K was a girl in my class at ballet summer camp who I studied every single day. I studied the way her shoulder muscle cut into her upper arm (I had no muscle definition myself). I studied the elevation she was able to achieve in jumps. I studied the way she wore her leotard (with two safety pins making a square boat neck) and her hair (low, flat bun against the nape of her neck). I studied how the light reflected off her rhinestone stud earrings. I studied the geometry of where she chose to sew the ankle elastics on her ballet slippers. I studied the precise pink hue and make of her ballet tights. I studied the light, downy hair on her forearms and the very beginnings of hair under her arms when she raised them over her head (we were 11 years old).
I befriended K. We traded sleepovers. I would get a note from my parents letting me take her chartered bus to her house and return to camp the next day and vice versa. I ate her mother’s food and studied that too – Shake and Bake chicken cutlets with no salt because sodium is bad for you (she said). I studied her dog, a little Terrier of some sort that would eat every dropped crumb off the floor before you had time to get out a broom. We talked about boys and about how another girl in our class, D, wasn’t as good a dancer as she thought she was.
K went to the School of American Ballet, and that fall I went to the open auditions for the school and tried out. I was accepted. The first day of class K bumped into me in the hall. “What are YOU doing here?” she said. We were both wearing Division 4 Forest Green leotards.
My studying of K continued and worsened when I heard Madame Tumkovsky praising her end-of-class jumps. K’s best friend at SAB was also a teacher favorite, and she had the distinction of being the thinnest girl in our class. “Nice to meet you,” she said coldly. They stood together in the “short girls” section at the front of the class. The “short girls” had all been picked to dance in The Party Scene of The Nutcracker. I was a middle-height girl. Some of us were picked to be Polichinelles (the dancers under Mother Ginger’s skirt) or Candy Canes but I was not picked for anything. During the audition, David Richardson (the casting director for The Nutcracker) reached his hand out in my direction. And then he picked the girl standing right behind me.
K didn’t talk to me much at SAB, although she was friendly enough when we met at “open” classes elsewhere in the city. In those, I would do everything in my power to add a rotation to every turn that she did (if she did a double, I did a triple) and to get my leg higher than hers in développés. Eventually K stopped being my friend altogether. “You’re always competing with me,” she said.