Capital: Jamie & Seven Friday night
It wasn't like, late. Late was when the buses to Repose stopped running and Uber tripled the price. Jamie wasn't out late: he wasn't even dressed for it. He had come for the last class. Not the pros, because the pros on a Friday night were on stage, performing. Friday night for a ballet company was like a Tuesday, maybe even a Wednesday for someone who rode a desk. Sunday was like, the only weekend day off and you hurt so bad that your teeth ached by Sunday that you didn't do like, brunch or whatever. But the pros were still in the final half hour of hurting while smiling, sweaty and gasping in the wings and gulping water in between orchestral beats. Jamie knew it without looking at a watch or his phone, the same way a desk-jockey could glance up and see it was somewhere between three and four pm. Habit, familiarity. Same thing.
He'd come in for class. With the kind of college kids who had given up dance and a serious attempt at a career they wouldn't have made it in anyway, but who had trained long enough that they stopped laughing, talking, whatever and worked the second the music started. And yeah, it was dumb af. His knee hurt. He'd started to feel the tug in his left calf of a muscle stretched to strain and the bathtub at the apartment sucked for icing anything. But Jamie wanted the way class felt: stripped back, pared down, clean. And tbh he wanted the admiration that reflected off glass from kids who hadn't like, bothered to go through the meat-market at how tight his turn was, how high he could get off the floor.
And now, yeah, it hurt. He had a bottle of ibuprofen crammed into the side pocket of his bag, and he took two, and necked them dry in the street outside the class studio, the chill of evening air washing over the back of his neck, where the hair was damp and clean. Jamie had planned on waiting. Until the curtain-call, until the stage door slammed. The guy he'd been stretching with for four mornings out of five, who'd given him a look - a little fond, a little exasperated - and told him he just couldn't fucking quit - had invited him along with the rest of the corps. Drinks, in a bar Jamie hadn't bothered with before, and he didn't know if it would hurt or it would feel so much like coming home it would hurt worse to go out in their throng. He was a hanger-on, and he like, got that in the same way they had rejected dancers who fringed their crowd at a bar, drinking post-performance in other cities.
So like, Jamie had taken indecisive as fuck to another bar and ordered vodka in Coke, where he could feel the sugar climb in his blood and the vodka kick muted over the buzz of his stomach, the timbre of his heart. He could like, think about it a little. He had an hour, maybe two, depending. If he wanted to look like a fan, or someone star-struck by the smell of old pointe shoes and greasepaint. Yeah, nah, he had TWO hours and he paid the guy at the counter and picked up his stuff, with a half-decision to book it. To go home, to the place Mars had mostly made look like they actually lived there, to ice the knee in the pathetic excuse for a tub, to think about something else that wasn't like, impossible to climb back up to.
Outside, the guy leaning into the door-frame of the store long shut next-door, was watching people pass. Old, the kind of old that was the street rather than years clocked up on the dial and a paper cup in front of him, old coffee take-out cup and a wodge of blankets piled into his lap. Jamie wasn't like, a good guy? He didn't know if he thought like, drugs or mental illness or where the guy could go to get help, he didn't like, KNOW that shit, but he paused long enough to empty the change from his twenty into the guy's cup and headed right down the street, instead of left in the wrong fucking direction for the bar or the choice, either.