Free Serafim and Claire by Mark Lavorato Page A

branch, run sheep run — or in winter, when they skated together near the local fire station, where the firemen hosed down a field to make a rink, or sledded together down the length of Hogan Street, the steep road lined with snowbanks and mittened children towing their toboggans back to the top to run down it again.
    The girls at the École de Danse Lacasse-Morenoff talked giddily (stupidly, as far as Claire was concerned) about boys, with puppyish sniggers and cutesy affectations. Disappointed, Claire felt they were shamefully distracted from what they were all there to do, what they loved. Her classmates were losing their focus, too easily reshuffling their priorities, and it was maddening.
    It was in grade seven, when she entered a school of twelve-to-sixteen-year-olds, that everything really changed. Claire was not prepared for how exasperating she would find the halls of a coed school that was pulsating with teenagers. It was as if, overnight, both the sexes had dramatically transformed, and the alterations were ludicrous. Girls whom she knew to be cruel and competitive and unforgiving were suddenly living out a kind of sham. They had instantly, and falsely, become frail and timid. What she found strangest of all was how they would out-and-out lie to make themselves appear stupid, even dull. The girls had become a pathetic charade. At the same time, they forgave the even more outlandish falsehoods being perpetrated by the boys, who were, in their own way, lying to make themselves appear fiercer, brutish, as if they cared forty times less than they actually did. It was baffling and, for Claire, a dismal turn of events.
    After a year of Claire’s friends (even Cécile) confessing, with an air of great secrecy, their consuming crushes and yearnings for these utterly feral creatures that were the opposite sex, Claire began to wonder if she was normal, if there wasn’t something wrong with her. Even if she happened to doubt there was. If anything, the sensations her classmates were feeling — this irrational, fantasy-invading want — was something that she already understood better than most. Claire was well acquainted with infatuation; but more than that, she had come to know something beyond it, a kind of rare, sustaining, constantly maturing kinship. Only it was with dance, not boys. With dance she nurtured a relationship that was, even now, there for her, accepting her unconditionally in her daily moods, teaching her patiently about tenacity, resilience, art, subtlety, grace, beauty, and her body. Could a snivelling teenage boy really hope to compete with that?
    Claire decided to ask her grandmother whether she would ever feel as strongly about boys as she did about dance. Afraid of giving herself away at the outset, she asked simply about love, in the most abstract sense of the word. It was a winter evening, and they were alone in the boudoir, listening to Vivaldi on the gramophone, and once the discussion began, her grandmother looked as though she’d just been asked to walk a thousand miles. She told Claire that a person only had enough room inside her body for love to occur — and she stopped to specify that she was talking here about the most real, rawest, most precarious kind of love — once in her lifetime. And if it happened at all, it almost always took place, she said, when a person was very young, at a stage when they were still foolhardy in their generosity, when they gave and gave away, unsustainably.
    Claire, beaming with validation, hesitated for a moment at a discrepancy in her grandmother’s statement. “But . . . I thought you moved to Montreal when you were twenty-one, from a small town up north, and then married Grandpapa, who died two years later.” Twenty-one didn’t seem young to Claire.
    And by the looks of it, that wasn’t quite the age her grandmother had in mind either. The woman’s expression seemed to wade back to the tiny