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Getting into ballet was the best mistake I ever made, or so my family thought. When I was a kid, I lied to my parents about boy scouts being full-up so I could get into ballet. Sometimes I’d catch a dance taped for public television and it was a majestic sight, and I didn’t even know why. It predated all the “Heathcliff is a sissy boy!” taunts after all.

Ballet was going to make me the best sissy boy that Twinbrook had ever seen. And it took strength; ballet is an artform for the eyes and a workout for the legs and core.

“Toes out, Heathcliff!”

Society said what it wanted to, but it was nice to make progress on a stupid hobby. It could get me on a big stage in Empire City one day. I started out as a clumsy and shy little boy…

…showing promise at age eight…

…and a shoe-in for the Bridgeport Ballet as soon as puberty hit! That one was even better. Ms. Whelohff, my stern-eyed teacher, sighed and told us to practice more. I guess I had to leave a spot for my classmates too, they were great dancers too. They were a family of mine who waited for me at the Twinbrook Rec Center four times a week. So I forgot for a few hours that the rest of my life was going to be strange. And I feared it intensely.

As if I was the first child raised by separated parents, though?

Mum and her family were amused by it. I’d dance for them and get golf claps from Grandpa Samhain and Great-Grandpa Screwtape. The two of them blended into polite society somehow, but of course I asked about their grey skin and got a shrug. “We’re daemons,” said Samhain. “But we’re supposed to be kind.”

That didn’t extend to ballet, because they asked me about doing anything else. They didn’t want me to be manly, because they suggested art and music and riding horses too. But I think dance bothered them like it bothered a lot of boys in school. Samhain was a martial artist and a stage magician, and ballet is both of those but with less lying.

At least they told cool stories about traveling and my great-great-grandmother. She was a scholar and witch birthed from a supernova, and that’s why my last name was Ironstar. Where she was now, no one knew! I thought she was hiding in the basement, since no one went down there.

I said I was gonna change my last name when I got married and they laughed. Then I wondered who I wanted to marry at all. Then both grandpas had to admit to being in an arranged marriage and made it awkward. They both said they’d never been happier than they were with their wives, but I don’t think that Vega’s magic would have worked on me. Screwtape and Samhain were too normal.

And she would have done something weird like pairing me with Ms. Whelohff too.

For a while I lived in fear of it. I wasn’t convinced that the grandpas would be any better than her. I didn’t think they were evil, but if I didn’t have the words to say what I am and what I wanted, they didn’t either.

So escaping to grandma’s house it was! My dad lived there too. I used to ask Grandma Sheila if she was married to Screwtape and she pinched my lips shut. In my defense, Grandpa Heath died when I was little. Otherwise, she loved to paint and hear about ballet class. She said she was too old to learn how to dance or play an instrument, but I said that Ms. Whelohff taught old people too.

She bought a guitar after that.

Grandma was honest and would die one day. She was really tired of me asking if she was immortal too. She said some strange things happened to her. Then said that she was resurrected after her normal death and cherished all the time she had left. That meant spending it with dad and I.

I didn’t want to die, but I liked that house more anyways. I could be at either of them any time I wanted to because of what mum and dad told the court. And I’m still unsure how I ended up with the daemons one afternoon.

“Puh-lease, I’d rather not drag you two into my kid’s personal life. Letting you into mine’s bad enough.”

“But we’ve never had a kid like him,” said Screwtape.

“And I’d never forgive myself if we messed this up,” Samhain said.

“Guys, you didn’t hear about the party, did you?”

I got invited to it by two of my fellow dancers, the Baker twins. They were linked at the hip and Sherrie was always chosen as my dance partner for recitals. But I still wondered if they liked me at all. They used to whisper about me all the time like the other kids. Imagine the endless cycle of “Heathcliff is a silly gay boy taking ballet” and “Heathcliff is only in ballet to get girls.” Like that’s supposed to make any sense put together. The same people thought the same two things.

The latter was supposed to be unusual to assume about any guy in ballet, but I actually understood it the most. Dance was intimate by design. I know I connected with my classmates on some level. There are more paths to them than through the heart. It was our shared understanding of movement and music. We had a middleman!

But was I attracted to them? Hell no, I figured out I was gay when Ms. Whelohff took us on a field trip to see Coppelia. I had the biggest crush on the dancer who played Franz.

I was the gay ballet classmate, and I was going to steal someone’s boyfriend.

And I really thought it could work!

If Sherrie was the beautiful fairy who would take my spot at the Bridgeport Ballet Company one day, then Kyla was her understudy. Actually, she was lovely and a great dancer too. I know regular boys liked her. But she was a werewolf who would end her career the moment a show lined up with the full moon. Her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind that, and he was the most beautiful of them all.

Tarik Byrd played football. We may as well have been from different planets, which was also technically true. I’d spare him that detail. I went to a game just to see him tackle other boys and wished he would do the same to me. Sometimes I’d see him in the gym, lifting in short-shorts. I’d pretend to look at myself instead, but I wasn’t as impressive.

Somehow, we got invited to the same party. I had more cousins than I thought, which I guess is what the Prudence boys, Tad and Hassan the Second, thought as well. They were the kids of my undying werewolf great-aunt, Valencia Knack. We kind of had the same jawline. And their other cousins were my dad’s other kids with another Prudence. It was bizarre. I guess one of them played football or was a male cheerleader and invited Tarik.

“You know, you should go easy on that stuff, I don’t know where Hassan got it from,” said Tarik.

Ballet made me boring. My diet was controlled, my days were scheduled out weeks in advance, and I may never get the chance to drink unknown stuff again. It tasted nice, if kinda bitter.

“You ever listen to Strapping Young Lad?” I asked him. He shook his head no. It was industrial metal from a dystopian future and Ms. Whelohff would not let me choreograph a dance to it.

And then Kyla put on a different CD instead.

It was so weird to get flustered over being near Tarik while effortlessly dancing in front of others while wearing tights. But then, I felt so loose. I’d fall if I tried to do an arabesque that night. Maybe that was what being Kyla felt like. She wasn’t always clumsy but brushed off her mistakes and falls like I never could.

I wanted to make a bold move more than ever. Being subtle got me nowhere. I never had a date after all while everyone else was on their second or third boyfriend.

“Aww snap Tad, I could never dip someone like that!”

I didn’t know what Kyla was talking about, she was a great pas a deux partner even if she wasn’t her twin. Usually the men did the dips, but as an unbalanced class it got reversed a lot. Modern ballet companies wanted those skills anyways. They wanted me to dance en pointe even though I was a tall and bulky man.

That wasn’t the kind of brag that would steal me someone’s boyfriend though.

Then someone said ping-pong, and I was either going to be fooled into drinking more stuff or revealing that I was a great paddle handler. I mean, I was an athlete in my own right.

But as it turns out, my arms were the least athletic part about me. I forgot Tarik’s sport was literally throwing hand-eggs to other guys. What hurt would another drink be anyways?

After more than I could count, I clung to his jacket and threatened to tear it off. And I cried and smelled kinda funny.

“You’re so cute!” I cried out. “And you gotta be bicurious at least.”

“What? No, you gotta go home instead,” he said. “Or it’s just gonna get worse…”

And that was the last I remembered. I lived, but now I was in front of the elder Ironstars to be grilled about my sexuality. Every teenager did dumb stuff at a party, but I was the only gay boy there. It wasn’t supposed to be news, but if the gossip circled around school before first period was over, then it had to hit the family too.

Some people were mean, but I feared them less than a triad of daemons, even if I was one of them.

“Look kid, we’ve been 95% sure you were gay since you were five,” said mum. “And we love you very much for it, or we did until these two knuckleheads started getting anxious about it.”

“I worry if my mother comes back and wants you to continue her quest to help humans and live forever,” said Screwtape. “There was never a need for this conversation about your sexual orientation before this.”

“Man, you really know how to make coming out awkward.” I thought them living forever was a quirk of biology. Now they wanted to tell me there was a deep meaning to everything and I was a key player. Would I even be able to dance then? I guess it explained the arranged marriages though, like we were royalty. “Is this what grandma says ruined her life?”

“I will not take any blame for her suffering!” said Screwtape. “Not as if you said that, sweetest great-grandson. My mother was a woman who followed order and strictness, even if we did not understand why.”

“We found some of her writings downstairs, and it may be for nothing, but I think my dad’s on to something.” said Samhain. “There’s nothing in the old book that says you can’t be who you are. But it never talks about romance and only talks about natural offspring, and we’re not ready to face her wrath again.” At least he seemed as disgusted as I was with that. Grandpa was a true ally after all.

“Gimme the book then.”

I never thought of Samhain as much of a reader, but he had everything bookmarked with photos of my grandma. He always said I looked just like her before I dyed my hair for the first time. It was an odd book, half in English and half in an alphabet I was not going to learn.

“It’s daemonic, none of us know it either,” said Samhain. “And your great-great-grandma was as good of a translator as she was a tyrant.”

“Yeah, reads like it,” I said. It explained everything about Grandpa Screwtape, because this author was the same pretentious nutcase that he was.

“You will forge the bond between Life and Death, living between their margins forever. But for a generation or eight of humans, your help will be most clever. Your talent and careers and parenting too…

But do remember: all the life you live will not be for you.”

“It isn’t perfect poetry in English, I will admit,” said Samhain. “And the rules are a lot more extensive.”

“Doesn’t sound like they remembered gay people exist.”

“There’s just no hints about it, we’re confused until it happens.”

“No husband, no dynasty. I have to stick up for my kind somehow,” I said to all of them. They were swarming around me like fruit flies. “And I don’t think Tarik would agree–”

“You looked like a moron in front of him, it’s not gonna happen,” mum said. “It’s fine, we don’t have anyone to play matchmaker with anyways. You’ll figure it out on your own like a normal kid…and that’s all we want from you?”

“Uh…I think you all tried your best. No more awkward dinners now?” I asked. I was still going to grandma’s for dinner instead. She would take the news a lot better, besides the dynasty part. At least no one had actual plans.

Grandma had taken up guitar after all. She wasn’t good at it but she could play the main riff to “Planet Caravan” I guess. It was cool to hear her chords echoing off the walls of that creepy old place, especially in the “bird tower” as we called gazebo there. It became a parlor and foosball room.

“Hey grandma, I’m gay and the Ironstars were being weird about it!”

“Oh…it figures.”

She wrapped me in a bear hug, which was typical but this was tighter than ever before and it lifted me off the ground. And to think that was my job!

“I’m so proud of you…and always disappointed in them,” she said. “Don’t tell me that they tried to make you revive their dynasty.”

I rolled my eyes. “They think I was a moron for chasing Tarik.”

“You should probably clear the air with him, and I’m sure there are cuter guys at the Bridgeport Ballet anyways. At least call me to judge them if I’m still here.”

“But that’ll take forever.”

“Imagine how long living forever would be, though…anyways, Marco baked more than enough trout for the four of us,” said Sheila. I guess I had to talk to Aunt Carisa after all. At least she complained about her dad a lot and rode a motorcycle. And I think she might have been gay too, but the other kind and she never talked about it.

“Yeah, I’m not surprised by it either,” said my dad, after he got the news. “You’re not gonna have luck dating here anyways. Tell Ms. Whelohff how much you need to go to Bridgeport.”

“We haven’t inbred that place to oblivion yet,” Carisa muttered.

---

The recital was upon us and I tried to forget about Tarik instead of seeking forgiveness. It meant dancing with Sherrie a lot and avoiding the questions I feared the most from her. We were supposed to stay silent during a dance, but she broke it constantly. It was mostly gossip I didn’t know about or ask for.

“Oh, you see Tarik out there?” she whispered to me.

“More than ever before.”

“Not to scare you, but if you even think about hurting my sister or touching my wings, then I assure you that both will sear you with the pain of ten-thousand suns.”

“Sherrie! Mouth shut, toes pointed,” said Ms. Whelohff. “Or the whole audience will hear your petty squabbles next week.”

After practice, it was time to sit on the trampoline outside and wait. Or hope that a fall from the trampoline would kill me before embarrassment would.

“Hey, you doin’ alight?” Tarik asked me. “Remember when I drove you home?”

“No, and…and I know a date isn’t gonna happen. My mum called me a moron and she was right,” I said.

“You’re not a moron, you drank too much from the keg…I would’ve done it too.”

“And I tried to take your shirt off.”

“There’s a gay bar in the capital,” he said, as the sun started to set. He sat down beside me and I swore that our hands almost touched. I still had too much hope, didn’t I? “Heard so from a cousin. He’s way too old for you, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get you in.”

“So you don’t think I’m hopeless.”

“No, but maybe you have to hide that you live with grey people. I almost fainted on the porch when your grandpa answered the door.”

I laughed. I didn’t even want to laugh, and I was afraid to laugh in front of him if my stupid head didn’t have other plans.

“Yeah, they’re not gonna be the death of me, but I wish they were. Beats the alternative.”

And somehow, that wasn’t the last time I saw Tarik. There was still school, and he let me go to football games if I didn’t make things weird. And between everything, I wondered why he still expected that. Or why I delivered it.

But one thing was for sure: I needed to get out of Twinbrook. I wasn’t sure how or if Vega was going to be a part of it, but I kind of hoped to never meet her again. No matter what, it was a long swim out of that swamp.