Page 71 of Icarus

Helios made a sad sound. “Your turn out is perfect. Your arch is . . .”

“Are you jealous?” Icarus joked.

Helios didn’t answer him.

“Usually you would run into this position and I would catch you, but I think we could do it the opposite way. You stay here and I’ll run and catch you up.”

“Okay.”

“Watch yourself in the mirror,” Helios said, backing away.

Helios waited a minute for the song to catch up, then Icarus heard the sound of pounding feet and then . . .

He was aloft.

Strain

Helios clamped his hands firmly beneath Icarus’s arms, spanning the width of his ribs, so tight that it hurt. But Icarus was frozen, staring at himself in the collage of mirrors.

Head thrown back, arms bent and solid, but placed in exactly this way. Arched in exactly this way, he looked fragile and graceful and vulnerable in Helios’s grasp.

He looked, for the first time in his life: pretty. Icarus stared back at himself desperately trying to sear this image into his mind.

Helios’s chin was pressed to the cut of Icarus’s stomach, using Icarus’s own musculature for balance. Helios took the momentum of the lift and turned it into a spin so he could let Icarus down gently.

Icarus slid down Helios like a silk scarf falling from his shoulder until his feet were on solid ground. Helios was breathing steady, but Icarus was panting like he’d been running.

“How do you not get dizzy?” He laughed.

Helios still didn’t look happy.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said, rushing to turn the music off. “Can you do this with your hand?”

Helios stuck his arm out and bent his thumb close to his arm.

Icarus did it too, a little farther than Helios could. “Yeah, why?”

Helios let out a sharp breath. “Do you know what Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is?”

Icarus shrugged. “No. Why?”

Helios rubbed his eyes. “Okay. Okay. EDS is a connective tissue disorder that impacts how flexible you are, and it has a lot of other side effects. Your turn out was . . . too extreme for someone who hasn’t broken their body in for this. Sometimes . . .”

Helios paused like he was trying to figure out how to continue. “I’ve taught the little ones, a few times. At my school, we’re taught how to pick up on signs that they might have something like this going on so we can inform the parents. A girl comes in who can do the front splits on her first try. A boy comes in with arms that bend in unusual ways . . . I just. There was probably never an opportunity for you to learn about this.”

“What does it mean?” Icarus said. “What does it do to you? Is it bad?”

“It hurts, Icarus!” Helios cried.

“Oh.”

“Do your hands hurt? Does it hurt when you climb the wall of my house? Does it hurt so much sometimes you need to take baths to make it stop?” He sounded frantic.

Yes, it did.

“It hurts all the time,” Icarus said, starting to feel uncomfortable with how emotional Helios was getting. “Does it eventually kill you? If those are features of it, I think my dad might have it too.”

Helios nodded and squatted on the floor, sitting on his heels. “That would make sense, it’s genetic.” He looked up at Icarus. “And no, it doesn’t usually kill you, but it doesn’t feel good. Your joints and connective tissues move that way because they’re weaker than everyone else’s. If you keep doing this you’ll have to go to physical therapy, wear special rings and braces. You might have to do that stuff anyway.”