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over to the window. Her face was goofier up close than it was when I saw her from afar. Or maybe it was just distorted by the glass. I opened the window and she fell into the room.
    I ripped right into her. “Freaking a girl out is not the way to be neighborly. You could have been a murderer! Next time just ring the doorbell.”
    She smiled as she gave me her hands so I could pull her up. Which I did.
    “Yrena,” she said, smiling at me face-to-face now. She was a little bit taller than me. Her long blond hair was up in a tight bun, like always.
    “Rose,” I said.
    “Rose,” she said. “Like a flower.”
    For two years, she’d been on my radar, but I never took much notice. She was just there, doing her thing in my peripheral vision. Every now and then, though, she’d emerge and I’d pay attention. Those moments of hers that I’d notice were never big. It was just small things: doing her homework at night at her big brown desk, folding clothes and puttingthem in drawers, taking those white bows out of her hair, getting up to turn off the lights but always leaving one light on.
    I noticed that she was wearing pants instead of a skirt. That was something new. I had never once, in the two years she lived next door to me, seen her wear pants.
    As a dancer, I always sized up everyone’s legs, and she had good, long legs. I would’ve killed for legs like that.
    I imagined her dancing the combinations that we’d had in class that week. I imagined her getting through them flawlessly. She looked like a star.
    “I’ve always wondered about your room,” she said. “I can only see a part of it, you know. The rest of it is exactly how I thought it would be. It’s so American girl. ”
    Sometimes, when you don’t know someone except for what you’ve gleaned through a bedroom window, you get a distorted view of what they are like. Yrena thought that I was a typical American girl, but the truth was that there was no such thing as a typical American girl. I was very typical for myself, but that was it.
    I couldn’t tell from her accent if her thinking that my room was so American girl was a compliment or a dis. I suspected it to be a dis. I didn’t need to be dissed in my own room. Not when I had just been scared that she might be a pervert.
    “What does that even mean?” I asked.
    “You have many things that you don’t need,” she said.
    Then she went over to my vanity and fingered the new pair of Freed of London pointe shoes I had lying there because I had to break them in.
    Then she went to the wall, where she gently handled the pointe shoes that I had tacked on there. Those were the special ones, signed by dancers I admired: Natalia Makarova, Suzanne Farrell, and Gelsey Kirkland. I had gotten them after shows that I had seen when I was a little girl. It was a dorky thing to do, maybe, but those dancers were my heroes and those shoes had touched the stage that I wanted to dance on.
    She moved on to the wicker basket on the floor where I kept every single pair of pointe shoes I’d ever had. Most of the shoes were trashed, but I couldn’t seem to throw them away. She picked through them, turning each shoe over to examine the stitching, the shanks, the bend, the wear. It made me self-conscious, like she was reading my fortune. If she looked too closely, she’d know everything there was to know about me. That I wanted to shine, but I didn’t.
    “Why are you going through my stuff?” I asked.
    “Your right leg is stronger than your left. I am the opposite,” she said. Her English was not bad, and her accent made her say things in a charming singsong way.
    Right then, something switched. It went from her picking through the things in my room as though it were the most natural thing in the world to this dancer shorthand. Something about Yrena standing there seemed familiar. Maybe it was something about dancers when they gottogether. I watched as she looked around the room like she wanted to do some dance moves