“How do I forget?” I screamed, tears glistening on my eyelashes. “How do I make it all go away?” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold everything in. It was only when I was alone that I could afford to unlock the mental doors that I keep shut snugly most times. My parents were both out, and I knew that I only had a little bit longer until my mom would come home and drive me to ballet, but I was too mentally exhausted to keep myself composed any longer. I tried to breathe, like the therapist taught me right after it all happened, but my lungs and my brain were not in sync. I may have been barely twelve years old back then, but I still remembered everything in vivid detail, three years later. It was times like these when I wished that my sister was still living at home with us, not across the country taking summer courses at some college in California. Taylor was the first person who I told about what had happened, about what I now refer to as The Incident, even though it really wasn’t much of an incident at all.
I could still see myself in my little twelve year old body, shaking as I knocked on my sixteen year old sister’s open bedroom door. She looked up from notebooks that she had strewn across the bed, and immediately saw the tears building in my eyes. “Come here, Eva. What’s wrong?” Taylor asked me, pulling me into her lap and wrapping her arms around me. I began to tell her my story, having to pause multiple times as the sobs shook my entire body. By the time I had finished Taylor was crying too, stroking my blonde hair and telling me that it would be alright. When the two of us finally calmed down after two or three hours, Taylor held my hand and led me downstairs to where our parents were watching the news on TV. She sat and held my hand as I re-told the story to my parents, until the four of us were all crying together.
The sound of the garage door coming up pulled me back into the present, and I got up from where I was sitting on my bed, wiped the tears from my eyes, and began to yank off my frayed sweatpants in order to put my tights, leotard, and shorts on. I grabbed my dance bag, slinging it over my shoulder, and slipped my feet into my purple clogs before pulling my hair back into a neat ballerina bun.
“Eva! Are you almost ready?” My mom called up the stairs. On a normal Saturday both of my parents would bring me to ballet, and the rest of the day would be a family day, but not today. My dad was in Ohio on his annual business trip, and my mom was babysitting her best friend’s three year old twins while they were away at a funeral.
“I’ll be down in a second, Mom!” I looked into the mirror one more time, making sure that I wasn’t showing any more evidence of the agony I had been in just moments before. My family loves me, and is there for me through everything, as I already knew, but I just couldn’t bear to cause them any more pain by allowing them to see mine.
“Okay, sweetheart. The O’Harris twins are still in the car, so just come right out when you’re done.” I lingered for an extra moment outside, breathing in the fresh Spring air, before sliding into the car.
Ballet was one of the only places that I was ever happy anymore. I could just let the music carry me, and flow gracefully with the rhythm. Ballet never bored me, no matter how many hours in a week that I spent practicing the same dance. I was never too tired for ballet, and the friends that I had made at the studio were some of my favorite people in the world. Everything came out in my dancing. My pirouettes and plies show the turmoil and destruction of my past, exemplifies my happiest moments, mirrors everything in my life.
The other girls in my classes were my best friends, the people who I hung out with on the weekends, the people who I giggled with at three in the morning during sleepovers. Even our teacher, Ms. Claire, was easy to talk to. Classes were a blast, and we were our own mini-family. Everyone at the studio knows about what happened with The Incident, but there are very few people who understood how deeply I had been affected. I tried to be strong in front of everybody, I saw how much it had hurt them when I told them how badly I had been hurt, and I wouldn’t let them see me in that much despair ever again.
I walked into ballet a few minutes late, and the other girls had already begun to warm-up, so I hurried to fill the gap between Rachel and Dana. We were about two weeks from our recital, and I was doing a solo dance that I was so excited about. Ms. Claire had allowed me to do most of the choreography myself, and this was my favorite one ever. It was slightly above my skill level when I first started creating it and rehearsing, but I mastered it fairly quickly. Everybody was impressed by the dance, and though I had been extremely shy since The Incident, ballet was the one place that I was not afraid to stand out.
After class Marissa and Dana, my two best friends in the entire world, walked up to me, water bottles in hand. “Eva!” Dana squealed, “Guess what!”
“What?” I asked, slightly out of breath from our faster paced dances.
“Chris finally asked me out!”
“No way! That’s awesome, Dana!” I tried to sound excited for my friend, but I was worried that Chris would hurt her in the end. They always did.
“Yes!” Dana was smiling ear to ear.
“I told Dana that we would help her get ready before he picks her up on Friday night, right Eva?” Marissa said. I nodded.
“Of course.” And I knew that Marissa and I would sit in Dana’s house the entire time that she was out, and then the three of us would have a sleepover, and Marissa and I would hear all of the details. This is what I loved about the three of us, though, our predictability. I didn’t like things to come as surprises to me, even before The Incident. And I was always super protective of my friends, just more so after what I’d been through. Right?
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