Pas de Deux of the Soul

My senior year at North Central High School I was let out early after several classes so I could already attend Butler University's dance classes. My heart and brain already wanted to be a paid apprentice, then a paid professional with any dance company that would hire me, but my parents had saved up money for the university education they believed would be more beneficial to me. Although I believed being paid to dance now and waiting to attend university until I was ready to study something other than dance would ultimately be more effective, I received a scholarship at Butler, the same university my dad received his MA at decades earlier.

My one other invigorating thought was to be accepted to a tiny marine biology school in Alaska and then dance as a professional hobby and turn some of the boy oil drillers into dance artists as well. Unfortunately I never received word from the simplest, sweetest university application I had applied for. The mailbox stayed empty on that count, and I checked it more often than I admitted.

In the studio I carried the heavy label of a local prodigy. High school peers watched me leave campus at midday with a mix of awe and distance. A few girls asked how many hours I spent at the barre. I told them the truth and they nodded as if I had described a foreign country. Boys I had known since middle school treated my schedule like a closed door. There were options for one day, the usual teenage pairings that bloomed in hallways and after football games, yet my logic of marrying a man who could support my dance profession was far from ready. Their occupations were also yet to be formed. The love of people and companionship was generally very strong, yet the lack of capability in our teens for financially supporting each other was too big of a turn off to continue pursuing beyond the everlasting affection that lasts whenever paths continue to naturally align.

At home my mother, Brittany Watson, laid the scholarship letter on the kitchen table beside a plate of toast. She spoke firmly, the way she did when she had already decided the outcome was kindness. “You use this,” she said. “Your father walked those same halls. The money is already set aside. Auditions can wait until you have something to fall back on.” I wanted to argue that falling back was the opposite of what a dancer needed, but I ate the toast and listened. She was not cruel. She was practical, and she had watched me stretch until my muscles shook. She believed the university would keep me safer than a contract that might never arrive.

Butler’s studios smelled of rosin and old wood. I changed in the locker room while older dancers finished their morning technique. They were polite. They were also already cast in the roles I craved. I took class beside them and tried not to measure my height against theirs. I was petite, wiry, and used to being the smallest one who still hit the balances. Here the rooms felt larger and the competition quieter, more institutional. I did the combinations as they were given. I smiled when a faculty member corrected my épaulement. Inside I kept counting the months until I could audition without a parent’s signature on the permission slip.

The Alaskan application had been a secret I mailed myself. I had written about tide pools and glaciers and how movement could teach men who worked the rigs to feel their bodies as something other than tools. I imagined teaching in a community hall with windows facing water. No one at home knew. When the silence from that school stretched into weeks, I folded the brochure into a notebook and left it there. Classical expectations pressed from every side: the scholarship, the family name on the alumni list, the assumption that a serious dancer still needed a degree first.

Peer tensions at the high school were subtle. I was the girl who left early, the one whose name appeared in local papers after recitals. Some classmates treated that like a trophy I had not earned in their presence. Others asked me to choreograph a pep-rally number and then forgot the request. I did not take it personally. I understood the distance. Dedication looks like absence when you are seventeen and everyone else is still in the cafeteria.

Teenage romance sat in the same unfinished place. I liked the quiet ones who did not demand I choose them over rehearsal. We held hands in parked cars and talked about cities we had never seen. None of us had money. None of us could leave. I recognized that neither I nor my peers possessed the financial independence needed to launch an autonomous career without parental backing. That fact sat in my chest like a second heartbeat. I could want a company contract with every muscle I owned and still need someone else’s savings to buy the plane ticket.

Evenings I stretched on the living-room floor while my mother folded laundry. She asked about class. I described the new combination and left out how small I felt next to the college girls. She nodded and said again that Butler was the right next step. I did not tell her about Alaska. I did not tell her how badly I wanted to be hired now, to be paid to travel and perform outreach, to let the universe decide the rest. I washed my leotards in the sink and hung them to dry. The scholarship felt like a door that opened only onto another hallway I already knew.

Some afternoons I walked from the high school parking lot to the university studios with my canvas bag packed with pointe shoes. The route was familiar. The decision was not. I wanted the paid apprenticeship more than I wanted another year of being the promising local girl. My parents wanted the degree their savings had prepared for. Brittany’s voice stayed gentle and immovable. I kept dancing. I kept applying in secret to the place that never wrote back. I kept noticing that everyone around me was still forming, still waiting, still unable to underwrite a life that began with a contract instead of a classroom.

The studios at Butler were brighter than the ones I had grown up in. Mirrors ran the full length of the walls. I took my place at the barre and told myself the work was the same. It was not. Seniors already owned the best roles. New dancers already craved greater parts. I was still the support, the one who showed up early and stayed late, the one whose image might one day appear on a poster while the actual dancing went to someone taller, someone already inside the hierarchy. I did the pliés. I did the tendus. I thought about oil rigs and cold water and the chance that a tiny school at the edge of the map might have understood me better than the university that already had my name on a scholarship list.

At night I lay in my childhood bed and listened to the house settle. I was eighteen soon. The future career paths frustrated me. I did not feel right about staying overly committed to any single plan when dancing dreams could still take me anywhere upon being hired. The Alaskan silence hurt in a quiet way. The Butler acceptance sat on the dresser like a finished argument. I closed my eyes and pictured myself on a stage that paid me, then pictured myself teaching men in work boots how to find a rhythm they did not know they had. Both pictures felt equally far. Both felt like mine. In the morning I would leave high school early again, walk into the university studios, and keep the two routines running side by side until someone, or something, chose for me.