Free Roses and Rot by Kat Howard Page A

Michelangelo, and he couldn’t take the criticism. You know, you find out that you’re not perfect, and so instead of figuring out how to get better, you quit because you’re not good enough.”
    “I guess that makes sense,” she said. “I remember the first time I didn’t get something I’d auditioned for. It was a couple of months after you left, an open call for Ballet New York.” She set down her coffee mug and looked out into the forest. “I was so desperate for them to pick me.”
    This was a story I didn’t know. Ballet New York was the company that Marin had been with from the time she left home to when she quit to come here. I’d always assumed she’d gotten in right away. “What happened?”
    “To this day, I don’t know. I even asked, after they did hire me and I’d been dancing there for a while, and they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me.
    “I’d had what I thought was a good audition, made it through to the last round of cuts, then ‘wasn’t what they were looking for.’ No other reason. I almost quit dance.”
    “Really?” I couldn’t imagine a Marin who didn’t dance.
    “I felt like, if they couldn’t even tell me what was wrong with me, it obviously wasn’t fixable. I just wasn’t right.” She looked lost, as if there was a part of her that still heard that voice.
    “What made you keep dancing?”
    She laughed, sharp and bitter. “Our mother. She had paid for classes, after all, and I was going to take them. So she wouldn’t let me quit until she’d gotten her money’s worth. And the next audition call was during that paid-up window, and I got it. It was the one time she’s ever helped my career.”
    “I got fifty-three rejection letters before I sold my first story.”
    “Seriously?” She looked at me.
    I nodded. “Fifty. Three. I probably have hundreds by now, if I were ever masochistic enough to count them all.”
    “Do you ever wonder why we do this to ourselves? Spend ninety percent of our lives being told we’re not good enough?” Marin tied her hair back for practice, and picked up her bag.
    “Sure,” I said. “It’s for the ten percent of the time we know that we are.” I picked up my mug and went back inside to write.

    Walking back from Beth’s that afternoon, I cut across the Commons and through the studios, first wandering along the forest edge to see if Marin was in hers.
    It had been an uncomfortable meeting. Beth had asked me for pages, even though we had agreed that she wouldn’t. “Proof of work,” she called it, and said she wanted to be sure I was pushing myself.
    “What happened to protecting my art?” I asked. I had finished work, of course I did, but she had promised, and I had trusted her.
    “That’s fine, Imogen, but you also have to learn to accept feedback. If you wanted to work in an echo chamber, you didn’t need to come here to do it. I’m not asking for everything, or for something that’s still in draft. But I want to see two or three of your more polished sections. I can’t help you if you don’t show me what you’re working on, and in case you’ve forgotten, the entire reason I am here is to help you.”
    “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it when I get home.” I had left then, cutting the meeting short. I had been on the verge of tears, and I didn’t want her to see me cry. Part of me felt her request like a betrayal, like the rules had changed midgame.
    But I was also angry at myself, because I knew better. I knew feedback was part of the process, and Beth had said during our first meeting that she wouldn’t let me waste my time here. We had been in residence for six weeks now, and I hadn’t shown her anything, hadn’t taken advantage of her expertise. And not for any good reason, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that what she would tell me was that I wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t now, and never would be.
    Marin wasn’t in her studio, so I kept walking, curious to see if I could find Evan’s. I