Dance of Shadows
Authors: Yelena Black
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Fiction, #Performing Arts, #Love & Romance, #Dance, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Horror & Ghost Stories
To Emily,
For hanging out at the vending machines with me
when we should have been learning how to do the splits
In the harsh glare of the lights, Chloë’s shadow stretched across the stage. Her toes pointed and taut, her arms fluttering like wings, she arched her neck and watched as her own silhouette seemed to move without her …
A drop of sweat slid down her chest and seeped into the thin fabric of her leotard. There was no music. The room beyond was dark and empty, yet she could feel her master’s eyes on her. She tried not to tremble as she lifted her chin to meet his gaze. Slowly, she extended a long, slender leg into the air.
He rapped his staff on the floor. “Again.”
Chloë wiped her temples. The floor was speckled with sweat and blood from hours of practice, but still she took her position. On the choreographer’s count, the thirteen ballerinas
around her began to flit in and out in cascades of white, their shoes pattering softly against the wood.
“One and two and three and four!”
And before she knew it, her feet were moving soundlessly across the stage. She dipped her head back, fanning her arms toward the light.
“Now rise!” he yelled as she thrust herself toward the circle of dancers, keeping in step. “Transcend your body! Your bones are hollow! Your feet are mere feathers!”
Chloë twirled, her back flexed into a crescent as the dancers flew past, their faces vacant, their feet moving so quickly they seemed to blur.
“Yes!” cried the choreographer, his smile wide and triumphant. “Yes!”
Chloë was dizzy and exhausted, her leotard damp with sweat, but she didn’t care. The routine was finally coming together. Her legs wove around each other with effortless grace, and her body followed, smooth and slippery, like a strip of satin gliding over the stage.
Letting herself go, she cocked her head back in a flush of rapture. Her chest heaved, and hot, thick air filled her lungs.
The other dancers reached for her, their faces a pale swirl. Chloë bowed out of their reach, dipping low and letting her fingertips graze the wooden floor. It felt strangely hot. The thin smell of smoke coiled around her, tickling her nose, and the choreographer’s voice grew distant and watery. The overhead lights seemed to flicker, casting eerie shadows against the walls.
A wave of heat rippled through her body. It was strange, unidentifiable—a hot presence spilling into her veins, making her head throb.
A string of whispers began to unravel in her mind, the voices too soft to understand. She jerked her head, trying to shake them off, but they melded into one another, foreign and indecipherable, growing louder, shriller.
Her eyes burned. The room swam with red. The ribbons of her pointe shoes tightened around her ankles. Without warning, her legs bent backward, as if boneless. Her arms cracked and swung over her head. Against her will, her chin jerked upward to face the overhead lights.
Mine
, a voice said inside her head.
Chloë teetered, her legs trembling as she fought to maintain her balance. Using all her strength, she forced her lips to move. “No!” she screamed convulsively, and fell out of position.
The dancers stopped midstep, their faces empty and distorted. From somewhere in the darkness, the choreographer’s voice cut through the room. “That, my dear, was a fatal misstep.”
“What?” Chloë whispered. “How can—” But her words were consumed by a stifling breath of heat. It enveloped her, licking at her legs, and she twisted in pain as the presence took hold, her blood boiling as it pulsed through her fingers, her arms, her chest, until she was filled with an unbearable, burning ecstasy.
The colors around her sharpened until they were so bright they burned her eyes. Something screeched in her ears—a
shrill, deafening cry that she suddenly recognized as her own voice.
She blazed into a brilliant, coruscating light, her body dissolving into ash.
With a swish, her mother opened the curtains, letting the afternoon sun stream into the room.
Vanessa shielded her eyes. “Mom,
please
.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a little sunshine.” Mrs. Adler pursed her lips as she stood back to observe. “Besides, it kills the germs. Who knows how properly this place has been cleaned.” She dug inside her purse and withdrew a small bottle of Purell, squeezing a dollop into her palm. “Bacteria, be gone!”
Vanessa couldn’t help but laugh, and then she let her eyes wander.
It was a simple dorm room, sparsely furnished with two beds, two desks, and two dressers. The walls were painted a pale yellow. A long mirror nailed to the back of the closet door reflected the unpacked boxes that littered the floor. The
other half of the room was already decorated in loud, bright colors: movie posters, patchwork pillows, shoes and clothes spilling from the closet, but Vanessa’s roommate was nowhere to be found.
Outside the open door, the hallway was bustling with chatter—girls laughing and gossiping about their summers, parents arguing while they squeezed heavy trunks through the corridor, little sisters spinning like delirious ballerinas.
Vanessa had once been that little sister, though she could barely remember the last time dancing had made her smile. She blew a wisp of red hair from her face and glanced at her father, who gave her a sympathetic shrug.
“Something’s missing.” Her mother moved a small vase from one side of the nightstand to the other. “That’s better,” she said, though it looked the same to Vanessa.
Her father sighed, and when his wife wasn’t watching, he rolled his eyes at Vanessa. She laughed.
“What’s funny?” her mother asked sternly.
Vanessa bit her lip. “Just thinking about something from the past.”
“The past is nothing,” her mother said, a slight quiver in her voice. “Focus on the future.” She ruffled the edge of the duvet and ran a hand across her forehead, as if trying to erase the fine lines of stress and worry that had formed there over the past few years. “Of course, being here doesn’t help.”
There was a knock on the door. A girl with an upbeat ponytail stood in the hall, holding a clipboard.
“Yes?” Vanessa’s mother said.
“Hi. I’m looking for Vanessa Adler?”
Vanessa took a step toward the door, but her mother didn’t budge.
“I’m her mother, Mrs. Adler. And you are?”
“Oh, I’m Kate, the resident adviser.” The girl tried to peer into the room. “I wanted to welcome Vanessa to the New York Ballet Academy.”
“Resident
adviser?
There’s only one of you?”
“There are two of us, actually,” Kate said cheerfully. Her eyes were bright and blue, her hair light brown with blond highlights. “I’m in charge of the freshman girls, and Ben is in charge of the boys.”
Mrs. Adler frowned. “I think I misunderstood you. You’re trying to tell me that
you
are the only person watching over the freshman girls?”
Vanessa winced, and Kate flashed her an understanding look before giving Mrs. Adler a reassuring smile. “I am. But I promise you—”
Mrs. Adler cut her off. “Do you realize that there are only twenty dancers Vanessa’s age admitted each year to the New York Ballet Academy?”
“I do—” Kate said.
“And that fifteen is a very impressionable age?”
Vanessa felt her face grow hot.
“I know. I was fifteen not that long ago—” Kate began to say.
“That’s exactly my point!” Mrs. Adler raised her hands in the air. “You’re barely older than Vanessa. How can you always know
where she is and whom she’s spending time with? That she’s doing her schoolwork and practicing her dance routines, when there are dozens of distractions surrounding her? Manhattan preys on naive young girls.”
The entire room seemed to take a breath, including Mrs. Adler, who clutched the side of the dresser, fanning her neck. For a moment, Vanessa wished that her father would step in and tell her mother that she was out of line—but that wasn’t how things were with her parents. Her mother was the one who gave the instructions; her dad merely followed them.
“I’m sorry,” her mother said, composing herself. “I’m just worried about her.” She turned to Vanessa. “I understand the need to dance. Really, I do; I was the same way. But are you absolutely sure you want to be here? Because there are other things out there, an entire world—”
“Mom, I’ll be fine. Stop worrying.”
They had already had this conversation—many, many times. Her mother wanted her to stay home, to go to public school back in Massachusetts. But Vanessa wanted … well, it wasn’t so much about what she wanted to do. It was about what she
needed
to do.
And that was to be here. At the New York Ballet Academy. The same school that Margaret had gone to.
It had taken months of fighting and persuading her mom to say yes once the acceptance letter had arrived. The fact that Vanessa had been offered a full-tuition scholarship hadn’t hurt. “The most talented dancer we had audition,” the admissions officer had said. “Must run in the family.”
Eventually Mrs. Adler had succumbed to the pressure.
Vanessa gave Kate an apologetic shrug, hoping her mother’s diatribe hadn’t already destroyed her reputation. Being an outcast in a class with only ten boys and ten girls wasn’t exactly the fresh start that she wanted. But to Vanessa’s surprise, Kate gave her a wink and turned toward her mother.
“Manhattan
is
an exciting place,” Kate said, a cacophony of honking cars in the street below emphasizing her point. “And while I can’t promise to know what Vanessa is doing all of the time, I
can
say that we do everything in our power to make sure our students are safe and happy. There are curfews and lockdowns, and for the most part, everyone here is so busy that there’s barely any time to experience the city at all.”
Mrs. Adler seemed to relax. “Good.”
“Great.” Kate tucked her clipboard under one arm. “Well, I’ll leave you to your unpacking. Vanessa, I’ll see you during orientation, which is in the main studio at Juilliard, on the third floor, in two hours. If you have any other questions, I’ll be floating around.”
Mrs. Adler glanced at Vanessa, then stepped into the hall. “I do have a few more questions,” she said to Kate, following her down the hallway.
Once they were out of earshot, Vanessa shook her head, letting her wild red hair flail about her face. “Well, that was insane.”
Her father smiled and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was a handsome man, with strong, startling features that Vanessa had inherited, along with his height and fiery hair, though his had ripened to a distinguished auburn. She wasn’t a
delicate flower like her mother or her sister, Margaret, and that was partially why she was such an astonishing dancer. No one expected her to be weightless, but when she leaped into a grand jeté, she seemed to float with an ethereal lightness, her feet tiptoeing across the stage as she transformed herself into a white swan, a sleeping princess, or a Sugar Plum Fairy, her shock of red hair flashing beneath the lights like electricity.
He rolled up his shirtsleeves and reached for one of the ballet slippers on her dresser, letting its ribbons slip through his fingers. It looked impossibly small in his palm. “Ness, you know if you aren’t happy here, you can tell me.”