Chapter Nine
New Beginnings
Sydney
The twins have preschool on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, nine to one, which means three days a week I have four hours of silence and absolutely no idea what to do with it.
The first week I cleaned. I scrubbed the bathrooms, reorganized the pantry, and went through the fridge to throw out everything that had expired.
The second week I went for long runs and explored the neighborhood, which is gorgeous in that way New York neighborhoods are when the people who live in them make more money than I’ll ever see.
Brownstones with window boxes. Coffee shops where a latte costs eight dollars and comes with a lecture about the bean’s origin.
By the third week, I’m crawling out of my skin.
I’ve never been good at empty time. Lauren says I have the inability to sit still, the compulsive need to be useful.
She’s probably right. The few times in my life when I haven’t had something to do with my hands or my body, I’ve made bad decisions.
I followed a musician on tour once. I ate my feelings in carbs for a month once.
I cut my own bangs, which Lauren still brings up at every available opportunity.
So when I pass the Greenwood Community Center on my morning run and notice a flyer in the window advertising open programming slots for their senior activities room, I stop.
I stand on the sidewalk in my running clothes, breathing hard, reading the flyer twice. They’re looking for instructors. Flexible schedule. Small stipend. “Bring your talent and your patience,” it says at the bottom, which is either charming or a warning depending on how you read it.
I walk inside before I can talk myself out of it.
The director is a woman named Pat who has reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a desk covered in so many papers I can’t see the surface. She looks up when I knock on her open office door and gives me the once-over—sweaty, ponytail half-collapsed, leggings, running shoes.
“Can I help you?”
“I saw the flyer about programming slots. I’m, uh—I’m a dance instructor. I have a BFA from UNC and seven years of teaching experience, and I was wondering if you had any interest in a dance class for seniors.”
Pat takes her glasses off and lets them hang on the chain. “What kind of dance?”
That is a very good question. Senior citizens and ballet don’t exactly mix. I’d need something fun. Easy. Gender-neutral. I think about dancing in the living room with Lily and Luke.
“Hip-hop,” I say before I can overthink it.
Pat blinks at me.
“I know how it sounds. But hip-hop is fun. It’s about rhythm, and attitude, it’s about moving your body to a beat and feeling good doing it.
The steps can be modified for any mobility level, the music is fun, and honestly—” I realize I’m talking too fast and force myself to slow down. “Honestly, I think they’d love it.”
Pat glances at me. Then she puts her glasses on, shuffles through one of her paper mountains, and pulls out a schedule.
“Mondays and Wednesdays. Ten to eleven. The room is yours if you want it.” She slides the schedule across the desk.
“Fair warning, though. These are not easygoing people. Dolores will challenge everything you say, Gerald will go right when you say left, and Maryann will try to make every move sexual.”
“I can handle that.”
“Everyone says that. Then they meet Dolores.”
The first class has twelve people.
Twelve seniors in various states of athletic wear, standing in a fluorescent-lit activity room with scuffed linoleum floors and a wall of mirrors that haven’t been cleaned since the Clinton administration.
They look at me. I look at them. A woman in the front row—Dolores, I’m guessing, based on the way she’s standing with her arms crossed and her chin tilted like she’s daring me to impress her—adjusts her velour tracksuit and waits.
I set my speaker on the folding chair, connect my phone, and face the room.
“Morning, everyone. I’m Sydney. I’m going to teach you hip-hop.”
Silence.
“Any questions before we start?”
A man in the back row raises his hand. “What’s hip-hop?”
“Great question. Gerald?”
“How did you know my name?”
“Lucky guess.” I hit play.
Missy Elliott fills the room, and the energy shifts.
A few of them start nodding along before they even realize they’re doing it.
Maryann—bedazzled sneakers, earrings the size of doorknobs—starts bouncing in place with the enthusiasm of a woman who has been waiting her entire life for this moment.
I’m not gonna lie; I kind of love it. It’s so different from ballet. From working with kids.
I teach them a basic four-count: step, step, bounce, hold. Kind of like I did with Lily that day in the living room. It’s low impact but high energy, and the beat does most of the work.
Dolores nails it on the first try. She doesn’t just nail it—she adds a hip pop at the end that I didn’t teach, and three women behind her gasp and immediately try to copy it.
Gerald goes right when everyone goes left and crashes into Arthur, who absorbs the impact without complaint and keeps dancing.
Maryann does, in fact, make the body roll sexual. Impressively so for someone who probably has a replacement hip.
And I’m standing in the front of the room, watching twelve people over the age of seventy move their bodies to Missy Elliott in a fluorescent-lit community center, and I feel it—that thing I’ve been missing for months, maybe years.
That click. The alignment of who I am and what I’m doing, all of it lining up at once like a lock finding its key.
I’m not teaching ballet to eight-year-olds whose mothers want them in the front row.
I’m not worrying about recital costumes or studio politics or whether another Karen is going to threaten a one-star review.
I’m just dancing, and they’re dancing with me, and the joy in this room is so thick I could swim in it.
We run the routine three more times. By the end, Gerald has found his left foot, Maryann is grinning so wide I can see every tooth, and Dolores is teaching Arthur the hip pop in the corner while he pretends he needs more instruction than he actually does.
“Same time Wednesday?” Dolores asks me on the way out, pressing a folded twenty into my hand.
“Dolores, you don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to. Take it.”
I take it.
I meet Winnie for lunch at a café near the community center, and I’m still buzzing when I slide into the booth across from her. I must look different because she takes one look at me and says, “Okay, what happened? You’re glowing.”
“I just taught my first hip-hop class to twelve senior citizens.”
“You what?”
I tell her everything—Pat, the fluorescent room, Dolores, Gerald going right, Maryann making it weird. Winnie is laughing so hard she has to put her fork down.
“Syd, that’s amazing. You have to keep doing this.”
“I think I do. I think this might be my thing.” I say it out loud, and it feels real in a way that talking about opening a studio never did. “It’s not ballet. It’s not what I went to school for. But it felt right in a way that ballet hasn’t felt in a long time.”
“Sometimes the thing you went to school for and the thing you’re meant to do aren’t the same thing.” She sips her coffee. “I got a degree in kinesiology thinking I’d work in a hospital. Now I teach downward dog to hockey players who are so stubborn, I want to throttle them. Life is weird.”
“Life is very weird.”
We eat. We talk about careers and finding your path and the strange limbo of being adjacent to the hockey world without actually being part of it.
Winnie gets it in a way most people don’t—she’s this independent person who happens to be in love with someone whose life revolves around the ice, and she’s figured out how to have her own thing inside that.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, stirring her coffee. “About Archer.”
“Sure.”
“Is he over Bree? Like, really over it?”
I think about this. Weight it before answering.
“I think so. He doesn’t talk about her with anger or sadness.
He talks about her like someone he used to know really well and still respects.
From what I can tell, the co-parenting is solid.
She takes the twins every other weekend, sometimes midweek, and they communicate about schedules without it turning into a thing. ” I pause. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Banks says he’s been different since the divorce, more closed off than usual, and Archer was already the most closed-off person on the team. Banks thinks he’s lonely but would rather die than admit it.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Is he lonely?”
I think about the kitchen at six in the morning, Archer in his sweatpants, pouring coffee in silence. The way he stands at the window when the twins are with Bree, looking out at the street.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think he is. He just doesn’t know how to say it.”
Winnie nods. She doesn’t push further, which I appreciate, because the follow-up question—are you lonely too?—is one I’m not ready to answer honestly over lunch.
That night, after the twins are in bed, I find Archer in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. I lean against the counter and wait for him to finish because I want to tell him, and I want to see his face when I do.
“I found a thing today,” I say.
He closes the dishwasher and turns around. “A thing?”
“A class. At the community center down the street. They had an opening for a senior activities instructor, and I walked in and pitched a hip-hop class, and they said yes.”
“Hip-hop.” He crosses his arms and leans against the opposite counter, and I can see him working through this. “For seniors?”
“Mondays and Wednesdays. Ten to eleven, when the twins are at preschool. Twelve people showed up to the first class, and one of them added a hip pop I didn’t choreograph, and it was the best hour I’ve had teaching dance in months.”
His face changes. It goes warm—his eyes soften, his jaw relaxes, and he looks at me the way he looked at me in the living room when I was dancing with the twins, except this time there’s no surprise in it. This time it looks like pride.
“I’m glad, Syd,” he says, and he reaches out and puts his hand on my back.
His palm settles between my shoulder blades, warm and solid through my t-shirt. And then his thumb moves. Once. A single, slow stroke across my shoulder blade, deliberate and gentle and so unhurried that I feel every millimeter of it travel across my skin.
It lasts maybe two seconds. Then his hand drops, and he turns back to the sink and says, “You want tea?” like he didn’t just rewire my entire nervous system with one thumb.
“Sure,” I say, and my voice comes out steady, which is a miracle of modern engineering because my legs are not steady, and my hands are not steady, and the spot between my shoulder blades where his thumb traced that line is still tingling.
He fills the kettle. I stand at the counter and watch him, replaying the touch in my head—his hand on my back, the weight of his palm, the single movement of his thumb—and I know I’m going to replay it again when I get to the guest room, and again when I’m lying in bed, and probably again in the morning over coffee.
I’m in so much trouble.