but it’s hard to keep a secret in a small town.
Half the girls in my class had brothers, and before long everyone knew how I was spending my afternoons.
The teasing started right away. They called me a girl, a fairy, a poof, a princess, basically any homophobic insult they could think of.
They’d twirl around with their hands over their head whenever they saw me. It was relentless.”
“God, kids can be so cruel,” Ivy sighed.
It was a familiar story; as coddled as boys who danced often were inside ballet schools, with their scholarships and their lax dress codes, the world outside of ballet could be brutal.
No wonder teachers had to work so hard to recruit boys and keep them from quitting.
She knew that the few boys who had danced at her school had endured similar bullying, and there seemed to be fewer of them with every passing grade.
“Yeah, well, so can adults,” Justin said darkly.
“I told my mum and my stepdad what was happening at school, and they went to the teacher. The first thing the teacher said was, ‘Perhaps Justin should keep his extracurricular activities to himself.’ Like I hadn’t tried to do that.
Like there was any way of hiding it in a town of 300 people where everyone knows everyone. ”
“And like you were asking for it!” Ivy added, outraged on behalf of younger Justin. “You didn’t deserve to be teased like that even if you ran around telling everyone you were a dancer. What kind of teacher says that?”
“A shitty one,” Justin said. “Mum and Shane took it to the principal, who sat the worst offenders down for a talking-to, and most of them backed off after that.”
“Most of them?”
“Most of them,” Justin repeated grimly. “A couple of them decided I needed to be punished for running to the principal on top of being a faggy little ballet freak.”
He spat the words out, and Ivy sucked in a breath, realization dawning.
“Oh god, my review.”
“Yeah,” he said dully, and the resignation and pain in his voice made her cringe with shame. “Now you understand why that review hurt so much.”
“Of course I do. I had no idea when I wrote it… I mean even if I had known, I should have written it differently. God, Justin, I’m so sorry. Truly.”
“I know you are,” he said, reaching a hand across the comforter. She glanced down at his long, elegant fingers and the corded muscle of his extended forearm. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad about it again, I promise. I’m just trying to explain what happened that night.”
“Ok. Go on.”
“Those kids kept on me, and as we got bigger and stronger, the bullying got more physical.” Justin swallowed hard and took a deep breath.
“One kid, in particular, had it in for me and never let me forget it. Kyle Kavanaugh,” Justin said, his voice darkening.
“He liked to play a game he called ‘Boxer Versus Ballerina.’ I was never much for boxing, so I ended up with a bloody nose more than once.”
“What did your parents do?” Ivy said, horrified. She tried to imagine what her mum and dad, or her opa, would have done if she’d come home from school having been punched in the face by a classmate. They would have unleashed hell.
“They didn’t do anything,” he said, and when she opened her mouth to object, he added, “because they never found out. I hid it from them. From the teachers, too. From everyone except Missy. I swore her to secrecy, because I knew that if my parents went back to the principal, it would only make things worse.”
“Justin… that’s so awful. You were just a kid. She was just a kid.”
“I know. I should have told someone, some other adult. We both should have, but we thought we were doing the right thing at the time. It was that or quit ballet, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
“Good,” Ivy said softly. She couldn’t help but wonder how many boys didn’t get to keep dancing because the torment became too much, or because they didn’t have Justin’s stubborn grit.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling his hand back and squaring his shoulders a little, like he was proud of himself.
“They didn’t get to take it away from me.
It was where I felt like myself. And the worse things got at school, the more important the ballet studio felt.
The more I needed a place to be… safe. To feel special in a good way, not in a freak way. ”
Guilt twisted in Ivy’s stomach again at the sound of that word. “I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of that.”
“I know that now. But the messed-up thing is that at the time it just seemed like the price I had to pay for dancing. For doing this girly thing I loved. It took me a long time to understand how wrong that is, and that was when I got angry. And I left that town and never went back.”
“Never?”
“Occasionally for a quick visit, because my parents work a lot and it’s hard for them to get down to Sydney to see me. But I hate being there. I miss the bush and I miss my family, but Missy’s in the city now. I don’t like going back if I can help it.”
“Understandable. And those kids, that one kid, never got in trouble? Never faced any consequences?”
“Never. But by the time I was in high school, I was spending summers in Sydney at an all-boys ballet camp, and it made it easier to get through the school year, knowing there were other boys like me. Some of us were gay, some of us were straight, some of us were still figuring it out, but we all loved ballet and we were all willing to stomach the shit that came with it. The gay kids had it even worse than I did, but we were all just trying to survive whatever we were up against. I knew I just had to survive high school. I could see a way out, if I was willing to keep working hard, so I did. I worked my ass off, and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Ivy agreed, and she smiled at him, somehow proud of the boy she’d never met, and genuinely impressed by the man sitting across the bed from her.
Here he was, a principal dancer at the country’s national ballet company, preparing to perform at Lincoln Center tomorrow.
Here he was, telling her the truth at last. And finally, she understood it all.
No wonder he’d been so desperate to come on this tour, to salvage his career.
He’d given up his childhood and his hometown to have it.
Justin watched her for a moment, and one corner of his mouth pulled up into a shy smile and his eyes seemed to brighten a little as they looked at each other in shared understanding.
“So, that night at the Stoned Crow,” Ivy prompted him, and his half smile became a rueful grin.
“Jesus, Kurt. Incorrigible,” he said, but he didn’t sound annoyed, just unsurprised, and Ivy couldn’t stop her eyes from flitting quickly—she hoped imperceptibly—down to his mouth.
“I’d say you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to.” She wanted him to trust her with it. Even if she was pretty sure she could figure it out on her own now.
Justin’s face sobered. “He was saying some pretty vile homophobic shit. And for the first little while, I brushed it off. You can ask Matty and Ricky, they’ll tell you I let it go on for a while. Just told him politely to back off and go home, but he didn’t. And eventually, I just…”
“You snapped,” she concluded.
“Yeah,” he sighed heavily. “I’m not proud of it, and I know it was wrong, and I know it’s causing the company a lot of hassle and it could still get me sued and fired after all this, but—”
“He deserved it,” Ivy shrugged, and she watched his eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“You think so?”
Ivy waved her hands, as if weighing invisible options.
“Speaking as Ivy Page, PR associate for Australian National Ballet, I don’t condone violence and I find the incident regrettable and not to be repeated.
Speaking as Ivy Page, private and off-the-record citizen?
Some people need to get punched in the face. ”
Justin laughed, throwing his head back and lifting his feet off the floor in delight, and Ivy’s stomach flipped over.
He was beautiful when he danced, and he was breathtaking when he laughed.
She gave herself a little shake, remembering his palpable relief at not having to share a hotel room with her.
Beautiful or not, he wasn’t interested in her.
“Thanks for telling me the whole story,” she said, when he was done laughing. “I know it wasn’t easy, but knowing everything really does help me help you.”
Justin nodded. “Sorry I held out on you so long. I didn’t mean to make things harder for you.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Okay, I did, at first. But now… Now we’re good, right? Same team?”
She nodded. “Same team.”
“Alright, then. What’s the plan for dinner tonight?”