She shakes her head, then hands the taxi driver her phone, which is open to the map with our dorm’s address. My newbie mistake hits me right in the face. I’ve researched Paris so much that I should have remembered that Boulevard Saint-Germain is one of the longest streets in the city. It snakes across most of Rive Gauche, the side of Paris south of the Seine. Basically, it’s like telling a New York City cab driver that you’re going to Fifth Avenue.
Audrey gives me a pointed look that seems to say,Lucky I’m here.
Her phone rings just as we get on the freeway: a FaceTime call from her mom. I’ve never met her, but I know who she is—a retired principal dancer who spent her entire career in Moscow with the Bolshoi Ballet. As I listen to Audrey go on and on about how her flight delay almost ruined her life, I realize that I haven’t even told my parents I’m here yet. I send a quick text saying that everything’s fine. Dad responds immediately.
Good luck at orientation! Show them who’s boss! Love you.
I smile and respond.
I’ll try! Love you too.
And then nothing from Mom. I keep staring at my phone, hoping, wondering, wishing. She’s still mad at me. Grandma swore she’d get over it by the time I left for Paris, but clearly she hasn’t.
Ever since I was little, dancing has been my whole life. To my mom, however, it was just a hobby, something fun I did on the side, an extracurricular activity to keep me busy on weekends. I kept telling her I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer, and that I would do whatever it took to make it happen, but she always shrugged it off, like it was something I’d outgrow. Luckily, between Dad and Grandma Joan (Mom’s mom), there was always someone to drive me to classes, help me sew costumes for my shows, and cheer me on during important performances.
But things got really tense with Mom when I started talking about applying to this program.
“You didn’t get into New York. Why would you try again in Paris?”
I’d just received my rejection letter from ABT and was doing my best not to show how devastated I was. I always knew how competitive it would be, but I figured that, after a lifetime of dedicating myself to my art, I had a real shot. But Mom didn’t agree with me. “So many girls want this; there just aren’t enough spots for everyone,” she’d said with a sad face. It hurt a lot to realize that she was right.
“Paris is every aspiring ballet dancer’s biggest dream,” I’d said.
To be honest, that’s not exactly how I felt at the time. Even though it’s true—the Paris program is just as well regarded as the New York one—I only ever dreamed of attending ABT, and of joining their company one day. But that wasn’t going to happen this summer, and I couldn’t allow myself to accept defeat. Everyone knows everyone in the ballet world, and borders don’t really exist. If I made it in Paris, then I’d find my way into ABT eventually. They couldn’t get rid of me so easily, even if I had to cross an ocean to prove it to them. At least that’s what I told myself.
Mom shook her head. “It’s your last summer of high school. Don’t you want to see your friends, go to the pool, to the movies, and just, you know, do other things?”
“They have pools and movies in Paris, too.”
She ignored my snarky tone. “Mia, there’s more to life than ballet. You need to have a planB. Everyone should have one, especially when they’re only seventeen and chasing an impossible dream.”
She’d never put it so plainly before. An impossible dream? Thanks for believing in me, Mom.
Despite everything she’d said, I kept rehearsing for my video, checking the requirements—an introduction to explain my experience and credentials, a showcase of each of the key steps, then a personal routine of at least two minutes. Grandma Joan even surprised me with a new leotard in a beautiful shade of dove gray.
“It’ll be your Paris leotard,” she said as I dashed to my room to try it on. It fit perfectly and complemented my blue eyes.
“I haven’t even been accepted yet,” I told her as I adjusted the straps over my shoulders. My hands shook as I imagined myself practicingpliésin a light-filled Parisian studio.
“But you will be,” Grandma said, her voice firm. “How could they ever say no? It’s in your blood.”
“Mom!” Mom said to Grandma Joan as she walked into my bedroom. She cast a skeptical glance at the Degas poster hanging over my bed. “Can you please stop saying that? It’s not even true.”
Grandma sighed, then turned to me. “Of course it’s true. You come from a long line of ballerinas, Mia.” She gave me a wink. “You believe me, don’t you?”
Grandma Joan has told me the same story since the day I put on my first tutu. The first part of it is definitely true: My great-grandmother was French. She met an American man in Paris when she was twenty-three, fell in love, and moved to the U.S. soon after their wedding. But before that—and this is when things get a little murky—she practiced ballet. Like her mother before her, and her mother before her, all the way back to the late 1800s, when my great-great-great-grandmother was adanseuse étoile,a principal dancer, the highest, most prestigious ranking in the Paris Opera. Supposedly, this was around the time Edgar Degas created his world-famous paintings of ballerinas.
Grandma insists that Degas painted my great-great-great-grandmother, and that she was the subject of one of his masterpieces. The nonspecifics of this family legend drive Mom crazy. She doesn’t believe this story, and whenever Grandma Joan brings it up, she’ll happily point out that no one actually knows which painting our ancestor might be in, or even remembers what her name was.Ifshe was a ballet dancer at all. Mom never lets me forget that it’s most likely made up, and that there’s no way to know for sure. She doesn’t want me to believe in fairy tales.
But I do.
The myth itself is proof enough that ballet is my destiny—how could anything as strange as this get passed down from generation to generation if it weren’t true? This story has always been part of me, of how I dance. When I’m performing, I sometimes imagine my ancestor twirling across the stage, spotlighted by gas lamps, while Degas sweeps his oil paints and pastels onto canvas and paper. I like to think she was part of his inspiration, that he watched her spin in a sea of color and light.
I wore my new leotard for my audition video, which Camilla, my best friend from ballet school, helped me film. She’d decided to only apply to local summer programs, and swore it had nothing to do with the fact that she didn’t want to be away from her new boyfriend—an aspiring musician named Pedro. I think Mom wishes I had a boyfriend as well, but my dating experience so far has only proved that no one can make my heart flutter the way ballet does. To go with my leotard, I put my hair up in a tight bun, my face fully made up. And two months later, I got into the Institut de l’Opéra de Paris, just like Grandma had promised.
I close my eyes for a moment, and when I reopen them, one of the most famous churches in the world stares back at me.
“Notre-Dame!” I squeal to Audrey, who doesn’t react. I press my face against the window, soaking in its beauty, the two towers disappearing off behind our taxi, the arched structure revealing itself in the back, and the grand majesty of it all. My first look at Paris! But I don’t have time to revel in the moment, because our taxi makes a right turn, and, a couple of minutes later, we pull off to the side of a wide street packed with cyclists, buses, and pedestrians.
