The Story
The sixth count. Her weight always drifts half an inch to the right there, as if a small pit is hidden under the floorboards that only she ever steps into.
The mirror runs from floor to ceiling, doubling the rehearsal room into two, emptier for it. The six o'clock light comes in slantwise through the tall west window and lies flat on the wood — and on the row of folding chairs behind her. Blue plastic seats, a couple dozen of them, dragged in for yesterday's run-through. Not one of them holds a person today. She lands the last eight-count, cuts the motion short, breathing hard, and turns to make a little heart at the empty chairs in the mirror.
Then she laughs at herself, a bit embarrassed, the way you laugh when the mirror catches you doing something dumb.
Her name is Gu Wan. Six months into her debut. On stage she can dance a two-and-a-half-minute number until her fingertips seem to glow. Off it, the people who'd recognize her can be counted on one hand. That part doesn't scare her. What scares her is harder to name — probably the fear that one day, if she actually makes it, she'll look back at these empty chairs and take them for granted. That she'll turn into the kind of person who treats other people's effort as something owed to her.
So she keeps herself honest with a clumsy little trick. In her phone's notes there's a long column of dates, only dates, not a single word: March 12. April 5. May 20. One of the older girls in the group once glimpsed it and asked what she was recording. Practice schedule, she said, eyebrow up, grinning. It wasn't. They were the nights with no applause. She doesn't dare write anything down — afraid that a sentence would curdle into a complaint, into self-pity. She wants to keep those nights exactly as they were: bare dates, hard-edged, not allowed to go soft.
March 12 was her first showcase. The atrium of a mall on the south side of town, eleven people inside the barrier rope. She counted them, precisely: three old folks resting their feet, two holding light-sticks for some other group who'd clearly wandered into the wrong show, the rest scrolling on their phones. She finished the song, bowed until her forehead nearly touched her knees, and as she came up a little boy clapped twice before his parent tugged him away. Just those two claps. She never mentioned it to anyone — only added a date to the notes.
After that show she walked forty minutes, alone, to that lemon-tea shop on the south side. She ordered two cups. One she held; the other she set on the empty seat across from her, watching the ice sweat and slowly melt, and only when that second cup had stopped breathing cold did she drink them both, one after the other. She couldn't have told you why she ordered two. Maybe just so the table wouldn't look so empty. The lemon was sour enough to make her squint, and she told herself: run the solo one more time tomorrow, and I'll land it clean on the first try.
The truth is she gets lost even inside her own company. On her first day, hunting for the third-floor practice room, she somehow ended up in the second basement parking garage, standing among a row of unfamiliar cars with not a single bar of signal. A cleaning lady led her back up. The water in the woman's mop bucket smelled of lemon cleaner — sour, and somehow it overlapped, later, with that cup of tea. To this day she still can't tell north from south, freezes for two seconds in the elevator before she dares press a button — yet every hallway in that building that leads to a rehearsal room, she could find blind. She can't read directions. She only knows the road back to dancing.
Her memory is generous, and unfair. Whoever mentioned in passing which song they love, whose birthday falls when, who said last week their throat was sore — she keeps all of it for other people. Her own bruises she forgets: the one on her knee from cracking it against the barre, a whole ugly patch of purple she doesn't notice until she's in the shower, oh, that hurts. Ask if she's tired and she smiles first, waves it off, I'm fine — even as the rims of her eyes go pink, and she doesn't feel it happen, still grinning, still holding it up.
Today the chairs are empty as ever. But someone is standing in the doorway. You.
She counts a crowd fast and sure; it's a reflex the job drills into you. She cranes toward the door and starts, out of habit, to count — reaches one, and suddenly breaks into a laugh, and doesn't go on. No need.
She runs over, wiping sweat, gives a little hop. You came! Listen, I got that solo clean today, first try, no mistakes! …Hey, don't rush off. Want to come sit for a bit? Right there, front row, the blue chair — I saved it on purpose yesterday. That cup of lemon tea today, it finally won't have to sit across from me letting its ice melt for nothing.
