Tiny Pretty Things (33 page)

I slip on the right one and quickly lace the ribbons. It feels a little too snug, but I don’t have time to fiddle with it. I bolt to the center of the room to my position. I feel something thick and strange in my shoe, but ignore it. Morkie demonstrates the combination and Viktor starts to play. I rise on pointe. Whatever I felt in the heel of my slipper sinks toward my toes and suddenly a sharp pain shoots through my foot. “Ah!” the pain makes me collapse to the ground. I grab at my leg, my eyes close, my body wants to shut down. Warm blood pools in my shoe, the red seeping through the pink like a deepening sunset.

The other girls stop. “Your shoe is bloody,” someone shouts.

The girls huddle around and Morkie pushes through. I claw off my pointe shoe. Morkie holds my foot and pulls off the white padding. She pulls back my tights, ripping the bottom open further. Something is lodged in my skin. My eyes blur with tears and I can’t see what it is. Blood races down my arch.

Everyone gasps.

Everyone except Bette, who covers her mouth with one hand and practically runs away, like she can’t handle the sight of blood. If I wasn’t in so much pain, I’d hate her for it.

“What is it?” I scream in pain. There’s shock on the others’ faces, but in some I also read a bit of glee.

Morkie turns to Viktor and shouts something in Russian. He runs from the room. Moments later, the boys pour into the studio. Henri rushes toward me first, but Alec grabs his arm and shoves him aside. He kneels next to me.

“Take her to nurse, Alec,” Morkie says. “And, June, go get Monsieur Kozlov.” She touches her forehead. “How did zomething like thiz happen?”

I examine my foot and see a piece of the glass. Then I see there are three, maybe four pieces. More blood trickles out.

Morkie brushes my hand away. “Don’t touch,” she says.

I cry out in pain, and the look of my foot makes me feel nauseous. Alec lifts me from the floor like a doll.

“I can walk,” I say.

“No,” he says.

I try to fight my way out of his arms. I’m not weak.

“Just let me carry you,” he says. “You’re hurt.”

“Put me down,” I say a little too harshly. He obeys.

I hobble ahead. I scream out in pain and anger: both at whoever did this to me, and my bloody foot. The girls shuffle out of the way. Their faces twist in horrified expressions at my outburst. No one looks at my foot. They all cower in fear and gaze at their own feet. Bette turns her back to us and rests her hands on her head. She paces in a circle.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” I think I hear her say under her breath, but the pain stuffs up every bit of me, even my ears, so I can’t be too sure. I’m hearing everything through thick layers. People say things. I watch their mouths open and close, faces twisting in awkward expressions, but the voices muffled and clogged, thick and slow and unintelligible. My head is light and my limbs feel like they don’t belong. People are buoys drifting away from me. Even June steps back and I can’t see her anymore. Heat gathers in my cheeks and radiates from my skin—beneath the light brown is red.

Alec catches my arm before I trip. I smell his cologne and sweat, and his warm palms make me feel like I’m floating. “It’ll be okay,” he whispers close to my ear, and I almost believe him, but I feel the throb of the glass caught in my foot. Morkie follows closely behind in hysteria. I feel faint and black stars twinkle before my eyes. My heart squeezes and burns and thumps too fast in my chest.

By the time we reach Nurse Connie’s office, a crowd is in the corridor—the
petit rats
and their parents, the younger dancers, the administrative staff, and Mr. Lucas. Mr. K appears, his face long and grave as he takes my arm from Alec’s. He lifts me up on to the examining table. Nurse Connie pulls the tights up further. She rotates my ankle, exposing the shiny slivers of glass poking out of my foot.

I grit my teeth, but can’t stop wincing every time her hands near my foot, anticipating the pain, which I know will be excruciating

“Where did this come from?” Nurse Connie asks. “Did you break something in your room? Or did something break in your dance bag?” She asks like she already knows the answer.

“I don’t know,” I try to answer, my breath heavy.

“She was in class,” Alec says.

Mr. K and Nurse Connie exchange glances. “You and I both know someone did this,” Mr. K says to Nurse Connie. They all sigh. I’m guessing this is not the first time they’ve seen something like this. I try to focus on their faces, but my eyes fight to stay open.

The pain in my foot and the effort it takes to worry about what’s going to happen to me exhaust me.

“Deep breaths,” Nurse Connie says. “Stay relaxed. It’ll keep your heart rate down. Close your eyes.” She picks up the school phone and calls the hospital. “I’m going to take you to the emergency room.” I also hear her leave a message for my parents and Aunt Leah.

“Do I have to?” I ask. “Can’t you just clean me up?”

“It’s protocol,” Nurse Connie says. “I want to ensure that there’s no tissue damage.” That’s when the whole thing hits me. All of it, everything I’ve worked so hard for all these years, could end here. With this. What one of these evil girls will write off as a prank.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Mr. K chimes. “Alec, carry her to the RA van. Go with her.”

Nurse Connie grabs her bag and my med file. Alec scoops me up, carrying me through the corridor to the front of the school. He doesn’t take no for an answer this time, and Mr. K insists. Everyone is out there, whispering and waiting and wondering. I close my eyes and curl my head into Alec’s chest.

Once we’re in the van, he traces circles and hearts and triangles on my palm, and the sensation makes me relax into the seat. As we speed down Columbus Avenue, I feel like I’m not really awake. I fight thoughts about what this injury will do to my foot, to my dancing, to my role. Wind rattles the car windows. The sky is dark and gloomy. Ominous. A spring thunderstorm is coming. My foot throbs. I squeeze Alec’s hand, and finally let him take care of me the way he wants to.

“It’s going to be all right,” he whispers.

“Our
pas
. . . ,” I mumble, but he just shakes his head at me.

I close my eyes until we arrive at the hospital. We don’t have to wait. A nurse ushers us into a private triage room and yanks the curtain. Alec rests me on the bed.

“Alec, you have to go to the waiting room,” Nurse Connie says.

He gives me a concerned look, then retreats. The other nurse closes the drapes.

“How did this happen?”

I can’t answer. Another slew of questions are asked. I barely hear them. Nurse Connie hands the nurse my file. “Her health history and most recent physical.”

My eyes close while Nurse Connie fills her in on all the details. I block out her description of what’s wrong with me. The new nurse examines my foot, wipes it with a cold pad that makes it burn. “Big breath,” she says.

I take the deepest breath my lungs can handle, and she pulls the glass from my foot.

There is a surge of pain and release. More blood. More swelling. More heat.

I look down at my battered foot. Blood is everywhere, but the source is several deep slashes in my heel that feel like they’ve cut to the bone. I wonder if this is the end, after all of my mama’s fretting about my heart. Will I ever dance again? I can’t bring myself to ask. I don’t want to know the answer.

“She’s going to faint,” I hear Nurse Connie say, but I can’t get the energy to protest. “She’s got a preexisting condition.”

Someone moves my head between my knees and I’m being told to breathe. An oxygen mask is put around my face. A pulse monitor is clipped to my finger. Its beeps are wild, uncontrolled. Too fast.

The hospital nurse makes a little concerned noise as my vitals fill a screen. Nurse Connie hovers over the silver table where the hospital nurse placed the object from my foot

She puts on rubber gloves and picks it up with tweezers, holding it into the light. Her face scrunches. “Huh,” Nurse Connie says, almost to herself. “Looks like several pieces of a mirror.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I STAY IN STUDIO G
for hours after rehearsal. Even the hallways are empty, everyone hiding in their rooms after Gigi’s trip to the hospital. Personally, I haven’t felt this ready to dance since the spring cast list was posted, so I go with it. I work on pointe, aching to feel that crunch in my toes and that absurd new height when I’m balancing on tiptoes like this.

I’m best on pointe. Dancing in flat slippers is one thing, and people like Gigi can get away with
their shady technique or particular attitude. I get it; she has personality when she dances, and the audience will sit back thinking they could do it, too, sensing her ease and her joy.

But pointe shoes are unforgiving. There’s no room for that childish exuberance when your feet are forced into a whole new position and your weight is balanced precariously over the now straight line from your big toe to your hipbone.

I grab the barre for balance and work through basic exercises, preparing my muscles for the spasm of confusion that comes when you hoist yourself up into that erect, impossible position.

Gigi’s mangled foot and bloody slipper flash in my mind—the bright red of her blood and the sounds of her screams. The whole incident replays, making me push harder. I throw myself into my variation. We all have nails separating from our toes and purple and yellow bruises that look like modern art painting decorating our feet. But after what happened today, Gigi’s tender foot might take on a whole new level of disfigurement.

I work harder. That’s enough to get my legs fully extended, and counting the beats of the dance in my head. I don’t want to turn on the music in case of any stragglers. I don’t even want the little ones looking in to admire. I just want me and the mirror and the violent images of glass and skin flashing through my head.

When I mark myself in the mirror, I see that I’m smiling. I shouldn’t be smiling after what happened today. If someone saw me, they’d think I did it. I know they all suspect I’m the one who planted the glass in her slipper. Especially the ones who know I wrote the message on the mirror. Or the other little things. Whoever put the glass in Gigi’s shoe was possibly out to get me, too. Framing me, knowing I might get blamed. I run through a list of potential suspects. June, for sure; maybe Will now that Alec is officially with Gigi; and most definitely Henri to get back at me for messing with Cassie. I dance harder, hoping the exertion will help me come to definitive conclusions.

What I am trying
not
to think about: the way Alec rushed in and leaped to Gigi’s aid the second she made that sad little-girl yelp. The way he held her mangled foot in his hands and didn’t seem to mind the blood. The look Will managed to give me in spite of all the chaos. Like if Will can’t have him, I can’t have him either. Like he’d rather see Alec with literally anyone but me. And why do I still care after all these weeks? He’s left me. Our on-again, off-again relationship seems off in a way it never has before.

I step into a turn, whipping around until I’m a tornado and can think of nothing else but watching my spot on the wall. Three pirouettes. Four. I will turn until I can’t see Alec or Gigi or any of them anymore. Five. Until I don’t think about what I did to Cassie anymore. Six. My supporting leg and ankle tire, wobbling in my pointe shoe. Seven. Alec rushes back into my head. Eight. My foot slips from under me and I stumble. I’m ass-down on the floor, lucky to not have scraped my chin or clicked my right hip out of place. But it hurts, a laser of pain that moves from my ankle all the way to my tender knee.

If things were going well with me and Alec, he’d show up with a heating pad at just the mention of me being in pain. But everything’s a mess between us now. And I need to figure out how to put us
back together.

I get back onto my toes. Like a girl on a horse, or a kid on a bike, or, I’d imagine, a tightrope walker high in the air, it’s imperative that I don’t give in. If Alec were here, he never would have let me get back up.

I rise up, up, up. It feels like stilts, even though it’s just a few extra inches. I hang on the barre for a few moments, steadying, controlling, lifting and releasing and drifting into dance again.

“You keep losing the core,” someone says. The startling sound makes me lose my balance. This time I grab for the barre before going all the way down, but the pain surges up my right side anyway, like it knows something I don’t. I can’t fool my body into not feeling it.

“Crap.” I spin around only to see June.

She’s quiet, I’ll give her that.

And, if I’m being honest, she’s probably right.

“Sorry. Just looking at your form. It’s gorgeous, but when you pirouette you lose your core for a moment and the whole thing falls apart.” If Eleanor were saying the same thing I’d snap at her, but June has the serious look of a teacher or a minister, and I can’t find it in myself to dismiss her. I’m all out of mean things today. Her head is cocked and her eyes look up and down my body, critically but not cruelly.