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Nina tells the doctors it was all a drug freakout. “One of the guys had some pills,” she tells her mother, because otherwise her mother won’t let Lily come back, and Lily comes every day with a bouquet. White lilies, tiger lilies, lily-of-the-valley.
Her mother clips some of the lily-of-the-valley. She braids them into Nina’s hair and tries to smile. Nina stares at the ceiling. The fluorescent lights blur as she tries to count the dots in the ceiling tiles.
It looks just like the hospital Beth’s in: the buzz of the flickering fluorescent lights, the empty too-narrow halls. Again and again, Nina asks the doctors, the nurses, her mother, and they all assure her that it is not the same hospital, and so Beth cannot smother her with a stiff antiseptic hospital pillow.
No, Lily was the one who smothered Nina with a pillow, anyway.
No, none of that ever happened.
Lily is the only one who comes to the hospital. Thomas sent roses – white roses. There is no note.
There are ninety-three dots in the ceiling tile above her bed.
Her mother’s neroli perfume is astringent beneath the scent of roses. Nina can feel her mother’s eyes on her, her hands pulling at Nina’s hair as she braids the lily-of-the-valley into Nina’s hair. Her mother’s hands are fine: no bruises. What kind of monster imagines hurting her own mother?
Her mother gives Nina’s braid a final tug. “I’m never letting you out of my sight,” she says.
“You won’t be able to stop Beth,” Nina says. Her legs look like sticks beneath the nubby bluish blanket the hospital provided. “You can’t, she’ll get you too – ”
Nina’s mother hugs Nina. “Shhh,” she says, rocking Nina. “Shh.” The smell of neroli engulfs her.
A knock on the doorframe. Nina’s mom pulls back, eyeing the intruder warily. “Lily,” she says.
“Hey,” says Lily, her voice husky and warm, as always. A nosegay of lily-of-the-valley hangs carelessly at her side. “Nina! You’re awake!”
Nina’s mother reaches for the flowers. Lily shifts them away from her. “Catch,” she says, and tosses them to Nina. It fascinates Nina, the way Lily moves: so unselfconscious, uncontrolled even, but so graceful.
“You coming back soon?” Lily asks, sitting next to Nina on the bed. Her loose hair brushes Nina’s arm.
“No,” Nina says, pianissimo. She listens to herself speak, as though listening to someone else. “I’m not dancing ballet anymore.”
“Nina!” her mother cries.
Lily’s grin droops. “But you’re so amazing, Nina,” she says.
“I was perfect,” Nina agrees.
“You have to dance,” Nina’s mother says. There’s a note of panic in her voice. “Nina? Nina, look at me. You have to – ”
Nina closes her eyes against tears. Tears will smear her make-up. Except she’s not wearing anyway. Maybe it will smear her face.
“Swan Lake sucks without you,” Lily says. Nina can’t read her voice, so she opens her eyes. Lily looks…sad? She waves a hand, like – like the fact that she’s Odette now doesn’t matter. How can that not matter?
“I’ll never be that good again, so what’s the point of going on?” Nina says.
“I don’t – ” Lily begins.
“You have to dance!” Nina’s mother shouts, and her mouth seems to grow with her voice, till her face is all mouth mouth mouth.
Nina buries her face in the lilies-of-the-valley. Go away, she thinks. Go away, go away, go away.
When she looks up, Lily is gone. Her mother’s mouth is normal again. She sings Nina a lullaby.
***
Nina’s mother takes her home. The door to Nina’s bedroom is gone. Nina stares at the doorframe.
“After what happened,” her mother says, and looks down, her voice fading away. “I’ll get you tea.”
Nina looks at herself in the mirror. Her eyes look dull and bruised. She bares her teeth at herself, experimental. Nina-in-the-mirror bares her teeth too. Nina smiles, frowns, bites her lip. Nina-in-the-mirror obediently follows her lead, and finally Nina smiles again, uncertainly. Perhaps her reflection will behave.
Nina curls up in her comforter. She wants to go to sleep in her pink bower and sleep for a hundred years, but her room feels cold and empty with her stuffed animals gone. Coppelia sits on her bed, though – Coppelia, the monkey with the tutu that Nina’s mother got her when Nina won the part of Clara. She holds Coppelia to her: a friend.
Nina used to have tea parties with her stuffed animals. All the soft plush creatures, and Nina, the strange tall bony monster.
A saucer clinks on Nina’s bedside table. “You have practice in an hour,” Nina’s mother says, casually.
Obedient, Nina sits up. Her hands shake on her toe shoes. A movement in the mirror catches her eye, and Nina stars, fixated, at the mocking grin on Nina-in-the-mirror. She has fangs, like a snake’s.
Nina touches her own mouth. It is knotted up in a tiny frightened rosebud. She wants to force her fingers past her lips, to check her teeth, but she cannot bear to cut herself again.
“I can’t,” Nina whispers.
“You have to,” her mother says. Tears leak from Nina’s eyes. She closes them, turning her face into her pillow. Her mother’s voice rises. “The doctor said you’re fine. Physically there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re fine.”
She pulls Nina out of bed. Nina grabs the bedpost. She kicks, and her mother lets go, and Nina scurries under her bed and weeps till her cheeks are gray with tears and dust.
Her mother goes to work, eventually. Time crawls. Nina gets out from under the bed. Her legs are shaky.
Her mother left a glass of milk on her bedside table. Nina drinks it. She had not realized how badly her throat ached until then.
Her legs feel strange. She walks to the mirror. She seems to be hovering, her feet not touching the comforting hardwood floor. She is afraid to look down, in case she has lost her feet.
She has not gone so long without dancing since she was four.
Her feet are still there in the mirror. Her reflection is as white and nervous as she is. She bites her lip, hard enough to feel it. Nina-in-the-mirror bites her lip too. Blood trickles down her chin. Nina touches her face. Bloodless.
A simple plié. Her legs tremble. She straightens, and bends again, deeper.
Nina-in-the-mirror smirks. Her snake fangs pierce her chin.
Nina’s legs buckle beneath her.
She lies on the floor, very still, listening to her breath. Her pink room grows blue with twilight. Nina draws her legs up to her chest and stares at herself in the mirror. Nina in the mirror stares back.
Nina bares her teeth, very carefully. Nina-in-the-mirror has lost her monster fangs.
***
“He-ey, Nina,” Lily sings, swinging off Nina’s doorframe like a monkey, grinning. “How you feeling?”
“Fine,” says Nina. Nina’s mother stands behind Lily in the doorway, anxious, hovering.
Lily is looking around the room. Nina studies Lily’s face. Lily looks curious and friendly, like always. It makes Nina anxious.
Lily picks up Coppelia. Nina’s heart flutters. What if Lily is here to take away her last stuffed animal?
But it wasn’t Lily who took away her stuffed animals. Nina got rid of them: Nina threw them out. Nina betrayed them.
She wishes that were not one of the real things.
“Lily,” Nina’s mother begins.
Lily smiles at Nina. “What’s this little guy’s name?” she asks, holding up the monkey.
“Coppelia,” Nina whispers, and clears her throat. “She’s Coppelia.”
Lily’s brow knits, turning from curious to quizzical. “So like everything in here is about ballet?” she says, and suddenly her grin is back. “Let’s get you another hobby.”
“Lily,” Nina’s mother says. “Nina needs her rest.”
A package arrives for Nina later that week. Inside is a teddy bear in an Irish dancing dress, red and green and cheerful. A gift tag hangs from its ear: XOXOXO LILY.
Nina’s mother’s face clenches up. “We’re getting rid of this,” she says.
“No,” whispers Nina. She holds the teddy bear to her.
“Give it to me,” her mother orders.
“No,” repeats Nina.
Her mother takes hold of the teddy bear’s head. She pulls. Nina clutches tighter. “No!” Nina shouts, and pulls back.
The teddy bear rips. Nina screams. She curls around herself, arms clenched against her stomach. She shuts her eyes. Teddy bears do not have blood.
“Nina!” her mother cries.
“Don’t touch me!” Nina shrieks.
Her mother doesn’t touch her. Her mother has begun to listen to her since Nina went to the hospital. Her hands flutter uncertainly in the air. Nina curls forward, face to the carpet. She feels like her insides are falling out.
Her mother sits by her bedside that night, sewing the teddy bear back together. Nina pushes her head under the pillow.
***
“Nina?”
Nina sits with her back to the door and her knees drawn up to her chest. She raises her head from her knees and looks up, up, up at Lily standing above her. Lily’s long scarf dangles almost within Nina’s reach. She bats at it, like a cat.
“Lily,” Nina says, or tries to say, but she’s not sure she gets any noise into it.
Lily crouches beside her, like the world’s most graceful frog. She almost topples over, and laughs – Nina can smell the alcohol on her breath – and asks, “How did you find my apartment?”
“I asked Susie at the office.”
“How long have you been waiting here?” Lily says. “Jesus, I went out right after practice ended, it’s like….” She checks her phone. “Two o’clock. Jesus, you’re lucky I made an early night.”
“Can I come in?” Nina asks. Lily doesn’t answer at once. Nina panics. “I should go,” she says, and tries to stand, but her legs have stopped working again.
“No, no, come in,” says Lily.
“I should go,” Nina repeats. This time she makes it halfway up, but then she falls. Lily catches her. Nina props herself against the door. “My mom will be worried,” Nina says, and tears well in her eyes.
“Your mom? Probably she’s already frantic,” Lily says kindly. She maneuvers an arm around Nina to snake her key into the lock. The door opens. Nina falls inside.
Lily nudges her the rest of the way inside, then steps inside herself. She tosses the keys into a red glazed bowl on the table. “Three points!” she says, raising her hands in mock victory, then swoops down and pulls Nina to her feet.
“Do you want me to call a cab?” she asks, hands on Nina’s elbows.
Nina shakes her head. She steps forward, tentatively. Lily stops her with a palm flat against her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Nina insists. Lily shakes her head. Nina blinks back tears. “I should go,” she says again. Her voice is high and breathless. She rarely feels that she is getting enough air.
“Stay and watch a movie,” Lily suggests.
Nina wavers.
“If you give your mom a little more time to worry, she’ll come out the other side of furious to relieved that you’re alive,” Lily advises. She drops her bag in a basket by the door and walks through her apartment, flipping on lamps.
Nina follows, as if in a trance. The apartment is sparse. Brick walls, hardwood floor. A battered red couch stranded in front of a small TV and a big stereo. “This isn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Lily calls from the kitchenette. The microwave beeps as she punches buttons. Too loud. Nina curls up on the couch, pressing one ear against the fraying brocade pillow to quiet things down.
“Black,” Nina says.
Lily laughs. The sound echoes around the exposed pipes in the ceiling. “God, the whole apartment? That would be so depressing.”
“Black and white?” Nina suggests. A wisp of stuffing sticks out of the couch’s arm. Nina eyes it uneasily, and tries to poke it back inside. It will not go. Her stomach flutters. “Like Thomas’s apartment.”
“Of course Thomas’s apartment is like that,” Lily scoffs. The flutters die away in Nina’s stomach. Lily hasn’t been to Thomas’s apartment.
A many-headed hydra lamp sits atop the stereo, each head a different color, scattering elongated colored dots across the wall behind the TV. Nina stares at it, her arms curled over her stomach.
“Dinner is served,” Lily announces. Nina unknots herself. Lily comes out of the kitchenette brandishing a bag of popcorn. The popcorn smells so good. Nina has not wanted to eat anything in weeks. She sits up, and freezes, vertigo twisting her stomach as she looks into the shadowed expanse of hardwood floor behind the couch, the mirrors on the far wall. They reflect the hydra lamp, but the heads seem horribly multiplied, dotted like pinpoints across the surface –
No. Not mirrors. Night-black windows, looking out over the city.
Lily does a quick pirouette, popcorn bag in one hand, hair fluttering behind her. In the window, her blurry image pirouettes too. “Stop,” Nina pleads.
Lily stops. She vaults easily over the back of the couch. But she doesn’t sit next to Nina: she goes on, landing in front of the TV with her legs curved across the floor. “What do you want to watch?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
Lily shakes her hair back impatiently. The top of her tattoo flashes through the shaking strands. “Do you like Johnny Depp?” she asks.
Nina doesn’t answer. Lily grins. “You don’t know who that is, do you?” she says. Laughing. At Nina.
Nina throws a pillow at her. Lily hoots with laughter. “So you have got some fighting spirit!” she says, and makes a fist and punches the air. Nina flinches. Lily stops laughing. A taxicab honks far below.
“We’ll watch one of my favorites,” Lily says. She pops in a movie and flings herself on the couch.
It is Beauty and the Beast, one of the few movies Nina has seen before. She loved this movie, she remembers. Her mother made her a Beauty and the Beast cake.
The crook of Lily’s knee rests against Nina’s head. Cautiously, Nina moves her head onto Lily’s knee. Lily tugs her hair gently.
“Sucks that it’s not like this in real life,” says Lily. She’s crunching an Oreo. She twists them apart and licks out the center, twisting up the white filling with her tongue.
“How do you know?” Nina asks. She cannot quite imagine Lily in love. Love is wasting away and dying, like in Swan Lake or Giselle or La Sylphide. Lily would never do that.
Lily shrugs, stretching her arms above her head. The movement ripples under her skin, and for a moment Nina sees feathers bristling along Lily’s arms. “The Beast always stays a beast.”
There are no feathers on Lily’s arms. Nina’s hands clench on the couch cushions. “That can’t be true,” Nina protests. The rip in the couch cushions widens under her fingernails – not fingernails. Claws. Fur grows off the back of her hands.
“Yeah it is,” Lily says, tossing a few unpopped popcorn kernels from the bottom of the bowl into her mouth. “Listen, Nina, Thomas is just a jerk, okay? Find someone who loves you and not your dancing, because if it’s all ballet, ballet, ballet all the time you’ll go –”
Crazy. Insane. Lily would probably say nuts.
Nina stares at herself in the black windows. Stoplights dot her reflected face. “No,” Nina says, because she understands suddenly, staring in the window, watching fur grow off her face: Thomas isn’t the beast, or Lily, or even Nina-in-the-mirror.
It’s Nina, Nina is the beast.
“Nina?” That’s Lily. “Nina, I’m sorry, that was kind of – I wasn’t thinking.”
Nina looks at Lily. Lily looks concerned, her arched brows drawn down, full lips pursed. Her dark eyes reflect two tiny versions of Nina’s face, one pale, the other covered in fur.
“It’s okay,” says Nina.
Lily’s lips part, as if she’s thinking what to say. Nina kisses her.
Time splits in two.
On the right, Lily pushes Nina away. “Nina, I'd totally like to tap that, but, like…I don’t think this is a good idea right now.”
On the left, Lily kisses her back. She strokes Nina’s cheeks, smoothing the fur, and she laughs when Nina’s fang cuts her lip.
On the right. Nina springs off the couch. She runs across the apartment, her feet not seeming to touch the floor, and slams the bathroom door behind her. The door is solid if she isn’t.
On the left. Lily says harshly, “Open your mouth.” Nina opens her mouth. Lily tastes of lipgloss and schnapps – no, whiskey – would Lily drink schnapps? The world wavers. Jack Daniels. Lily’s lips burn against Nina’s.
Lily slides her hands under Nina’s big sweater, under her camisole, she’s running her fingers over Nina’s breasts. Nina gasps.
Nina turns the shower on. It soaks her sweater, sticking the heavy wet wool to her skin. Purple dye runs down her legs, in mauve swirls on the white tile floor, like alien blood. Oh God, oh God, she is a beast after all, with purple blood. “Nina?” Lily calls, through the door.
Lily tosses Nina’s sweater and camisole over the couch. She sucks Nina’s nipple, presses her against the arm of the couch. The stuffing tickles Nina’s neck. Lily slides off Nina’s leggings. She’s stroking Nina through her panties, sliding her fingers under the fabric. Nina moans.
Lily knocks on the bathroom door. She pounds. “Nina?” she calls. “You okay?” Nina turns up the water. She drags the shower curtain down on top of her. “Nina!” Lily yells.
Lily is licking her, like she did the first time, (that didn’t happen), like when she came back to Nina’s apartment, (Lily can’t leave this time, they’re at her place), Lily strokes Nina’s inner thighs and licks her, inside her, (it didn’t happen, it isn’t happening) –
The hot water gives out. Cold water pours into the shower curtain, gushing through, and the shock of it drowns both timelines. There is nothing in the world but cold water, roaring, cold water trickling through her hair, cold water pooling between her legs. Both timelines collapse into black.
***
“Nina? Nina!”
Nina pushes the shower curtain off her head. The movement sends cascades of shivers richocheting through her, and when she tries to get up she slips and bangs her knee on the cracked tiles.
“Nina? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Nina lies, from long habit. Her knee drips blood. What if she can’t dance on it?
She’s not dancing anymore, anyway.
“Can you, like, turn off the shower?” Lily asks.
Nina turns off the shower.
“And maybe open the door?” Lily says.
That would require moving across the bathroom. Nina slumps against the wall. She’s so cold.
“Or not,” Lily says, and there’s a shushing sound, like cloth against wood. Nina imagines Lily sitting on the other side of the door, back pressed against it, close as she can be and still give Nina her space. “Jesus, Nina.”
“Do you hate me?” Nina asks, in the littlest of her voices.
“Why would I hate you?” Lily sounds genuinely puzzled. Nina loves her voice, that edge of roughness to it.
“I thought I killed you,” Nina says.
A long pause. “Uh…just now? Like that Psycho shower scene?”
“No. At the premier. You tried to steal the black swan, and I stabbed you, except it was me, in the mirror…” Nina can’t go on. Her tears are shockingly hot on her cold face. Her teeth begin to chatter. “I’m a monster.”
“No,” says Lily, and Nina is shocked by the strength of her voice. “Jesus, Nina…” There’s a sound, like Nina shifting against the door. “I never would have given you E if I’d…Oh, fuck. Please open the door?”
Nina doesn’t get up. She pokes at her knee. It has stopped bleeding. Dead people, she remembers, don’t bleed.
“We could go to the diner – there’s this great diner just across the street, massive pancakes – and I can call my shrink, and – ”
“You have a shrink?” Nina is astonished: not that Lily has one, but that she admits it, loosing that fact like it’s nothing.
“Yeah. Duh. And you can talk to her, okay?”
Nina saw a shrink when she started scratching. He said she should stop dancing. “But I can’t do anything but dance,” she had told him; and told her mother, and her mother said that she should never go back.
But she has stopped dancing. A shrink can’t hurt her now.
“Come on out, Nina,” Lily says. “I’ll make coffee. It’s my one amazing cooking skill. And you can put on something dry.”
Nina thinks. Then she gets up. Her knee begins to bleed again; her legs tremble. The floor is cold against her feet as she crosses the bathroom, and opens the door.