[Author's note: This is my first fan fiction that I've written in a long while, but the idea came to me, and so I thought I'd just go for it. This tells the story of Kate (nee Fritzgerald) Jacobs and her daughters. If you wouldn't mind reviewing I would really appericate it. I'm going to need a beta reader if you're interested. Please PM me and let me know. I only have one eye which makes making sure my grammar is prefect very tricky. Enjoy. ]
In her shoes
Andromeda
"One, two, three." I hear my mother instruct the girls as they move in graceful motion. From a complex leap and eventually back into a modest first position. The music playing in the background is Bring me to life by Evanescence. My mother likes to have us girls dance to really ancient music that actually sounds better than the crap they refer to as music now. I watch all of the older girls as I sit cross-legged in my mother's dance studio. I am thirteen years old. I'm also bored out of my skull because I just want to be able to dance myself, but my class doesn't start for another hour. The girls in my class are always snickering because they think that I'm only any good at dancing due to the fact that this is my mom's class. Sia, my older sister, tells me to not let their words bother me. They all are just jealous because you are a gifted ballet dancer. Every now and then, her words will echo in my head and it makes me feel better.
Sia is three years older than me. She takes tap and lyrical jazz. Classes that my mother doesn't teach. Sure, when she was younger she and I took ballet together, but Sia isn't as fascinated by it as my mother and me are. There's just something so graceful about ballet. That and Chase Chandler is one of the only guys who can properly lift a girl. He's also as straight as arrow. Thank you very much, a guy can dance ballet and not be gay. Chase is also very soon to be my first boyfriend. That is, if I play my cards right.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sia watching through the window. Her black dance bag is thrown over her shoulder. Her raven-hair cascades down to the small of her back. She already has curves in all the right places. I constantly tease her that her boobs are the size of watermelons which causes her to get all quiet and shy. Don't tell her this, but I am jealous. Guys notice her, but she's kind of oblivious to that fact. Really, she is. I mean last week when we were in Wal-Mart, a guy in her class came up to her and was like "hey-y, Sia "in that way guys do when they try to conceal the fact of the matter. Though, it totally does nothing to mask the fact that they like you a lot. All she did was blush and walk away. Want to know what I, Ise Jacobs would've done? I would've flirted like there was no tomorrow and then gotten not only the guy's number, but a date out of that short exchange.
I glanced at her and then waved. She waved back before pulling out her cell phone. Finding nothing else to do with my time I began to examine my reflection using the back mirror of the dance room. I was rather tall for my age. My full height currently is 5'5" I'm actually taller than Sia by a few inches. My chocolate brown hair falls down in waves. My father always says that I look like my mother. Though, I feel like a mess of gangly arms and legs also the fact that my growth spurt hasn't seemed to stop isn't very re-assuring to my desire to not be a giant. Save that my eyes are the same amber brown as his are. Sia got our mom's deep blue eyes that seem to penetrate through the soul of any individual who finds themselves staring into them.
"Ladies, productive class today." I hear my mother's voice call out to the elder girls the lot of them were fifteen. The way that they danced seemed flawless and they made every twist, turn, and leap look easy. How I envied them. How I wanted to do that. I secretly long to up-stage them all and go to Juilliard after high school, but then again, I'm only a seventh grader. Please don't remind me of that. I hate junior high.
I watch her standing up there at the front of the room. Poised and beautiful. Her long brunette curls pulled up in a delicate bun held together by a blue scrunch-ie.
The passion and determination evident in her eyes. I knew what my mother's past was like, but only in pieces. The fact that she lost her sister, Anna, when she was sixteen. The fact that she had had APL almost all her life, but now, she was healthy, free from its clutches and had been for a long while for which I was glad. I almost forgot about the fact that Grandma Sara was unbearably over-protective and absorbed in my mother's life. Well, that one hasn't changed at all.
Hell, the proof still resided there though. It was written on her hands, her face, and the unmistakable sadness in her eyes. The smile that never quite reached her eyes when she was around our dad because all the two ever do is argue. I think, and Sia agrees with me our dad brings her down worse than her chemotherapy ever did. It saddens me, and Sia even more. Sia is more free with her emotions and feelings than I am. I tend to bottle all of what I'm feeling inside of myself. The faded scars from her graft-versus-host, the pictures of Aunt Anna tucked away in the attic that I have hidden under my bed along with a few of Taylor Ambrose and my mother. Though, she hardly mentions our late aunt and never Taylor Ambrose. There has to be some reasoning behind Sia's name. I feel that Taylor Ambrose was more than just mother's best friend. No one names their daughters, Ambrosia and Andromeda, without a valid excuse for their lapse of sanity. I have to talk to Uncle Jesse if I want to get more information. My mom is a closed book. The only way one can fully understand Katherine Fritzgerald Jacobs is in her dancing.
The girls filled out of the room. I watched them walk out. How toned their legs were. Their nearly prefect posture. Before either of the eight fifteen year olds caught me staring I run into the locker room and change into my long pink skirt and black leotard.
"Hey, star," I hear a voice call out as I head into my mother's class. I know that voice, I'd reconigze it anywhere. I can feel the tips of my ears heat up and I hope that this is not noticeable, but sadly, this is how I always get around him.
"Chase," I laugh, but I feel my throat slowly constricting. I am glad that my mom has her back turned and is fiddling with the boom box because it's so hard to try and flirt when one's mom is around. Especially, when you're the one in her dance class. "My name is that of a constellation, not a star."
"That's merely a technicality, Drom," Chase grinned. I hope that he hasn't realized that I have been staring at the biceps that are developing on his chest that are exposed by his white t-shirt. He is wearing tights. I am well aware that he hates them, but at least he doesn't have to wear a leotard, right?
"So, Mrs. J, what'cha have planned for us today?" Chase asked. The rest of our class had walked in and now, we were all doing stretches. There were ten of us. Luckily, for us, five guys and five girls so, it made pairing off much easier and not harder on my mom in terms of putting together routines for all ten of us to preform to.
"Mr. Chandler, I'm the instructor and you're my student," I watched my mother give him a teasing grin. With holding information from her class again. Plus, she was well aware of how impatient Chase Chandler got and how he always wanted to know exactly what they were going to do that day. "That's for me to know and you to find out." Kate paused, she had the attention of all of the group though. "Now, today, we're going to focus on Jeté en avant, grand, as well as more complicated lifting techniques, boys." I watched as she eyed each of them with a dangerous look in her eyes as if to say don't you dare purposefully drop the ladies. I looked from Dakota, who eyed Elia, Chase whose focus was somewhere between my mother and I. Tommy, Kenneth, Eric, and Jason. I didn't even want to possibly consider what these five boys thought of when they lifted us in the air. Most likely it was that their hands were relatively close to the proxmixity of our developing chests. Oh, thirteen year old guys and the fact that their minds were now immersed in the gutter.
Elia and I laughed. Elia Jonstone was a slender girl, petite and one of the smallest girls in our class, but very flexible. She happens to be one of the first of the girls able to do the splits at the age of six. I secretly envy her uncanny ability to not seem gangly. Her hair is a short cropped to a little below her chin and jet black. Elia was also my best friend, not only in class, but at school too.
"Mrs. J, I hate jumping." Rosa whined. I can't stand her not only does she always complain, but she thinks she's the best at everything. That and she's trying to steal Chase from me and that's not going to happen. Sure, her chest is bigger than mine at this present moment, but Rose is a regular ditz and the whole blonde haired, green eyed, girl next door can only take a girl so far in life. She was a spoiled Prima Donna that was the general concensus of our whole class. Her father was a movie producer and so the world was at her finger-tips.
Rosa Dalance made me sick to my stomach. That was my last thought before the music began to play and I had to pay attention to the steps that was mom was instructing us through.
Dance was life or I should say an escape from it, for me. Reality. It wasn't something I was fond of. Home wasn't a safe heaven for me, on the contrary, it was chaos.