Page 107 of Spiced!

I built the dance out of my mother.

I’d never told anyone that either.

It’s not on the program.

All the program said was, “Solo, choreography by the performer,” and that’s all anyone needed.

But the dance was her.

It opened in joy—a boy and his mother in a kitchen in Santurce, before the mainland, before the gray highways, when she was the whole, warm world and her hands in my hair were the safest place a person could be.

And then it thins.

The music turns, and the body turns with it. The reaches grow longer and land on nothing, the joy stretching into something that keeps reaching for a warmth that has moved to the far side of an ocean. It ends with me on the floor, one arm extended toward a door that isn’t there, not collapsed, not defeated—still reaching.

Because that’s the truth of it.

You don’t stop reaching.

You just learn to dance with your arms out.

There’s a moment before you go on when you can see the house through the gap in the wing curtain, a slice of audience lit by stage-spill. I always looked, every performance. And every year there was no one out there who was mine. My mother was three islands and one ocean away. Abuela didn’t do stairs anymore, and the black box was a third-floor walk-up. The showcase was the one place I danced for strangers on purpose, precisely because there was no one out there whose face could undo me.

So I looked through the gap the way I always did. For six years, it had shown me the usual anonymous darkness. This year, Benji had sworn on his own life (and several saints that he didn’t believe in) that it would show me something else, something more than darkness.

Still, the wound in me had built a lot of empty theaters over the years, and it braced, out of habit, for the seats to be empty anyway.

Yet there was Benji.

Third row, aisle seat, in an actual collared shirt, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees like the stage owed him money. Next to Benji was Peter. Jacks and Skyler sat beside them. Then there was Finn and Chase, Mark, Rod—and even Dante, seated at the end of the row with his arms crossed and his chin up. Behind them sat Tasha and two of the regulars, and—God—Jacks held a hand-lettered sign in his lap that I couldn’t read from the wing but that I already knew was going to ruin me or make me laugh in the middle of a very emotional piece.

They had come.

My family had come.

They had all come.

Benji had said they would, and Benji had made it so; still—still—seeing it undid me, because knowing a thing and watching it fill three rows of a theater are different animals entirely.

My heart climbed my throat.

That is what they were, familia. I understood in that instant, watching them settle and jostle and shush each other. They were the loud, bright people who had gotten into cars on a Saturday night and climbed three flights of stairs above a cigar factory to watch me do a quiet thing, a real thing, a thing it had taken me six years and a cracked note in Benji’s voice to finally invite them to.

The I realized something else.

They had closed the bar on a Saturday night to be there.

For me.

A tear slipped free and trickled down my cheek.

I had spent my whole life being easy to love from a distance, being fun, being the one who read the room so well that no one ever had to read me. Now, here, sitting before me were rows of people who had driven across town to read me anyway.

I let my eyes travel the rest of the house, greedy now, cataloguing the faces that were mine—and stopped.

Because I hadn’t invited him.

I had even told Benji, flat and fast, “Not the vet.”