As the music faded away for the dancer currently performing, Drew gulped noisily. She squeezed her eyes shut and crossed herself. With the houselights still low, she hurried noiselessly onto the stage, the wood cold below her mostly bare feet. She got into her starting position, kneeling on the floor, and took another deep breath. Her song started and the lights came back up gradually, in synch with the music. Drew preferred that to the lights coming up blaringly bright before her song started; it allowed her to relax into her movements without the pressure of being beheld by every audience member for a few long seconds before her music began to play.
Drew pushed everything out of her mind—her stage-fright; what her life had been like a year ago; what it had turned into; her stresses with her family; the stress of the weekend; losing the studio; her issues with Heath. She gathered all of those things up, and dumped them into a dirty laundry hamper in the closet of her mind and shut the door. Her mind transformed into blank space with room only for the music, the emotion, and the movement.
And she began.
***
Heath elbowed his way into the theater one minute past seven; he was shamefully out of breath, but he was showered, changed, and clutching a huge bouquet of flowers—a mixture of stargazer lilies, tulips, hydrangeas, and baby pink roses.
The theater was dark and silent, save for soft noises of a throat clearing here and there, someone shifting in their seat, a cough, a sniffle, a whisper. Suddenly the strains of a vaguely familiar song floated through the air and the houselights gradually began to brighten. He saw Drew kneeling in the center of the stage, dressed in black with what looked like duct tape over her mouth and red paint in places on her body. She slowly rose to her feet, extending each leg high into the air gracefully in time with the music, before suddenly, the beat burst to life and she danced with strength and energy.
Heath had watched her dance before, once, when he'd first come to see her at the Y. As a complete ignoramus of the art of dance, he had been impressed. Since then, he'd seen a professional performance and been forced to watch the performing arts channel on cable that Drew insisted on watching regularly. She had explained things to him, and he'd come to develop a tiny, secret appreciation for it. Now that he was just slightly more educated about it, he was floored as he watched her movements.
The height of her leaps, the straightness of her legs, the strength and control she had over her muscles, the fluidity of movement and absolute grace she embodied, the ease with which she executed her complex and expert choreography blew him away. Moreover, he knew there was a difference between going through the movements of choreography and dancing with real emotion. Her eyes would dully move across the audience from time to time, but Heath knew she wasn't really seeing anything or anyone. She was "seeing" with her emotions; he knew she might be in the same room with them all, but she was a million miles away.
Every so often, at a verse change or a music change, she reached up and ripped off a layer of tape. He took it to mean that she was shedding some sort of silence, some sort of fear. At the climax of the song, the houselights dimmed completely, but there was very faint backlighting from the backstage area. He could see her silhouette as she moved, but what caught his attention were the glowing red streaks of paint suddenly illuminated in the darkness. He studied them curiously for a moment, not sure what they meant, until a set of streaks on the inside of her ankle caught his attention and pulled his memory back to that awful night when he'd first learned of her secret.
He abruptly realized he was staring at the brutality she had inflicted upon herself, at one time the only way she knew how to deal with the emotional pain that was tearing her apart.
He watched as she spun on the ball of one foot, her head back, her long hair streaming out behind her, her arms down at her sides and her hands gracefully poised. He studied the straightness of her supporting leg, the point of the other foot lifted to the knee, the arch of her back. The paint flashed around as she spun, and he could only watch in silent amazement. She bore her scars boldly, shamelessly, defiantly. This is who I was, she seemed to be saying. This is what I did.
As the lights crashed back on she stared at the audience fiercely as she came out of her turn, extending a leg at hip-height straight out to the side. Her brown eyes were flashing with something like anger and she yanked the last scrap of tape off her mouth, revealing a thin black X over her lips. She executed a leap/turn combination and as the music wound down, the passion and anger seemed to leave her movements, grace taking their place. Her movements gentled and gradually, as the music faded out, she resumed her original position, kneeling on the floor, in the middle of the stages. The lights dimmed.