Silent Arabesque

The tights were in the bottom of my backpack, wrapped in a gym towel I never used for gym. I'd taken them from the lost-and-found bin at school three weeks ago, and they'd been living there ever since, pressed against the spine of my math book like a secret that might dissolve if I looked at it too long. Black. Size medium. A small tear at the left knee that I'd already decided I could fix with clear nail polish if it ever came to that, which it wouldn't, because I was never going to wear them anywhere except inside my own head.

That was the thing about wanting something you couldn't explain. It didn't go away. It just sat there, patient and stupid, taking up space.

"Moritz. MORITZ."

My mother's voice came up through the floorboards like water through a crack. I shoved the backpack under my desk with my foot and opened my history book to a page about the Congress of Vienna, which I had not read and was not going to read.

"Coming."

She was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a laundry basket on her hip and that look on her face, the one that said she'd been calling me for a while and was now deciding whether to be annoyed about it. She was forty-six, worked at a dental office, and had the kind of tired that never fully left her face, even on Sundays. I loved her. I also wished she would stop looking at me like I was a problem she hadn't figured out how to solve yet.

"Trash," she said. "And your brother needs his jersey washed for tomorrow."

"Why can't he wash his own jersey?"

"Because he's at practice. And because I asked you."

There it was. The logic of the household. I took the basket. It was heavier than it looked. At the bottom, under a tangle of my mother's work blouses and a pair of my brother's socks that had gone gray at the heels, I saw something dark and stretchy. A pair of leggings my mother wore to her Saturday yoga class. Nothing special. But my hands went cold anyway, the way they always did when I saw fabric like that. Close-fitting. Made to show the shape of a body.

I carried the basket to the basement and started the wash and stood there for a minute with my hand on the machine, feeling the hum through my palm. The basement smelled like detergent and old cardboard. There was a shelf of photo albums my mother never opened anymore. My father was in some of those albums. He'd left when I was seven, and I remembered almost nothing about him except the smell of his jacket, which was leather and cigarettes, and the fact that he used to lift me onto his shoulders at the Christmas market. I didn't miss him. I just noticed the shape of the hole sometimes.

---

The thing is, I don't even like ballet.

I want to be clear about that. I've never watched a full performance. The music puts me to sleep. The women in their tutus look like something from a music box, pretty and pointless. But the men. The men in their tights and their fitted tops, the line of their legs, the way the fabric holds everything in place and shows everything at the same time. I saw a documentary once, late at night, when I couldn't sleep. A dancer named Sergei something. He was standing at the barre, and the camera was close, and I couldn't look away. Not because I wanted him. Because I wanted to be him. I wanted to be inside that body, inside those clothes, moving like that, being looked at like that.

I turned off the light and went upstairs and didn't think about it again for almost an hour.

At dinner, my brother Lukas ate like he was being timed. He was nineteen, home for the summer before his second year at university, and he filled the house with the smell of deodorant and the sound of his phone. He was tall and easy in his body in a way I couldn't imagine being. He'd played football since he was six. He had a girlfriend named Elif who laughed at everything he said.

"Mom, tell him to stop staring at the wall," Lukas said, his mouth full.

"I'm not staring at the wall."

"You're staring at the wall."

"Boys," my mother said, which meant nothing, which meant stop.

I looked at my plate. Rice and chicken and a sauce from a jar. I ate three bites and then moved the rest around. My mother watched me do it and said nothing. That was her way. She noticed everything and said nothing, and the silence piled up between us like snow.

---

That night, I locked my door.

I never locked my door. The lock was old and sticky and made a sound like a cough. I stood with my back against it for a second, listening. The TV was on downstairs. Lukas was in his room with music playing. Nobody was coming.

I took the tights out of my backpack and unwrapped them from the towel. They were softer than I expected. Cool against my fingers. I sat on the edge of my bed and held them for a long time without doing anything, because doing something would make it real, and real things could be found out.

Then I put them on.

It took longer than it should have. My hands were shaking, and the fabric was tight, and I had to roll them up my legs the way you'd roll a sock, careful not to stretch them wrong. When they were on, I stood up and looked in the mirror on my closet door.

I don't know what I expected. I looked like me. A sixteen-year-old boy with narrow shoulders and a soft stomach and legs that went on too long for his body. But the tights changed the shape of everything. They made my legs look like something that had been considered. Like a drawing someone had taken time with. I turned to the side and then back, and my heart was going so fast I could feel it in my throat.

I looked like a dancer. Not a good one. Not a real one. But a version of me that existed somewhere, in some other life, where I wasn't afraid.

Someone knocked on my door.

"Moritz?"

My mother. I froze with my hand on the closet door, the tights still on, my jeans on the floor where I'd dropped them.

"Yeah?"

"Did you take the trash out?"

I looked at the tights. At my legs. At the door.

"Yeah," I said. "I took it out."

A pause. Long enough that I thought she might push the door open. She didn't.

"Okay," she said. "Goodnight."

Her footsteps went back down the hall. I stood there for a long time, not moving, not breathing right, the tights tight against my skin and my whole body humming with something that was half terror and half the best feeling I'd ever had.

I peeled them off and hid them again. But I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and thought about the door, and the lock, and the fact that I'd lied to my mother about something so small she'd never think to check.

It wasn't about the trash. It was about the fact that I'd learned I could lie. And that I would. Again.