The Wrong Foot

The rhinestone was doing more work than my foot. I pressed the glue down, counted to ten, and held the shoe up to the changing-room light. From the right angle, the scuff on my toe cap looked like a design choice. From the left, it looked like I'd kicked a wall. I had kicked a wall.

"Very you," Ro said from the doorway. "Bedazzled battle damage."

"Structural," I said. "The rhinestone adds aerodynamics."

"To your toe."

"To my toe." I turned the shoe before she could see the glue string. "Don't you have a semifinal to panic about?"

"Don't you have a terrifying original routine to panic about?" She dropped onto the bench, far too relaxed for someone whose calves were doing that pre-show twitch. "Everyone's saying the heel catch is nasty. Like you invented a new joint."

The heel catch was nasty. It was also licensed, a detail Ro didn't need. I bent over my ankle like a woman with important shoe business. First switch, low on the collar: green, one blink. Balance support on. It hummed against the ankle bone, a small steady hand telling me where my weight was and doing absolutely nothing about it.

The second switch sat under the tongue. Amber. Optional step previews, loaded from the package I'd paid for with the money I'd saved for a jacket. The shoes would tap my heel a fraction before each suggested movement—three beats, a tactile whisper of what came next. They wouldn't move my legs. They'd only tell me where the floor was going, and I still had to get there myself.

"Original," I said, and the word came out wearing a cardigan. "Well. You know. You have to bring something nobody's seen."

Ro's eyebrows went up, delighted. "So it is yours. The heel thing."

I looked at the rhinestone, already pretending to be something it wasn't. "Somebody had to write it."

"Terrifying," she said. "I love it. Don't fall."

"Statistically unlikely." I went out to dance.

My semifinal was four minutes conducted at double speed, in front of a judge with a clipboard and Ro in the second row with her chin on her fist. The green hum caught my landings, ankle to ankle, a corrective murmur when the third turn pulled me toward the edge of the floor. It didn't hold me up. It told me, politely, that I was about to be sideways, and I did the rest with my own shins. The amber taps came in their three-beat clusters, and I followed them because I'd paid to and because the music had teeth. But they were suggestions. On the second diagonal the cue and my foot disagreed, and I placed the step myself, early, right on the snare. My feet did the actual arguing. At the last phrase I caught the heel, held it while the count stretched, snapped the toe down on the beat, and the room made a noise I felt in my back teeth.

Clean execution. Clean composition. The clipboard went up, and so did my score.

Ro met me at the water table. "Told you. That heel catch. Nasty." The rhinestone winked from my toe cap, satisfied with itself. Then, idly, she rocked back on one foot—heel, toe, heel—the exact three-beat entry to my signature phrase, like humming a song she'd heard once.

I picked up a bottle. "Where'd you learn that?"

"The package," Ro said, cheerful and matter-of-fact, like naming a brand of tape. "Same as everyone. Forty percent off if your studio buys three licenses."

The floor manager called the finalists. My face was hot enough to register on the judges' tablet. I bent to check the scuff, and the rhinestone flashed at me, still pretending. We lined up side by side and neither of us said anything, because four bars of music would say it better.

The music started. Amber ticked my heel—heel, toe, heel—and beside me Ro's foot rocked into the same three beats, her shoe and mine calling the same opening cue.

The lights came up, and both shoes began ticking heel, toe, heel. Not an echo. The same cue, in stereo.

Amber ticked along the instep of my shoe, the licensed entry, the same three beats I'd bragged about in the changing room. Under my arch, the balance support gave its low, steady pressure—weight left, weight right, catch. Two separate systems, two separate switches. The balance one I kept. During the held beat before the second phrase, I bent, thumbed the step-cue stud beneath my laces, and watched the amber die.

No previews. No little lights telling my feet where to go.

Ro glanced at me. I gave her my best innocent face, which has never fooled anyone but me.

The diagonal came at us out of the second eight. The safe path crossed right-foot first. I went left. I had never practiced it, not once, because the left-foot approach made the turn too tight and the landing ugly. I told myself that was the point. The balance support pushed a warning into my arch, but it only told me where my weight was; it couldn't pick the step.

I arrived on the outside edge of my left foot.

The ankle rolled. My toe cap skidded half an inch and squeaked against the lacquer. Count four went past without me. There's a particular kind of loud that happens when you miss a beat on a polished floor and everyone watches you hear it.

I dragged the turn.

It wasn't clean. It was a long ugly smear across beats five and six, my heel scuffing while I let the spin sag, and then I caught the next phrase on the rise with my shoulder and a slap of my palm against my thigh. The judges' styluses moved. I knew exactly what they were writing.

Ro didn't skid. She took the diagonal right-foot first, landed soft as a dropped coin, and finished with the heel catch as if she'd been born in it. Clean execution. Her shoulder never wobbled. When the last bar shut, she was already breathing with the count.

The scorer read her total first. Ninety-three point four. Mine came after: eighty-eight point one. Ro got the travel grant. I stood with my number bib in my hands and let myself feel the drop, all the way down, before I folded it.

"You turned the cues off," Ro said at the scorer's table.

"I rented the routine," I said. "I wanted you to think I made it."

Ro drank some water. "I know. The license shows on the shoe menu. Also, you called it 'my signature heel catch.' It's page six of the starter pack."

My face went hot. "You could have said."

"You could have split the forty percent with me. It's cheaper in threes." She screwed the cap back on. "Your recovery was ugly."

"It caught the phrase."

"It did. Ugly and on time." She bumped her bottle against my elbow, which was as close as we got to a hug in public. "Second place. Not bad for a rental."

The caretaker started stacking chairs. At the scorer's table, the practice recorder was still awake, its take list glowing. One line pulsed: Discard low-scoring take? I pressed no. The name field blinked. I typed Wrong Foot and saved it.

Then I played the scuff back. The speaker made it worse: rubber, squeak, one lost count. Ro leaned over my shoulder and listened with the same concentration she gave a judge's sheet.

"Try it with me," I said. "The drag. I want to see if it can be a transition instead of a rescue."

Ro set her bag down, nudged two abandoned water bottles out of the diagonal with her toe, and said, "Left foot first. Don't protect it."

The balance support pressed my arch, steady, still on. I stepped onto the outside edge of my left foot and let the ankle roll. The drag began. Ro's toe came down beside mine on the next beat.