Chapter 22
Dear God,
It’s been four weeks since my accident, and no one will talk about it. Every time I ask when I’ll be better, Dr. Hamilton says it’s too soon to tell. When I ask Kate when I can come back to the show, she says they don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on.
I’m not going to ask you for anything other than understanding. I feel so lost. I don’t know what to do. I trust in you, but I’m scared.
Please help me.
When I finished saying my prayers, I slowly removed the knee brace Dr. Hamilton had given me. It extended from my hip all the way down to the top of my ankle, completely immobilizing my left leg. It was made of tough, black padding encircled by heavy metal rings. I strapped it on every morning and only took it off at night (or occasionally to scratch underneath when I couldn’t resist). My leg was always itchy, hot, and inflamed. The top and bottom of the brace rubbed against my skin when I walked, creating semipermanent red rings of irritation. I felt like an impounded car with one tire locked in a boot, like I was dragging around my own personal anchor.
“Alex?” Mom called from outside my bedroom door. “You ready?”
“Yeah, come in,” I said.
Then I pulled the sheet over my nose like an improvised mask.
Mom pushed the door open with her shoulder and walked inside. In her hands she cupped a bowl-shaped piece of aluminum foil. Thick tendrils of steam wafted up from it.
“Ugh,” she said, her eyes watering. “Let’s do this quickly.”
“The faster the better,” I agreed as Mom took the chair next to my bed. I peered at the thick, brown sludge inside the foil. It looked terrible, and it smelled worse. In fact, we called it “poo paste.”
My cousin Emily taught us how to make it. Even once we knew for certain that I wouldn’t be dancing at Lincoln Center, she insisted on visiting.
“You’re still getting the award, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be up onstage,” I told her. “But I won’t be dancing.”
“Pshh! I’ve seen you dance before,” she joked. “But I’ve never seen you get an award at Lincoln Center. I’m coming.”
True to her word, she flew in from California a week later. When she arrived at our apartment, I couldn’t help but think how much had changed since her last visit, just a month ago. Then, I’d been on top of the world, opening my first show on Broadway. Now? There were some days when I felt like I had no idea who I was. I was trapped in limbo, unable to do any of the things I used to take for granted. Aside from Dad’s passing, it was the worst I’d ever felt.
I didn’t even know how to be a good host. I couldn’t show Emily around, not with my leg the way it was. And even though I was no longer in regular rehearsals, I still had a pretty busy schedule. They kept me in the acting sessions, to keep the script fresh in my mind. From the beginning, I went to physical therapy three times a week. I couldn’t do much with my leg, but I still needed to keep up my endurance, which was important if I were ever going to return to the show. And there were stretches and delicate strengthening exercises I could do to help my knee heal properly. I spent a lot of time at PhysioArts on the arm bike, wishing I were eight blocks away, onstage at the Imperial, where I belonged. It was so close and yet so, so far.
I also used the time to bank tutoring sessions. We were required to have a certain number of hours per school year, and I figured if I could do them all while I was injured, it would make returning to the show easier—whenever that happened.
For the moment we’d decided to take Dr. Hamilton’s advice and let my leg heal on its own. Our physician back home, Dr. Mysnyk, said that he knew Dr. Hamilton and agreed with his recommendation. Dr. Mysnyk was a family friend (his family had actually come to my opening night in Billy), and we trusted him completely. We scheduled a trip to Iowa so he could examine my knee himself, but until then, we decided to leave it alone and hope for the best.
If it had been anyone else visiting, I think they would have had an awful trip. But not Emily. She was always full of energy. She even helped make the Lincoln Center event fun. I was sad not to be able to do “Electricity,” but it still meant a lot to accept the award, and Trent did a great job dancing. There were tons of celebrities at the event, like Tamara Tunie from Law & Order: SVU, and Emily helped me get photographs with all of them. I thought I’d never want to look at that award, but when we got home, I put it on the desk in my bedroom and decided it was pretty cool.
But there wasn’t much to do for the rest of Emily’s trip. When I told her that I couldn’t really travel around, she said it didn’t bother her.
“Then pull out the Wii.” She smiled. “But no blaming your leg when I destroy you.”
“You’re on!” I laughed.
Nearly everyone in my life in New York was connected to the show, and seeing them made me feel sad and confused. But with Emily, I could just hang out and have fun. If not for her, I might seriously have become a hermit during that first month after my injury.
We barely even talked about my knee, except right when she arrived. She asked me a few questions about what I had done and how it felt, then pulled out her cell and called her mother, my auntie Polly, back in California. A few days later, a small package arrived in the mail.
“What’re those?” I asked as she pulled plastic bags of dried herbs out of the package.
“A remedy,” she said, “for your knee.”
“Do I . . . eat them?” I wrinkled my nose. They didn’t smell like something I wanted to put in my mouth.
“No,” Emily said. “Come to the kitchen, I’ll show you.”
The powders, she explained, had been sent by her mother and were a traditional Chinese herbal treatment for injuries. It was something you couldn’t buy in stores, not in this country, but her family had passed down the recipe.
“Add all these powders together, mix it with vodka, and heat it on top of the stove in some foil,” Emily directed me. Slowly, I hobbled around the kitchen following her instructions. “It’ll form a thick paste,” she continued. “That’s how you know it’s ready. Smear it all over your knee before you go to bed, and cover it with foil. It’ll help you heal faster. Just try not to breathe while you do it. You can tell it works by how it smells.”
If smell was an indicator of strength, this was definitely some powerful medicine.
Every night since, Mom and I cooked up a batch of poo paste for my leg. It really did make my knee feel better. It was warm and tingly and seemed to help with the swelling. And by this point, I would have done anything—even eat the poo paste—if it seemed to help. Being injured combined the two things I hated most in the world: being inactive and being unsure. And worse, they went hand in hand. The less I had to do, the more time I had to worry. It was a vicious cycle that left me staring at the ceiling every morning, having to will myself to get out of bed.
Always before, I would have tried to push through. That was my training. In gymnastics, the number one priority was performing. You focus, and you overcome. The same attitude did not prevail on Broadway.
“Absolutely not,” Kate said one afternoon, when I told her I thought I could work around the pain. “You are not coming back until you are better. Do you understand?”
“I can do it,” I told her. I’d done it before. “You’re pregnant, and you’re still working.”
“Being pregnant and being injured are very different things,” Kate said. “Also, I’m not thirteen and starring in a Broadway show three, four, five times a week. If you push and reinjure yourself, you might never heal. This is the rest of your life we’re talking about.”
She bent down until her head was close to mine.
“Alex, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we are not risking your health to put you back in the show faster. You’ll only make it worse.”
I wasn’t sure anything could be worse than this, but I did as Kate said. I didn’t seem to have any other choice.
Thankfully, the creative team came up with an idea. With all the buzz surrounding the show thanks to the Tony Awards, they were receiving tons of press requests every month. Some were for interviews and appearances on television shows, but many of them asked for support for charity events. They wanted a Billy to give a speech, or kick off a race, or lead a dance workshop. Because our schedules were so packed when we were in the show, we rarely had the chance to give back. Since I was out indefinitely, however, they decided to use me as a spokes-Billy.
It was the first good show-related thing to happen since my injury. In fact, I got really excited about the chance to do charity work.
My first event was just two weeks after the awards at Lincoln Center. I was asked to be a celebrity guest at the Covenant House annual Candlelight Vigil for Homeless Youth. Every year, hundreds of social workers, youth advocates, homeless and formerly homeless youth, family, friends, and supporters gathered in Times Square to bring awareness of the suffering of homeless kids. Simultaneous vigils were held in shelters, churches, and homes all around the country. I was shocked to learn that more than seventy thousand children live in Covenant House shelters across the United States, and many more were on the streets or in other homeless facilities. I couldn’t imagine how hard their lives must be.
The event had a lineup of speakers from Covenant House, as well as celebrities like former New York Met Dwight “Doc” Gooden and Guiding Light star Karla Mosley. I had been asked to read a letter that had been left in the chapel of the Covenant House New York shelter by an unknown homeless young person.
“Just read slowly and clearly,” said Juliana Hannett, the woman who facilitated all the PR done by members of Billy Elliot. It was her job to make sure we didn’t say the wrong thing, or stumble through our lines. She was sort of like our director for press events. Because Broadway shows are always making new casting decisions, thinking about tours, and extending (or cutting short) their runs, she made sure that we didn’t accidentally give out incorrect information, or say anything that wasn’t ready to be public knowledge. She was also a great speaking coach and helped me overcome saying “um” whenever I was nervous.
And I was nervous tonight. As hundreds of people lit thin white candles in translucent blue holders, I practiced what I was going to say and fussed over my hair. The reading would be broadcast on the Times Square Jumbotron above my head, making me nearly fifteen feet tall and sending my voice echoing across the most famous intersection in the world.
There was a flurry of activity on the stage as the head of Covenant House introduced me. Juliana counted down from three on her fingers, then silently cued me to walk up to the podium. As the audience applauded, I cleared my throat and began speaking.
“I feel so blessed, “ I said, looking out over the crowd. “I’m getting the opportunity to live out my dream on Broadway, and I believe with all my heart that every kid should have that chance.”
As I said the words, I realized they were true. I was blessed. I was living out my dream. Maybe there were some bumps in the road, but was life really terrible just because I hadn’t been on Broadway long enough? There were kids who didn’t know when their next meals would be, or where they would sleep tonight. As the November wind cut across Times Square, I shivered, imagining life without my family, or where I would go tonight if we didn’t have our safe, warm apartment.
I had a hard, uncertain path ahead of me, but it wasn’t the end of the world—unless I let it be. Nothing is guaranteed in life. But even if I never got back into Billy Elliot, even if I never danced again, it didn’t mean I couldn’t do great things.
Getting to Broadway required a level of focus that could sometimes make it hard to see all the other possibilities in life. Reading about the struggles of this young person who had so much less than I did put my life into perspective. Maybe I was meant to be on another path, or maybe this struggle was exactly the thing I was supposed to confront and overcome in my life.
But until I had a clear sign leading me elsewhere, I was going to do everything in my power to get back on that stage.