My phone rang. I looked at the screen and saw that it was the National Dance Company. My grandmother stood, but I answered before she could snatch it away from me.
“Yes?”
“Good afternoon, I’d like to speak to Maya Rivet, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Hello, Maya, this is Natalia Durán, I’m the director of the National Dance Company.”
“Oh, it’s a pleasure to hear from you.”
“Likewise.” She paused. “So, the team and I were very impressed with your audition and we’d like you to join our family. As a soloist.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. So if it sounds good to you, maybe you can come by tomorrow and we can have a chat and I’ll give you all the details in person.”
“Yeah, of course,” I responded.
“Will nine in the morning work for you?”
“Sure, perfect.”
“Excellent. Then I’ll see you tomorrow, Maya. And congratulations.”
“Thank you!”
I hung up and rested my elbows on the table. The adrenaline was coursing furiously through my veins. I could feel the throbbing in my jugular and pinpricks all over my body. I had done it. I had. For the first time in days, I looked my grandmother in the eye.
“They gave me the position,” I told her.
Her only movement was to exhale a breath through her nose. Her expression, her posture didn’t change. After a moment, she nodded slightly.
“Now don’t screw it up. Prima ballerina, that’s your next goal.”
I had achieved something important. A dream thousands of dancers work tirelessly for and never achieve. And yet, I wasn’t happy. I felt like I was drowning. Like a weight was bearing down on me.
There I was again, back at the beginning. With her. Without an escape hatch. Or maybe I just wasn’t brave enough to run away. I had so much to say to her, years’ worth of resentment to unload. But I couldn’t. I had never been able to.
And of course, I owed it all to her—that was what she’d told me till she was blue in the face:You owe it to me, you owe it to me, as if that were a tattoo on my skin.
I owed her, and she made me pay.
A year later. Early November.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing bad. The opposite, actually.”
Fyodora took my hands and made me sit next to her on a park bench where we’d agreed to meet.
“You seemed like you were freaking out on the phone,” I said.
“I am!” she almost shouted, then patted me on the knee to calm me down. “I’ve got something to tell you, OK? I have a friend at the American Ballet school and a few weeks ago she told me they were looking for a new dancer. It was invitation only, they weren’t holding open auditions, but I applied for you, and I sent a video in, too.”
“You did what?”
She took an envelope from her purse and handed it to me. “They picked you! You’ve got an audition in three weeks in New York!”
