I don’t suppose what happened to me up ‘til then, when we were surviving on the streets and living out each day like our last was very interesting. Most of my life had been disappointingly bland, devoid of excitements or funny memories that fill up wedding speeches and family albums. To all intents and purposes, I was born to social royalty in upper class New York to a wealthy father in the journalism business and a mother who would keep up appearances until we all went blind.
I was never going to love her. For one thing, I hardly saw her. And for another, I barely knew her. Most of what I collected about her I heard from my maids and babysitters- she was a weak, deranged woman who wouldn’t leave my father if he announced he was moving one of his many mistresses in to live with us. I’d always known he was nothing but a baboon with too much money and an underdeveloped brain. He was a stranger and an idiot to me. I was content with that.
I couldn’t fault my parents completely however. Because, through some clear misjudgment of fate was granted two things I knew I would have never survived without.
The first was my brother Luca. From the moment they brought him into the baby blue nursery down the hall from my own, I knew that they had made some glorious mistake in their miserable lives and gave me him. Looking back, Luca was nothing particularly special- he was just a kid who happened to end up in the same crazy family as me, someone who played tricks on me and occasionally made me cry with his insensitively, but who always knocked my door at the end of the day, smiling and wanting forgiveness, who awkwardly listened to the rain and their fighting with me, silently holding my hand like he would hold it forever.
I’ll never forget the day they sent him away to school. I swore I’d never love anyone like the way I loved my brother. And I never did.
The second thing my parents gave me was the place in my prestigious Catholic private school three hours from home. We had the works, the navy-blue checked skirts and sweaters, the rules, the rumors of nuns pushing unruly girls down the ‘old stairs’- the soulless, cracked holy relics and three hundred years of crushed individuality that they circulated through the school through the air condition that we spoilt little rich girls lived off. I should have hated the place. But I didn’t.
Igor picked me off at point range on my very first day in Saint Jude’s. He was the resident Ballet and classical arts teacher, an emigrant from the old country with suspicious papers but a total resilience to life and a knack each year for avoiding the green card police. The school would always protect Igor, regardless of his questionable relations with the students and even stranger dealings with his co workers concerning his healthy use of the cane and his wicked, foul language. He claimed to have seen me stretching up to get my coat off its hook in my classroom and to have had visions of me as the greatest dancer he’d ever taught. My father called him a pervert and for once I had to agree. Igor’s persistent claims that he was as gay as the day was long just didn’t add up. But all of these- the cane, the verbal abuse, the threats and the blisters and leg splints and six hour long rehearsals were minor details to the bigger scale that was taking rise. Because, to prove a point or to spite everyone in Saint Jude’s, by the time I was sixteen years old I was the best ballet dancer they’d ever had.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had an obsession, but it’s one of the worst and sweetest things in the world to have. It takes to the brink of insanity and back again and makes you more happy and more miserable than any human ever will.
‘Look in the mirror, little girl,’ he would say, as the sweat dripped from every pore I had like someone had set the room on fire and I sucked the air for oxygen like I was going to die ‘she will be great, and she will be great.’
My glory hadn’t come without its costs. I mean, think about it. I was not only the richest, but the most talented and questionably the prettiest girl in school. That’s a hell of a lot of pressure for one person to have. And so I dealt with it in the only way I knew how- by being a cold hearted bitch.
It seems like only yesterday that my life was plagued with barely contained sabotage- my school books stolen and flushed down the old lavatories, my hair cut from behind me in math class, my birthday parties conspicuously under attended. Truth was, I would have been lonely if I knew what that was. I was an island, and there was no way that was going to change. Ambition had found its twisted way into my brain and made me slightly deranged with a heady mix of confidence and arrogance that terrified and impressed everyone in my close vicinity. Even Igor, the sweaty dictator was a growing nervous wreck around me. He knew better than to threaten me anymore, as his protégé I could make or break his reputation and future career. Everybody hated me.
There’s a saying, or maybe it’s just a cheesy film- but in desperate situations, they say ‘something’s gotta give.’
And it did.
