Page 10 of Dance of Defiance

It matters. The history and the tradition and the discipline of itmatter. Because they ground you to something beautiful, elegant and utterly unimportant which is yet somehow one of the most important things of all when it comes to the human condition: art, and the way that art expresses the soul. Withoutart, I’m not actually sure youcanexpress what it is to have a soul.

Well, maybe fucking would do it. But it’s a distant second to dance, in my humble opinion.

Short answer, I was lost before I found ballet. Or maybe it was ballet that found me. Add the fact that “Billy Eliot” was the only VHS tape at one of my foster homes, and the glamor of the stage, with the costumes and lights—I can be a fancy fucking bitch when I want to be—and you have the initial pull.

And the feeling I got the first time I stepped into a studio and stood at the barre?

Indescribable.

Pure. Fucking.Peace. A respite from the endless screaming in my head that had been filling the void my lost memories left behind since I could remember.

That’s not to say that ballet changed my whole life right there on the spot. I mean, you wanna play life in hard mode? Go into the New York City foster care system as a queer kid and tell them at ten that you want todance ballet.

Yeah.

But get tough or die trying, and I refused to fucking die.

Not when the other kids tried to kick my ass for being a “princess”. A “ballerina”. A fruit. Far worse names. Not when the foster dad at my next home told me in no uncertain terms that ballet was for girls, and that he’d be damned if he kept a sissy homo under his roof prancing around in a tutu.

Not even at the house after that, when the devil would come to my room at night.

I. Refused. To. Die.

When I got beaten up, or someone put their hands on me, I learned to fight. And when some prick asshole told me the one fucking joy I’d found in life wasn’t allowed, I snuck out of the house at night and took lessons with the adult class at the church community center ten blocks away.

Ever since then, ballet has been my anchor. It’s what’s kept me sane and prevented me from straying too close to the darkness that swirls inside me, or the looming, jagged edges around the holes in my memory that I’ll never get back.

These days, at least, I have a better understanding of those. I know now who I used to be during the time I can no longer remember. That happened several months ago, when Vaughn came into my life.

The brother I never even knew I’d lost.

He was the one who filled in some of the gaps for me, though I still can’t remember them. We were born to addict parents in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Dad stole cars and Mom turned tricks to feed their heroin addictions. And one winter night, after they’d both disappeared for longer than usual and the house was below freezing inside, Vaughn got us both bundled up and out of that place forever. He broke into the furniture store downtown: it was heated and had warm beds, and we wouldn’t be sharing with addicts or criminals.

Or so hethought.

But as it turned out, breaking into that store to avoid freezing to death was the moment our lives swerved from one direction to avastlydifferent one. The furniture shop was a front for a safe house belonging to a group that would change the course of our lives: the Obsidian Syndicate.

I’ve got mixed thoughts about what I know now happened after that. On the plus side, the Syndicate took us in. They fed us, clothed us, gave us a place to live and a family, a brotherhood, to grow up in.

That said, we worked nine hours a day packaging up drugs for distribution.

But—shit. It was better than freezing to death in McKeesport or waiting for one of mom’s Johns to put his hands on us, or one of Dad’s buddies to go psycho and stab us.

Then one day the police raided the warehouse where we were working. They came in guns blazing: SWAT team, armored car, the whole bit. And when I got hit hard in the head by a bouncing tear gas canister and was knocked unconscious, Vaughn made a split-second decision to give me a chance at a better life.

As our Syndicate brothers were fleeing through the back door, Vaughn, knowing I’d be found by the cops, told the men that I was dead. He even slipped his wallet into my pocket, trying to give me what little money he had in case I needed it.

Then, he was gone, along with my memory of him.

I woke up not knowing who I was, why they’d found me where they did, or anything about my past. All I knew was I had a wallet in my pocket with fifty bucks and a gym ID photo that looked like me and said my name was Vaughn.

So that’s who I was for the next twenty-ish years.

Vaughn the foster kid.

Vaughn the queer.

Vaughn the ballet dancer.