I was never a rebellious kid. My parents knew they could trust me not to pour soda on the dog or to sneak out of the house at all hours (things my teenage sister and her friends were all too good at). After all, we lived in the woods. Sneaking out of the house meant I would either have to find someone to pick me up, walk ten miles to a friend’s house, or chill with the deer all night and hope I didn’t step in too much of their pellet poop along the way. The only moments of disobedience in my childhood came when I would scamper across the street to jump on the neighbors’ trampoline, defying my mother’s stern rule to stay away from all things that could potentially launch me into the surrounding tree line. On the Richter scale of disobedience, I ranked a mild two.
That is, until I went away to the Houston Ballet Summer program at the age of thirteen and got a taste of Boston Market. Suddenly there was a fast-food restaurant right across from the dance studios—where I was spending my second summer away from home—that allowed me to have my favorite meal, Thanksgiving dinner, on any day I desired. When I discovered the addition of cornbread that was almost as sweet as a Hostess product, I knew I would routinely be making my way across the busy intersection behind the dance building while others concocted vending machine lunches where peanut butter crackers constituted a main course.
I became addicted. I’d hop scotch through oncoming traffic with packs of dancers in tow, everyone anxious for a hot meal that wasn’t cooked in the dormitory microwave, and hope to be able to cram in all the food before the next rehearsal started. This was always a challenge, considering our nearly eight hour schedule that mixed dance class, Pilates, gossip sessions in the lounge and, what was initially the most exciting thing to me, new choreography.
Broken into two sections over the six-week course, the student choreographic workshop was unlike anything I’d ever seen in Montana. At my home dance studio, the name of our teacher was VHS and the rep was continuously from storybook ballets; I didn’t know what else was out there.
For the first of the two sessions I was in a ballet created by an older student, Brian, whose group of friends, trainees with the company, I emulated and hoped to please. This plan went terribly down hill when I grand jeted directly into the testicles of his close friend Anthony during class, causing the boy to cough up blood and stare me down until I thought most certainly I was going to be hung from a changing room locker by my dance belt, if not castrated.
But while rehearsing Brian’s piece, I followed the rules just as my parents had taught me to do: I executed the choreography whenever asked; I showed up early to rehearsal; I even went home at night to my dorm room and wrote down the steps in my notebook while other boys, my Fruit Loop-loving roommate included, snuck out the tempting sliding glass doors to make out with female students. My goal was to be the star pupil.
I thought for sure I had succeeded when, for the second round of the choreographic workshop, I was cast in Brian’s piece again and given yet another chance to impress his friends and make up for my earlier ball busting. But a strange thing happened when the cast list went up on the board: my name was beneath a slot labeled “Understudy.” This was a word that had surely not been associated with me in Montana (except for the time when I begged my teacher to let me understudy one of the fairy variations in “Cinderella,” but that’s neither here nor there). My dreams of being the only thirteen year old asked to be a principal dancer with Houston Ballet were crushed by that one simple word. I needed comfort. I needed macaroni and cheese slathered over a luscious turkey breast. I needed Boston Market.
For the first few weeks of rehearsal I did my best to feign interest. I stood in the back of the cramped rehearsal studio in my uniform black tights and white shirt, while my classmates executed choreography in a ballet that to the best of my knowledge was about an angel and some sort of demon. It also could have been about Christmas. I wasn’t paying attention. Most of the time I was thinking about how I would rather be at home in Montana on the trampoline. The back of the room was so boring.
It didn’t take me long to think of a single word that could save me from my boredom: cornbread. One afternoon, when we were only three days away from the final performance, I decided to do the unthinkable and skip rehearsal to get some grub from my favorite high-class establishment while the rest of my peers executed choreography that didn’t reside in any dorm room notebook, or my head for that matter. I took my time. I used my plastic fork to swirl the potatoes with the creamed spinach. I strolled along the intersection on my way back to the studio, dangling my foot off the curb like a gymnast on the balance beam; just an awkward teenager in jazz pants roaming around Houston. This is the life, I thought to myself.
And then I heard someone scream my name.
I looked across the intersection and saw a boy, Josh, outside in little more than ballet shoes and cut-off tights, waving his arms up and down and yelling for me to hurry. I scuttled across traffic, half-hoping a car would take me out before I got to the other side to receive what I was sure couldn’t be good news. Anthony just twisted his ankle and we need you to go into the piece right now! Brian is looking all over for you, Josh informed me. It was time for the castration.
The walk from the front entrance of the studio, up the staircase to the second floor, down the fluorescent hallway to the studio in the back right corner of the building was a blur. All I could think of was how angry I was that my roommate had crushed an entire box of cereal into the carpet of our dorm room the night before. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a single step of choreography.
The studio door slammed behind me with all the weight of a prison cell. Everyone was staring. I was sweating in places I didn’t think my pubescent body could sweat, and then I saw Anthony, sitting in the corner with an ice pack around his ankle and a strange twinkle in his eye.
Okay. We’re going to run the piece from the top, Brian said. I shuffled to find my place in the opening tableau. The music started. Occasionally I was in the right position, but more often than not I turned around to execute a step and found a body directly on top of me, or a foot perilously close to kicking my face. All the while, Brian refused to stop and help me. The music reached its climax and the piece ended. I wanted to cry as everyone exited the studio, but Brian pulled me over to discus the fact that there was a large chance I would be performing the piece during the showing in two days, and that I better go over the choreography tonight in my dorm room.
The bus ride back to the college campus we were staying at seemed more like a consistent crowbar to the head than a means of transportation. Dress rehearsal was the next day, and I would have to use my cereal-covered floor as a stage for the evening. When I got back to the cell, my roommate was sitting on his side of the room (clearly delineated by a line of masking tape I had secured to the ground after one too many instances of walking into the room to find his items strewn over my bed), shoveling handfuls of dry Lucky Charms into his mouth. The marshmallows occasionally missed his chomping teeth and tumbled to the floor, but I had no energy for nitpicking. I popped my head into the common room to see if any cast mates would pry themselves away from the ping-pong table to teach me the choreography; no one budged.
Through the course of the night I managed to piece together a bulk of the choreography with the occasional grunts of approval from my roommate. I showered for bedtime and did my best not to slip while I marked the steps beneath a showerhead whose water pressure seemed to bruise my skin. I wanted Montana skies. I wanted to get as far away from the temptations of Boston Market as possible. I wanted to go back a few weeks and not jump on the trampoline of boredom, just like my mother had warned me.
But it was too late. The next morning I awoke and did my best to contain shivers of terror while we walked to the theater. Backstage was hectic with people trying to piece together costumes and students stretching against walls. Brian pulled our entire cast aside and called us to the stage to talk. He asked me if I had solidified the choreography over the course of the night. I told him I had. It was a lie.
The cast dispersed and Brian walked me to the front of the stage. Anthony is doing the performance, he said. Bullets to my skin; the most relieving bullets ever, but bullets nonetheless. He’s fine. But you can’t skip rehearsal again. All I could do was nod. The whole thing had been a farce, a joke at my expense to teach me a lesson. There was no injury, only great acting by a cast of people I looked up to.
I made my way to the audience to take my place among the other understudies. Even though I was seated firmly in a leather seat, I felt like I had been launched into the surrounding treeline, my limbs broken like my mother had always feared would happen. The music for the first piece started as the house lights faded to black and I vowed to myself never to jump on a trampoline again. If only I hadn't gone across the street in the first place.
