Miranda figured she had twelve hours until her world imploded.

She crept along, on her way home from work, the car ahead moving at a snail’s pace on the rain-slicked road. The ever-earlier darkness strained her fatigued eyes. She slipped by bus stops and gas stations and houses she’d passed a thousand times before while her mind darted into corners, seeking a solution on how to return the fifty thousand dollars she’d borrowed from work. It had seemed so simple: use the unauthorized check to stave off imminent foreclosure on home equity loans, then quietly put the money back.

Sweat pricked her hairline as she negotiated a hairpin bend in the two-lane road. Holiday lights in her periphery triggered a reminder of the costume waiting to be assembled for her daughter’s upcoming school play. She should have taken care of the costume last week instead of spending her evenings hunting the daily flash deals at MyHabit. She tamped down the self-reproach and concentrated, instead, on the crisis at hand, willing a resolution to emerge from the surrounding shadows. There had to be a way to fix this. Twinkling reindeer lights pulled at her, promising distraction, and before she could muster a defense, her mind escaped into the bright lights of the high-end department stores and their endless offerings. Silk pajamas, cashmere sweaters, 1000-thread-count bedding: textiles for every mood, every occasion. Last month’s lowest-prices-of-the-season shopping frenzy had been delicious. She’d emptied her daughter’s college account to fund the excursion, and the acknowledgement dimmed her momentary joy.

Miranda refocused on the road, her fingers locked around the steering wheel. She drove for several miles this way—past the Dollar Store, past the red-bricked bank that quietly denied her request for a personal loan last week—while mentally searching for a miracle. She dismissed the drained emergency-home-repair account, the nine maxed out credit cards, and paused at the fake surgery option, but quickly rejected it. How many bone spur removals, frozen shoulder repairs, and wisdom teeth extractions could she expect her mother to buy? With her shoulders bunched at her ears, she accelerated through the intersection at Virginia Street and reiterated her mantra: calm and focused gets the job done.

She was out of time. Tomorrow was a new month; the books would be reconciled, the missing money discovered. A finger of fear tapped on her spine. She drew a breath, deep and deeper still. The radio was on low but a snippet of melody caught her attention and, just like that, she was in a canoe with her husband. She breathed in the scene: sun warming her face, their shared laughter as they splashed each other with water, a picnic of grapes and cheese waiting on the beach. Looming red disks pierced the memory, and she hit the brakes, the car thudding to a stop. As her adrenalin slowed, irony bloomed. Soliciting her husband’s help wasn’t an option; the days of sun-drenched tenderness were long gone. In its place echoed his supplications to corral her mounds of in-progress cross-stitch projects, to purge her piles of clothes and books.

She reached across to the passenger seat and dug blindly through her purse, searching for chapstick. Her attempts were clumsy and ineffective, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the road for more than a few seconds at a time. She gave up, frustrated, and shoved the bag onto the floor, cursing the chapstick, the traffic, the gigantic mess before her. What she needed was a time out, like those she administered to her kids when they misbehaved. Hers would be welcomed, though, used to stop time so she could think. A little breathing room. If she could talk to someone, her boss, her boss’s boss, explain how she got here. She’d tell them about the itch for something new because it was the perfect color or precise shape, how the craving grew until it overtook her, the insistence pressing pressing, the anxiety that swelled to atomic proportions, the sweet release of holding the purchase in her hand.

Traffic moved again and Miranda pressed lightly on the accelerator. The distance between her and the car ahead lengthened as she drove, unseeing. A soundtrack looped in her head, her mother’s voice mixed with her husband’s: Can you follow through, please? Where’s your head? Why is everything always a mess? At Kentucky Street, she blinked and blew out a breath. She would prove herself worthy; she would fix this disaster, make a payment plan, get things back on track. She squared her shoulders, then checked the mirrors. The tail lights from passing cars left faint streaks along the wet pavement and the effect pulled her back to the nights when she’d scoured the cityscape learning nighttime photography. Staking out a vantage point on the I94 overpass, calculating moonrise over downtown skylines, light painting the Old Soldier statues marching through Monument Square. Life seemed simpler then. If she had her gear with her, she could leave this behind and escape into the world of long exposures.

As she approached Highway C, she switched lanes and got into line. Going northbound regularly required a long wait. She thought of her granddad Oscar—Oscar the grouch, they called him. He hadn’t always been surly. She remembered the times when she was young, back before every inch of space in his house became choked with stuff, they’d walked to A&W, the sun hot overhead and his stride slowed to match hers, how they’d sat on picnic tables and shared a root beer float.

The dash-embedded clock glowed orange-red against the darkened interior, and as the minutes crept onward, panic cinctured Miranda’s belly. She knew there was a solution, there always was. She needed only to relax and let it come. Flashes of her scheduled life intruded—her son’s soccer game on Saturday, the dinner party at her sister’s house afterward—but she refused them with a decisive shake of her head. She had to right this before her kids found out. She cracked the window, swallowed against the rising bile, and conjured up soothing images: skipping rocks across the lake, mashed potatoes and cornbread, the perfect sunrise photo. Would sunrise hold the answer? In those moments right before daybreak, when the world was asleep and the day’s congestion still at bay, everything was possible.

When her turn came, Miranda merged onto the highway with a quick glance in the rearview mirror to confirm she’d allowed enough room. She half expected to find flashing red lights chasing her down. Ahead, the sea of oncoming headlights sent pinpricks to the backs of her eyes. She traveled several blocks, then maneuvered into the median’s left-turn lane while her brain served up inventory for Saturday’s assigned dessert: chocolate chips, tapioca pudding, graham cracker crust, gummy bears.

She sat, warm and dry in a cocoon, while cars raced by in both directions. The road ahead curved upward in a gentle slope. Think, she demanded. She heard the honking horn as the metal bars of a jail cell clanking shut. When the sound morphed into an insistent bleating, she startled and refocused. With a mumbled apology at the rearview, she inched forward.

Eleven hours and counting. The finger tapping Miranda’s spine became a fist, pummeling her. Desperation clogged her throat and dampened her armpits, and when a primal urge to turn the car around and head to the mall gripped her, she nearly laughed out loud. Wouldn’t a new pair of Bandolino heels be the perfect answer? Even better: a pair in prison orange. She looked dully at the unbroken path of approaching cars, then flicked her eyes at the night sky, and for the briefest of seconds, she searched for a focal point, something to highlight the frame of stars.

She sat, her spine rigid, her breaths shallow as the minutes ticked by, relentless. How had she allowed this to happen? She swiped her bangs out of her eyes, then slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. She expected her head to blow any minute, like a teakettle. The wave of oncoming cars appeared endless. Maybe, she thought, she should have listened when her husband suggested therapy.

Lulled by exhaustion and the hum of passing cars, she sank into a void, one where the weight on her shoulders vanished and her mind unfurled. She’d been here before; it was welcoming, comforting. She eyed the continuous lines of bright lights and thought: what if?

She eased her foot from the brake to the gas pedal and marveled at how something so powerful could feel so invisible beneath her shoe. She hovered there, between the known and the unknown. Images swirled like glossy snapshots: her daughter’s ribboned braids, heaps of past-due notices, family dinners, QVC delivery boxes, concrete cells. They all coalesced, building, building, and in that moment of white-hot pressure an understanding surfaced. She looked over her shoulder, seized an opening, and shot back out into the northbound traffic.

At Howell Avenue she turned east. The road was narrow and sparsely lit, and the space between houses gradually grew until there was nothing but empty fields on either side. When the entrance to the rock quarry materialized, she slowed and rolled onto the gravel drive. A half mile later, Miranda veered to the right, past giant bulldozers and mute dump trucks, following the curve of the canyon until she could drive no more. Swinging out, she angled the car, nose first, toward the chasm. A flick of a button lowered all the windows, and the silence, expectant and weighty, washed over her.

Miranda extinguished both interior and exterior lights and drank in the vast night sky, reveling in the fixed points of light, pure and bright, like her children. The view intoxicated her. The pinpoints seemed to expand, a deliberate odyssey, drawing her in. She wished for her camera in order to capture the ethereal beauty, wished she could showcase how the fixed points weren’t fixed at all, rather, they blazed a trail home.

She sat this way, in the glow, for several beats while the stillness pulsed in her ears. She inhaled, a deep-through-the-belly intake, then placed her palm on the gear shaft. Acceptance trickled through her, warm, certain, and she closed her eyes. She imagined the thrill of the stars rushing toward her, enveloping her, imagined their effulgent tips bending and smearing as she dragged her fingers through them, the silky sky a panorama of bleeding white.

Mitzi McMahon lives in Wisconsin, near Lake Michigan, where she writes fiction and chases the light, camera in hand. Her fiction has appeared in over two dozen publications, including The Bitter Oleander, The Summerset Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Evansville Review. Her photographic work has appeared or is forthcoming in Marathon Literary Review and Apeiron Review. She holds a BA in Business.

Illustration by FINAL GIRL, anonymous street artist

Damn kids! That’s what Ed yells. I say, they’re just boys, but my voice fails to rise to an equal timbre. Boys making noise, he roars. I tell him, it’s music. That’s music! Stop being a fuddy-duddy. Do you want me to tell them? Fine, I’ll talk to them, I say.

Our son plays in a rock and roll band. Okay, not a real rock and roll band – a garage band, currently our garage, with two of his high school buddies. It’s ten to ten on a Saturday night. We live in suburbia. So maybe they should think about wrapping it up.

I stand for a moment on the back deck to settle my breathing. From here I see a corner of the open garage where a shaft of white light angles onto the driveway. Tim’s best friend plays guitar. Head down, dirty blond hair spills over his shoulders, hiding his face. He doesn’t shift his gaze from the concrete floor to make eye contact with the three girls huddled by the front bumper of our aging minivan– high school groupies crooning for my son and his band. I recognize two of the girls, not the third.

I move to the shadow of the willow tree where I can see now Tim in front of the drum kit strumming his bass. I recognize the Kiss cover tune. How could I not? It’s one of the few tunes they know. Tim practices the bass line relentlessly when he’s home. God of Thunder. Eventually, I picked up the lyrics. Tim sings:

“You’ve got some-thin’ a-bout you.

“You’ve got some-thin’ I need.”

Tim’s voice has not fully developed. He wants to sing with a deep basal tone, but the words come out sounding pinched. I stifle a smile, fold my arms, and admire my son’s thick, curly black hair. His hair – it explodes like a supernova. Hair any woman would envy. Tim sings:

“Daugh-ter of Aph-ro-di-te.

“Hear my words and take heed.”

The one girl – the girl I don’t know – I see her better now. I see how she watches my son. She appears more mature than the other girls. Physically, yes – her breasts are fully formed, accentuated by a white sweater. But there’s something else – the way she stands, confident. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s smart, one of the smartest kids in school. She already has her career planned, I’m sure. She knows what she wants out of life.

I don’t think Tim knows what he wants out of life, and I think it’s better that way. How can you possibly know what you want at that age? He enjoys playing rock and roll and eventually his voice will mature. If he wants to be a rock and roller, I’m okay with that, so long as he’s happy. He sings:

“God of thun-der ­– and rock and roll.

“The spell you’re un-der.

“Will slow-ly rob you of your vir-gin soul.”

A heavy bass line kicks in here as Tim’s voice fades away from the microphone, like he’s falling down a deep well. That line – rob you of your virgin soul – bothers me. I don’t know if my son is a virgin. I know Tim and his father have had that talk. I don’t know if his father knows. I don’t know if I want to know. But by the way Tim looks at the one girl, I think I can figure it myself.

They finish the song. The three girls applaud. Two of the girls squeal, but that third girl, she just claps quietly, her eyes lock on my son; she smiles with beautiful white teeth. In the moonlight, her straight brunette hair cascades over her shoulders like a dark waterfall. I smell lilacs, or maybe it’s her perfume.

I step out of the shadows onto the driveway, clapping and calling Tim’s name. Nobody seems startled by my presence, except for Tim’s best friend, the guitarist. Always shy, he waves, and says, “Hi Mrs. Miller.”

Tim leans his black bass against the garage. As he walks toward me, my heart flutters. His steps are like royalty. In the past year, he’s grown taller than me. “What’s up?” he says.

Words catch in my throat. He’s beautiful. My son. He is. A god. A rock and roll god. Smooth skin. Not even a trace of razor stubble. And all the kindness in the world buried in those soft, brown eyes. I want to throw my arms around his neck. Hold him against me. Kiss his cheek and never let him go.

“Who’s the girl?” I say.

“Jennifer?”

“The brunette?”

He glances back at her, smiles at me, and I know. “She’s a friend,” he says.

I want to touch him. I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it between both of mine close to my heart. But I say, “It’s getting late.”

“That was our last song. Don’t want to keep Dad up.” He smirks. He knows. There are a lot of things he knows now. A lot of things I wish he didn’t know. He knows he and his father don’t see eye-to-eye. They seem more to tolerate each other. They’ve given up trying to form a bond. That realization makes me want to cry. But more, I think he knows his father and I have fallen out of love. That’s something I always wanted to shelter him from.

He tells me he and his friends are going out. I tell him to be home by midnight and ask where they’re going. He says to Jennifer’s house. Her parents have a finished basement with a pool table. We have a basement with a workshop and power tools. He tells me they’re walking two blocks to Jennifer’s house. New to the school, she just moved to the neighborhood. This fact both surprises and calms me, knowing that my son will be close.

Tim punches the code onto the keypad and the garage door rattles and begins to drop. As a group, they move down the sidewalk, passing beneath an amber streetlight before disappearing into darkness, my son and Jennifer lagging behind amongst the whisper of cicadas.

~

Inside, a dull quietness fills the house. The only light comes from a lamp beside the recliner in the living room. Beside the chair, an empty whiskey glass. I pour a glass of Merlot and return to the back deck to sit and listen to the cicadas – the remaining audience to my son’s rock and roll show.

At one time, I thought I knew what I wanted, just like Jennifer – eighteen, nine months before Tim would arrive on the scene, when his future father pulled into my parents’ driveway to pick me up in his dad’s Ford pickup truck. His dad had built a plywood camper into the truck bed, for hunting. If my parents had seen the vehicle, they probably wouldn’t have allowed me to go. All they knew is that we were going to see Journey in concert.

But what they didn’t know – we didn’t go directly to the show. We took a back road into the state land and parked. We crawled into that makeshift camper and made love on a thin mattress over a plywood bed. Everything smelled of freshly cut wood – even Tim’s father. We rolled around on that creaky plywood bed, taking turns on top of each other. At the time, that’s all I wanted. Him. Ed.

Afterwards, we left state land and found our way to the highway. Music blaring, I pressed myself against Ed, one arm around his shoulder, the other hand in his lap. We talked about I don’t know what. We laughed about stuff – I can’t remember what – and Tim’s father drove fast, with one hand on the wheel and the other rubbing my thigh, so roughly he rubbed my leg it later left a purple bruise. We followed our headlights down a black highway.

When we arrived in the parking lot and exited the truck, Ed stood dumbfounded staring at the empty truck bed. The plywood camper, we learned later, had never been properly secured. At high speeds on the highway, it must have blown off somewhere. We had never known. Never heard it rip from the back bed and crash onto the road.

I started to laugh, and then Ed laughed, and we hugged each other and kissed and laughed some more until we had tears in our eyes, because nothing really seemed to matter at that time, nothing seemed more important than the two of us.

~

I finish my glass of wine, and I’m nearly lulled to sleep by the relentless cicadas when the door to the deck slides open and Ed steps out. He wears powder blue pajama bottoms and a white tee shirt. His hair is disheveled and he needs a shave. He sits in the chair next to me. He’s barefoot. “What?” he says, noticing I’m staring.

“I was just coming to bed,” I say. “I was listening to the cicadas.”

He grunts, scratches his inner thigh, and peers at the half moon hung over the neighbor’s roof. His face, I notice it more now – heavier, more full, weightier, yes, but something else. His face, it seems, carries a quiet anger. “Tim in bed?”

“He’s with his girlfriend,” I say.

His expression doesn’t change. “He has a girlfriend?”

“I think,” I say. “Her name is Jennifer. She just moved to the neighborhood. That’s where they are – her basement playing pool with friends.”

“Oh.” He leans back and rests his palms on his thighs. Ed’s hands look too large for his body – big and beefy with fingers like sausage links. I know, I’m pretty sure, his work causes his hands to swell – the constant drilling, hammering, pounding. Ed’s a hard worker – that I’ve never doubted. He massages his right hand between the thumb and pointer finger. I catch him doing this more often, and this time, now, for the first time, I take his hand in mine and continue the gentle massage with my thumb. Ed turns toward me, appearing sleepier than surprised, then looks back at the moon.

“Remember that plywood camper of your dad’s?” I say.

Ed chortles, though it sounds more like a grunt. “Whatever made you think of that?”

I set Ed’s hand in my lap and cover it with my own. “I just was,” I say.

His hand stays motionless like a dumb, cold brick while I rub his knuckles with the tips of my fingers. Sometimes, I think I try too hard. Sometimes, I think I’m trying more for Tim than for myself. Then, he says, “A girlfriend, huh.”

I say, “Yep.”

“Hmm,” and I feel his fingers move in my lap, ever-so slightly, like life awakening.

The cicadas sing louder. The moon shines brighter behind a vapory veil. My heart, I feel it beating. I feel it beating so fast and heavy, I feel it breaking.

~

When Ed sleeps on his back, he snores. When he has one too many highballs, he snores, and after sex, he snores. Tonight, he’s got two of three going for him. As I ease out of bed, the digital clock on the nightstand reads 3:10. I pull on a pair of sweatpants and nightshirt, and carefully close the bedroom door behind me.

After using the toilet, I gingerly step down the carpeted hallway to peer into Tim’s room. Curled in the fetal position he looks suddenly small to me. Then, in the moonlight splashed across his bed, I see that’s not my son! A stranger sleeps in his bed. I take a step closer, holding my breath, and realize it’s Jennifer. But no Tim.

In the living room I find Tim sprawled on the couch. He sleeps on his stomach, one arm hanging over the side, his knuckles on the carpet. His bare back, I have to look closely to witness the gentle rise and fall of his quiet breathing. His bare back, it captivates me in the moonlight-filled room, its eloquent grace.

In the kitchen I turn on the light over the sink, take a cup from the cupboard, and as I’m rinsing out the inside I hear my name. “Hello, Mrs. Miller.” I spin quickly around and discover Jennifer standing in the doorway.

She wears the same clothes she wore earlier in the night. They look slept-in. The end of her hair frizzes with static electricity. She’s hugging herself, her arms crossed over her chest. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I just wasn’t expecting someone,” I say. Then to clarify, I say, “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

Jennifer takes a seat at the kitchen table, and she appears to me now much less confident and self-assured as she appeared standing in my driveway watching my son’s rock and roll band. I stand by the table, cradling the empty cup in the palm of my hand. “What are you doing here?”

She hugs herself tighter. Looking first at the floor and then to me, she says, “My parents, they argue a lot.”

“Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.

“Tim said it would be okay for me to spend the night.”

“I guess that’s alright,” I say. “Would you like some hot cocoa? I was just going to make some.”

“That would be very nice. Thank you.”

I fill the cup with water and place it into the microwave to heat. I feel a strange sense of anticipation in this rather intimate opportunity to speak with and get to know this girl so smitten with my son. I stir cocoa into the hot water, and when I turn back, Tim stands in the doorway wearing only his checkered boxer shorts.

I must have gasped, for even Jennifer glanced my way before returning her gaze to Tim. My son. He is. Beautiful. He is. A god. He crosses the kitchen, and their eyes never part. He places his hand on the back of her neck. My son, he has a look of supremacy, but not arrogance. He shows mercy and great tenderness. Jennifer, she sits peering up at him like the supplicant servant.

I’m not sure how to decipher this scene. I’m overwhelmed with pride for my son, yet with Jennifer, I fear for her well being. Not that Tim would ever intentionally hurt her. But I’m wondering – is this love I’m seeing before me, or something else? And if it is love, are they ready for it?

I place the steaming cup of cocoa on the table in front of Jennifer and take a seat opposite her. As I begin talking, Tim remains standing by Jennifer’s side. I find this disconcerting, so I tell him to sit down, which he does. I ask Jennifer if her parents know where she is. She hesitates then shakes her head. I tell them I don’t want anybody staying overnight at my house without permission. I tell Jennifer she is to call her parents first thing in the morning. I tell her I want her home phone number, too. “What if they’ve called the police?” I say.

Jennifer shakes her head again, looks me directly in the eye. A sense of surrender surrounds her. “They won’t call the police,” she says.

Tim reaches across the table to hold Jennifer’s hand. I want to cry, but I’m able to maintain my composure. “You’re sleeping on the couch,” I say, and I realize my tone and inflection makes it sound more like a question than the command intended. Nonetheless, Tim nods.

We continue sitting and talking. Mostly, I ask questions. Jennifer shares a little about her parents. They don’t sound like bad people or bad parents. They sound like a married couple that argues from time to time. Jennifer and Tim – they’re at that age of hypersensitivity to the world around them. They don’t understand love. Love is not always a given, and it’s not always the Holy Grail. It’s not always constant in its intensity. That thought – love is not always constant in its intensity – makes me pause, and an awkward silence ensues.

Yes, of course.

As Jennifer finishes the last of her hot cocoa, I realize I never made a cup for myself. Strange, but I suddenly feel like the uninvited guest in my own kitchen. I remind Tim again about staying on the couch. I tell them both to get some sleep. I’m tired, too, but I know I won’t sleep. In another hour, dawn will break.

I exit the kitchen and then hesitate in the hallway leaving the two of them alone. But I have to trust them.

In the bedroom, Ed now sleeps on his side; a hollow wheezing has replaced the rancorous snoring. As I ease under the covers, the wheezing stops and I know I’ve woken him. My mind – it flits back to that wild ride from the state land to the concert, the highway mile markers appearing in the truck headlight beams then disappearing in the dark in endless succession. Our life seems to have been that way ever since. Non-stop. How I wish we could slow down. How I wish, at times, we could even turn around. Go back. I curl up behind Ed and press my nose against his neck. Ed reaches back and rests his hand on my knee. His thumb stirs the delicious scent of plywood.

Brian Kamsoke has fiction forthcoming in New Plains Review and Night Train. His other work has appeared in FICTION, Almost Five Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Reed Magazine, Pearl, and the Flint Hills Review. He received his MFA from Wichita State University where he was awarded the 2012-2013 Creative Writing Fellowship.  He’s currently putting the finishing touches on a travel memoir while continuing work on that damn novel. This is his second installment in r.kv.r.y. quarterly.

At first we all mugged for the cameras, even the guys. We thought it was what they wanted, even though Jan Janis kept telling us to just be ourselves. We were being ourselves, we told her. Angel was worse than me, flirting with the camera guys and the PAs until I wanted to slap her. Nina, the ballerina, actually did it, a hot one across the face that left fingerprints. But after the camera guy drifted away, Nina went and got Angel an ice pack from the triage room. Then the choreography got fierce and we forgot about the cameras, at least for a while.

I auditioned for Dance Champ because it’s the quickest way from the flyspeck of a town I grew up in to a college dance scholarship or even an L.A. audition. Dancing is all I ever wanted to do. When I’m dancing I’m calm, focused. It’s the times I’m not dancing that I start to lose it. When I was about five or six, I started begging my mom for dance lessons. She never really asked why. Maybe she knew explaining it meant we’d have to talk about her break downs, which is something we never did. Not ever.

When I was really little, she used to bring me into her bedroom with her when it happened. The older I got, the harder it was to stay in the room with her when she shut down like that. I couldn’t breathe in there with the curtains closed and the lights off. I couldn’t be her little hibernating bear cub like she wanted. By the time I was in kindergarten I was pretty self-sufficient. I could fix bowls of cereal and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I knew when to leave for the bus in the morning and on days when my mom wasn’t waiting at the bus stop in the afternoon, I knew I was supposed to come inside and lock the door behind me.

On one of those days a thunderstorm was just starting to grumble as I got off the bus. I ran inside and turned on the TV to drown it out. I was looking for cartoons but landed on a show where people were dancing. There was fast music and colored lights. Their costumes were shiny and they smiled the whole time they were dancing. The next morning when my mom came out of her room, I begged her to let me take dance lessons.

Me and Angel were strictly dance friends then. We didn’t hang out together at school. I don’t really know why, different classes, different friends. But we were in the same classes at the same dance studio, the only dance studio in town and we carpooled to competitions. Mostly I rode with Angel and her parents because my mom hated driving anywhere further than her job at the insurance office or the grocery store. Angel’s parents drove us to the Dance Champ auditions down in the city and after we both made the cut to the New York City round, they came to my house to pick me up for the drive back down to the airport. My mom followed me out to the car and when Angel’s mom asked if she wanted to ride along with us, she surprised everyone by climbing into the minivan.

While we waited in line to check our luggage she kept fixing my collar and asking me if I had my boarding pass. She watched me so hard I could feel her worry weighing me down. It was so heavy that when the plane started to taxi down the runway I thought it might keep the plane from taking off.

When we got to New York, they corralled us in the hotel ballroom and paired us up. They put me with Claudio. He was this cocky, Latin dancer who Angel fell in love with on the spot. You could see why they put me and Claudio together though; we were built the same, tall and lanky, long fingers and sharp elbows. Even our hair was the same, dark, smooth, straight; later we found out he used a flat iron to get rid of the natural curl. Angel got Robert for a partner — short, blond and muscular. They say people always want what they can’t have.

The producers had a month to cut twenty pairs of dancers down to just five couples who would perform in front of a live audience. And the whole time that we were rehearsing, eating, sleeping, dancing for the judges and sabotaging each other’s dance gear, the red lights on the cameras blinked like a warning. They would shove a camera in your face when you first woke up or after a shitty rehearsal, trying to get a funny sound bite or a humiliating shot of you brushing your teeth that they could edit into the live show once they started airing episodes from Radio City.

By the end of the second week, they’d weeded out the kids who couldn’t keep up with the choreography. Now they started zeroing in on the photogenic, the ones with star personalities, and the kids with a story. According to Claudio, if you were good looking and had a made for reality TV story you were guaranteed a spot in the top ten. He claimed he’d survived a hurricane that swept through San Juan and gave Jan Janis a photo of himself with his arm in a sling.

It was easy enough to let Claudio be the one with the personality in our couple, like Angel was the personality between her and Robert. Then Jan Janis took an interest in me. She sat down with me like she did all the other kids and flipped through screens on her tablet looking at shots of me in rehearsal, childhood pictures I had to beg my mom to send, and the questionnaire I’d filled out. It asked basic stuff about your family and school and relationships and stuff.

“Says here it’s just you and your mom?” Her eyes were dark and hard to see into.

“Yeah.”

“No siblings?”

I shook my head.

“It says your mom never married, what about boyfriends? Was there anybody special in her life?”

“Not really.”

“What about grandparents? Aunts? Uncles?”

I couldn’t figure out where she was going with this. I mean I knew me and Mom were different. Other kids had grandparents who showed up for performances and cousins who came to their birthday parties. But the way Jan Janis was looking at me made our life seem freakish.

“What about your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what did your mom tell you about him? Did he leave? Is he dead?”

I shrugged and Jan Janis gave me a lecture about how on-camera shrugs make you look arrogant or stupid or both. I tried to give her something. “She didn’t have a relationship with my father.”

That wasn’t enough for Jan Janis.

“So you’re telling me you were an immaculate conception?”

“Didn’t you ever hear of artificial insemination?” I wanted to cut my tongue out as soon as I said it.

“And what did she tell you about that process?”

“She said she picked him out of a book. She didn’t want to wait around for Mr. Right and she really wanted a baby so she went to one of those fertility clinics.”

I have this thing where I can’t look right at the person I’m talking to, so when I finished the story about my mom I looked over at Jan Janis. Her mouth had gone all tight and she was tapping her screen like mad.

“She never told you anything about him?”

I always thought my mom was embarrassed about the way she had me, so I never asked. But Jan Janis was looking for more and I didn’t want to be the reason me and Claudio ended up on the next plane home, so I lied. “Sometimes she’d say, ‘your donor had curly hair,’ or ‘your donor was left-handed.’ Stuff like that.” It was all bullshit. My mom never said a word about him. Ever.

But that’s when Jan Janis finally smiled.

Claudio said that every season Jan Janis picked a dancer to be her pet project and her pet always made it to the final show and sometimes they were even Dance Champ. Claudio ticked them off on his fingers – Carly from season two, Jefferson from season five, Ariel from season eight, and Trey from last season.

After that interview, it did seem like Jan Janis started taking more of an interest in me. She sent her staffers over to stock the mini fridge in our room with protein shakes and power bars. She made sure I got the practice studio at a decent time instead of six in the morning or ten at night like before. Angel was happy because whatever Jan Janis got for me I shared with her and Claudio and Robert. Then I started worrying that all the extra attention was just a trick to sabotage me somehow. And all the time she kept asking me stuff about my dad.

“Didn’t you ever want to find him?”

“My mom said the clinic was strict about keeping donors anonymous.”

“But you’re curious, right?”

“I guess.”

“What if you could meet him?”

I shrugged and Jan Janis frowned.

My mom had stuck so tight to her sperm in a cup story all these years, that’s all he was to me. It wasn’t like he’d rejected me. He didn’t even know I existed.

After a while it was pretty clear that Jan Janis thought she was going to do some big reveal. She’d find my dad and stick us in the green room together until one of us started crying. They did that to a dancer from season three whose mom walked out on her when she was little.

Just to be sure there was nothing for Jan Janis to find, I asked my mom about it during our Sunday video chat session.

“They can’t do this,” she said.

Nobody looks good on video chat but all of a sudden my mom looked paler than usual, like she does when she’s been shut up in her room for a while.

“Do what?”

“I’ll sue them.” She was shouting so loud the vibration blurred the video feed.

“Jesus, Mom. Calm down.”

“It’s invasion of privacy. It’s libel or slander.”

“You always said the contract you signed at the fertility clinic was totally confidential. There’s no way for me to find my father or my father to find me.” I was trying to be reassuring but it didn’t calm her down much.

My whole life my mom had never been on a plane, but she caught an early flight the next morning and burst into the studio where I was rehearsing. There were six of us left in the competition by then: me, Claudio, Angel, Robert, Nina the ballerina and Nina’s partner. It was our third week dancing in front of the live Radio City audience. Two couples had been eliminated by viewers – death by cell phone – and everyone was edgy and secretly nursing an injury of some kind.

“Let’s go.” My mother grabbed my arm. “You’re coming home.”

Jan Janis was right there behind her. “You signed a contract with us, Mrs. Sanders.” Jan Janis whipped out her tablet and started poking at it with one finger.

“You’ve no business prying into our personal life.” My mother seemed different, armored.

“If you look at page eight of your contract.” Jan Janis started flipping pages and for the first time I noticed how bitten down her fingernails looked, the skin at the edges pink and angry looking.

Mom pulled me toward the door. “We’re going.”

Jan Janis blocked the way, shoving the tablet in my mom’s face. I ducked out from between them and turned off my music.

Then Jan Janis tried to buddy up to her.

“I respect the choices you made, Mrs. Sanders,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the fertility clinic option myself. I mean, I’m not getting any younger and I don’t need some man to give me permission, right?”

That flipped a switch in my mom but not in the way I expected.

“It’s not for everyone,” she said. Then she dragged me away to my room where she started stuffing clothes into a duffle bag. Whatever she put in, I took out again.

“I should have said no right at the beginning,” she said. “But to be honest, I didn’t think you’d get this far.”

“Gee, thanks for believing in me.” There was no way in hell I was leaving.

“Honey, I’m sorry. I blame myself for this, not Jan Janis. She’s only doing her job. But I won’t let her violate us this way. Violate you this way.”

“It’s reality television. It’s what I signed up for. If it gets me a dance scholarship or a second look for a major audition it’s worth it.”

“Not like this, you have to trust me. You don’t want them to put our story out there.”

“Yes, I do.” My voice cracked. “If it means winning a Dance Champ scholarship, they can say whatever they want.”

“You have no idea what you’re opening us up for. I can’t allow it.”

Twelve seasons, one hundred and twenty episodes and in all those shows there was only one girl who vanished mid-season. Joelle. One episode she was there. The next she was gone. They said she ruptured her Achilles. But there had been other contestants with injuries, most caught on film and edited for maximum effect. And in those cases the dancer left smiling, waving a cast in a sling or hobbling gamely around on crutches, putting a good face on it. Usually the show promised to bring them back the next season. But not Joelle. Joelle just blinked out.

Jan Janis caught up with us then and she had security with her. I felt bad watching Mom walk away between those two lunks but I had a lot riding on this. She looked back at me from the doorway but I pretended not to see. Later, she told me that she took a room at the hotel, on a different floor, just to be near me. She wandered around the city during the day and ordered room service at night. I wish I’d known she was there.

I don’t think Jan Janis had my story figured out before my mom showed up, but something definitely clicked when she saw my mom in person. After that her attitude toward me shifted from pet project to something else, a product or a specimen or a walk up to the next level.

That week Nina and her partner were eliminated.

The finale was two shows back to back. The first night we would dance for votes and the next night we would find out the results. Up to now we’d danced with the same partner but now we would be dancing solo. On the night we danced for votes, they would flesh out the two-hour long episode with snippets from our Dance Champ “journey” and live interviews of each of us in the green room. A good interview could boost a dancer’s votes and a bad one could send you home. You just had to sit there and smile while Jan Janis dragged out every sad or embarrassing moment from your past to broadcast nationwide.

I was the last in the first rotation of dancers to perform. As soon as the lights went black the assistant stage manager walked me to the green room. I was still a little high from the performance so it was hard to focus on what Jan Janis was saying at first.

Then she flashed a photo on the giant flat screen monitor in the green room. It was of a man, tall and lanky, dark haired, holding a rifle like he was comfortable with it, like he was about to hoist it to his shoulder and take out a bad guy. Except that he was the bad guy. The photo was scanned from a newspaper so everything looked grey and parched, the color leeched out.

Jan Janis tapped her tablet and the photo disappeared, replaced by soundless video footage. A female TV reporter dressed in suit, heels and pearls stood in front of a brick ranch. The land around it looked withered and dry. There were no other houses, just a few out buildings – a cinderblock bunker with no windows and a metal shed with a beat up van parked next to it. Beyond the yellow crime scene tape, police and F.B.I. agents milled around, measuring, documenting. The reporter spoke urgently, quietly into the camera. She kept looking over her shoulder at the house as if the evil inside was oozing toward her like hot lava.

I was beginning to feel that way, too.

“The story was all over the papers back in ninety-four,” Jan Janis said. “That pervert picked her up when she was fourteen, grabbed her from a shopping mall and kept her hostage in that cinderblock bunker.”

As the video ran, an F.B.I. agent escorted a man from the house to an unmarked car. His hands were cuffed and his face hidden by a baseball cap but his shape was the same as the man with the gun she’d first showed me.

“Convicted on kidnapping, rape and a bunch of other things,” she said. “He’s doing a double life sentence in some prison in Oregon.”

“Am I supposed to know him? ‘Cause I don’t.”

That’s when she showed us the school picture of my mother. It wasn’t one I’d seen before; we only had a few from when she was a little kid. She was young, maybe a couple years younger than me now. Her hair was blond, her face was baby-fat round, and she looked lighter some how, golden instead of grey.

“It was her? He kidnapped her?” I wanted to curl into a ball and run all at the same time, so I didn’t do anything. I just sat there.

“It was a huge media orgy when she first disappeared. Her parents were suspects for a while and then they investigated an older neighbor. It took them eighteen months to find this guy.”

Jan Janis swiped again and there was a picture of my mother with an older couple and a younger boy and girl with their arms around each other. It must have been taken afterward because the grey was there, hovering around her like an aura. She wore a UCLA sweatshirt that was too big except for where her pregnant belly bulged against it. Though it was meant to be a family picture, she seemed to be holding herself apart, a thin sliver of air separating her from the others.

“You must recognize your grandparents, your aunt and uncle?”

I shook my head. There was no way I could open my mouth. All the words I knew dammed up at the back of my throat. I looked at the camera, recognized that the whole world was watching – my mother, this family I’d never met before, maybe even the man with the gun. I wanted my mother’s dark bedroom, I wanted to go in and lock the door and close the curtains.

The dominoes began tipping over in my head. That I had a father. That he was a sick pervert. That he turned my mother into a woman who ran away from her family and spent half her life in a dark bedroom.

It made sense now. Why my mother never went on dates and hated crowds. Why she always looked out the peephole before she opened the front door. Why she told me I was a test-tube baby. That creep, my father, was still out there. Locked up maybe, but alive.

“Your mother is a remarkable woman,” Jan Janis said.

“Stop.” I reached for the camera. There had to be a way to stop that blinking red light. I stood up but my legs shook so hard I had to sit down again. “Turn it off. Make it stop.” I was whispering now.

She shook her head, disappointed.

“He’s kept your mother in a prison of her own making all these years. Maybe it’s not a cinderblock bunker but it’s not a real life she’s been living. And you. You worked your ass off to get here. You’re good. You could actually win this if you want it bad enough. Are you gonna let him steal that from you?”

“I can’t.” The fist in my gut expanded, filling my lungs, suffocating me like the heavy darkness in my mother’s room.

“You can. You will. You have the power to set your mother free, to reunite her with her family. And all you have to do is go out there and dance.”

The producers cut to the stage. Robert began his final routine.

Somehow Jan Janis hustled me out of the green room and into the warm-up studio. On the monitor in the corner, Robert flew across the stage, legs thrusting, arms flung wide. I wanted to be him. Claudio rocked me in his arms until the PA came for him then left to take his mark on stage. Angel dragged me to a corner of the room out of camera shot.

“I can’t believe you never told me,” she hissed.

“I didn’t know.” I could barely unclench my jaw enough to get the words out.

“You can’t let him get you, too. You have to dance one more time. Get your shit together.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to. Your mom’s out there in the audience.”

That’s when I knew she stayed. That she’d seen where all this was headed, where Jan Janis would take it. She wasn’t in her bedroom with the curtains drawn and the lights off. She was out there, ready to catch me or watch me, whichever way this turned out.

And then the PA came for me.

If you watch the show you know how it ends. Angel won – she really was that good – and Claudio was runner up. But I did dance. I shut down the fear, blocked the evil and disappeared for a while. It wasn’t dancing that saved me, like I always thought it would, it was knowing my mom was out there, probably more scared than I’ll ever be. She saved me. She saved us both.

Lori Eaton lives, works and writes in Metro Detroit. Her first short story appeared in Sassy Magazine more than twenty years ago. More recently, her short fiction was published in the spring/summer 2014 edition of The MacGuffin. Several of her 10-minute plays have been produced in theatre festivals in Michigan and California. Her first one-act play will receive a staged reading this spring. When she isn’t crafting stories or plays, Lori writes grants and other content for local nonprofits.