Not Otherwise Specified by Hannah Moskowitz

dancing.”
    She shrugs. “I don’t really get dancing, I guess. I mean, I want to . . .”
    â€œEver seen a ballet?”
    She shakes her head.
    â€œOhhh God, okay, we need to table this discussion. I will accept your dismissal of Billy Elliot after you’ve seen a better dancing show. Right now it’s winning its category just by, like, default.”
    â€œI like My Fair Lady .”
    â€œBoooring. Just choose Sound of Music , why don’t you.”
    She laughs with her head tipped back. It’s pretty and so much older than she is. Rachel laughs like that.
    â€œDid you always love ballet?” she says.
    â€œYeah, ever since I was tiny. I was this little overachiever in my class, it was ridiculous. But I ended up changing ballet schools all the time, following different teachers.”
    â€œStage mom?”
    â€œOh, hell no, just an indulgent one, I guess. By the time I was like eight she was letting me tell her what the best programs were and just following my lead. You?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she says. “I guess. My parents never performed or anything, but my mom has this really nice voice, so I guess they pour it all into us.”
    â€œGotta love that non-pressure.”
    â€œRight? So . . . you quit because they told you to lose weight? They shouldn’t have done that.”
    â€œIt’s not like it was this constant spoken thing, you know, everyone telling me to lose weight or whatever. It wasn’t like that. My teacher said something this one time and I wentcrying to Rachel about it and . . . I don’t know, we talked about it, and she was right, it wasn’t just this one teacher saying something. It was the whole system of ballet, the . . . I mean, the discipline of it. I didn’t fit. Depressingly literally.”
    â€œSo . . . you quit because Rachel told you to.”
    â€œIt’s that obvious, huh?”
    She smiles. “Maybe a little.”
    I don’t know how I’m thinking about this girl. Bianca. I’m not sure why I can’t stop watching her and I’m not sure any of the possibilities are okay, because there’s no answer that makes her not a severely eating-disordered straight fourteen-year-old , so I smile at her a little and then look away and sip my coffee.
    She says, “So, um,” and she doesn’t even need to say anything else before I know she’s doing some mind reading of my creepy half-lesbian brain, and shit, shit, she knows I was looking. “You, uh, are attracted to girls?”
    Damn. I really wasn’t looking at her like that, I swear. “Yeah. And boys too.”
    â€œSo I guess it’s hard from both sides.”
    She’s the only person who’s ever figured that out on her own. I put my cup down.
    â€œYeah,” I say. “Yeah. I’m never gay enough and never straight enough.”
    â€œSounds scary.”
    â€œJust lonely, really.”
    â€œSo do you, like . . . How did you know ?”
    â€œIt was finding out that everyone else wasn’t bisexual that was the shock, honestly. I thought it was like . . . you know, how some guys like blondes better. I thought that some people like girls better but that everyone likes both to some degree, you know? And I guess I thought people just usually married the other one because it was easier. And you know what?”
    â€œWhat.”
    â€œI kind of thought that maybe a bunch of them were cowards who just didn’t want to tell their parents. I guess I knew it was something my parents would disapprove of before I knew it was a thing .”
    â€œIt’s been hard? With your parents?”
    The truth is I feel shitty about complaining because I know so many people have it much worse. My mom hasn’t kicked me out. She hasn’t told me she disapproves. No, she told me she loved me and accepted me and of course