I halt my walking along the planks, stopping not far from where Cal stands, twenty-five, maybe thirty feet below. The red-hot anger I feel for Cal, for myself, negates the violent fear of heights I usually possess. I grip a dangling rope for stability nearby, one of the many arranged randomly throughout the rafters, part of the rigging system.
The young man wears nice tap shoes, a black T-shirt, and Adidas training pants, rolled at the ankle.
What was he doing, loitering outside of a disgusting East Harlem bar? He wasn't inside of it, preferring to stand at its edge, practically asking for trouble. No, he didn't score a brutal thug to pick a fight with, but rather a foolish, pickpocketing teen. And instead of sending me to the cops, he gave me two-hundred dollars and somebody to rant to.
If luck is real, because it's surely against me, then fate might be, as well. Whatever twisted, mutilated, comical fate this is.
Ann, up in the rafters with me, helping the stagehand with the light, revealed the cleaning staff was full, but one of the higher-ups suggested acquiring a new maid or two. I all but invited Cal into my apartment. He knows where I live, and after I bled my soul to him on our walk, he returned to East Harlem, sticking an advertising poster on Will's store window for a maid job at the Manhattan Dance Academy.
Alternatively called the Calore Dance Academy, dubbed after his billionaire family. I don't know why its name evaded my memory, but sure enough, below on the stage platform, further past the female and Cal, the name is branded on the stage, a near black on the dark wood. I was too entranced with the dancers to acknowledge it before, but it's striking, Calore written above Dance Academy, bolder in comparison to its counterparts.
Details about the family I learned years ago come flooding back, and I feel so, so stupid for not putting the pieces together. Cal's a nickname, and his father is the proprietor of one of the most successful dance companies in history to date. Dancers from around the world come to train under his family's leadership.
Everybody's heard of the Calores. I don't know how I forgot the name. I've known it for a decade, especially fascinated as a little kid. It was my dream to dance at a place like this. I suppose it's just another part of dance I've done my best to forget, remembering it simply as the Manhattan Dance Company, owned by insanely-rich people who don't deserve my thoughts.
In efforts to stalk from a new perspective, I resume my crouch, craning my head for the best angle between the beams' spaces.
"It's fine, Cal," the unseen man in the audience who asked the dancers their names says. "You haven't missed much, and your brother scored in your place."
Cal nods, faintly frowning at the silver-haired woman also on stage. "Best of luck, Evangeline," he says, but doesn't quite mean it, the wish monotone and bland. Not trying to hide his disinterest.
Evangeline. The girl who spoke with her mother on my assigned hallway while I hid in a guest room, assuming what I was listening in on wasn't meant for me. Her mom painted herself as a nightmare, but with Evangeline in the flesh, her infernal smirking...the girl takes after her.
"Thanks, partner," she returns, and my suspicions are confirmed. She and her mom spoke about Cal yesterday, and the dancer seemed awful confident in her ability to attain him as a partner. Until her mom broke the news—she and her father wouldn't be bribing anyone for the honor.
"Not yet," Cal mumbles, walking towards the front of the stage, my view of him cut off, and his shoes indicating a descent of steps.
Based off the scant interaction I've had with Cal, he isn't the cruel type. For my sanity, I'll assume he put that poster up on Will's storefront for good reason, not out of a wicked spite. He would've understood what it would mean to me to see the Academy, salt to a wound that I doubt will ever fully heal.
On the other hand, a job, any kind of job, would stop me from terrorizing innocents, give me a stable income to provide my family with. And it offers me the chance to see what could've been.
Though I don't know Cal, clearly not, I have no hesitation to believe those three ideas were what passed through his mind, causing him to advertise his own studio to me. They were what went through mine.
But a part, a part at large, despises him. Not for good reason, but for what he is, hundred-dollar bills at the ready in his wallet. Never known the feeling of a hungry stomach or the nervous high gotten from stealing for your family's monthly rent. Cal gave me this job, saved me from getting caught by men much worse than him, but I can't help but hate him for it.
"Evangeline Samos," the dancer below says, bringing me from the bar in East Harlem to the present. She doesn't delay for the man to ask for her name again. Dauntless. Without cue, Evangeline settles into her beginning position.
The hushed voices from the audience that started when Cal arrived lower, then cut off altogether.
I stiffen, sensing a hell of a performance coming. Ann and the stagehand even pause their work.
Her slender arms stretch outward, and Evangeline rises up in her pointe shoes.
She begins her routine, starting slow and displaying the muscles in her body as she kicks upward and holds a split position, repeating the movement three times. Her profile no longer faces me, so I imagine the vulpine smile on her features.
She leaps and jumps and arcs her body, each action—down to the flourishes of her hands—outlined with power. The other girls, good as some of them are, don't have her perfect grace, the kind of dancer meant to dedicate her life to this art form. Both natural and honed, the way she turns with ease and knows how far to bend her arms and legs.
"Mare," Ann hisses, probably wanting my help with the light. I ignore her, opting to watch Evangeline dance instead.
I walk along the beam, hands crossed behind my back. I walk while she glides across the stage, time straining, her leaps going by so slowly I can see the split formed in midair, her arms in a split of their own.
Impossible as it is, I hear music with her motions, dancer to dancer, because there's a track playing in her ears, guiding her steps, rising and lowering, jumping and plunging, forever landing on feet that are strong and callused. I've heard it with others, but not as beautiful; not as precise.
"Mare," Ann calls again, daring more volume this time, though not much. Without the music, and the utter silence of the audience, Evangeline, the wooden blocks in her shoes to be specific, are the only sound for miles.
Crossing a few beams, forgetting where I am up in the rafters, I trail Evangeline, who waltzes around herself, showing off a diversity of footwork, not of the grand gestures she was going through before, but just as relevant. Many of the previous girls failed in that way, favoring tricks and casting off skill. Arrogant, but rightfully so.
I find myself shaking my head at the girl, dismayed at her prowess she continues to exploit, going past the designated ninety seconds.
The girl does a few things that I've never come across before, never been taught. Maybe I'll learn them at home, on the roof. I part my lips, imitating Evangeline's fabricated smile, pretending I'm her, running across the stage for the center. I'm somewhat more delicate with my footing.
A finale, and she's already gone past her time. Nobody except me cares about the fact, though, the audience growing boisterous as she prepares for her turn in an exaggerated fashion. Her right leg extends to the side, then shifts to the back. Her arms spread wide.
"Finish it!" an onlooker hollers from the audience.
Whether the comment is from a friend or foe, she takes it as an invitation, rolling her wrists.
"Mare," Ann growls in warning, the rest of the words implied but left unsaid. Get your ass over here, or this might just be your second and last day. With a look towards her, at the end of the beam of lights, she doesn't pay attention to me as she says it, kneeling near the broken light with the stagehand.
But stubbornly mesmerized with Evangeline, executing turns identical to those I did in one of the studios, I walk towards her again, stepping across the row of lights bolted onto a continuous metal beam.
The lights shine brightly on Evangeline and her turns, the crack between them and beam enabling me to continue watching. I watch and watch, desperately searching for a fault in her composition. Tearing up, I realize there is none, no matter how hard I analyze her.
So after I realize there's no beam on the other side of the lights, my gaze is still fixed on the dancer and her turns, balanced and magnificent.
At least until I open my mouth to scream bloody murder, my other foot snagging on a light as the stage spreads out before my eyes, each wooden plank vivid and merciless. Evangeline jolts, falling out of her revolution, stumbling and barely keeping herself upright. She flings herself out of the way.
I flail my arms, wildly, manically searching for the next beam that has to come after the large space that shouldn't be here, a blindspot with the raised lighting hiding it. If I could just grab on tight...cling to it until I lose my momentum, then pull myself upward... Even as I fall, time slowing, my face not past the rafters, not into the view of the audience, I question how I didn't notice the gap I'm falling through. Too distracted, having lost my inhibitions to a dance routine. My arms reaching for that imaginary plank, I shriek louder.
Instead of a beam, I'm awarded a rope. My fingers graze it first, and out of some primal instinct, they reach out, wrap around the rope so hard it hurts. My hands are going to rip open against this rope.
Expecting to stop, jerk to a rest, I am unpleasantly surprised when I continue to fall, past the beams, the floor an unforgiving sight, and I understand I'm not going to stop. My gut plummets with more hesitation than the rest of me, riding up in my throat, the air not filtering through my lungs properly.
Is the rope broken? Is it too long and unraveling from somewhere?
I close my eyes, the rope my anchor to a fleeting life.
The consolation is Cal's guilt for my death, cracking my spine on his family's stage. It'll make for a good show, better than Evangeline's performance. The outrage, the horror, will be all over the news, and it will wreak havoc on the Academy's reputation. They'll try to hide it, but too many people are present, rich people who adore gossip and tabloids.
Or maybe nobody will give a crap, playing it off as the stupidity of a maid.
The audience makes noises I can only define as upset, hearing the shout and seeing a girl emerge from the stage rafters. A few go so far as to scream like me, as loud and terrified as me.
For me, I block my surroundings out, tucking my legs into my body as much as I can in the limited time—
The rope does indeed jerk to a rest, a second before it snaps in half, taking the bottom half—me with it—to the ground, however many feet away—
I land on my ass, back and head spared from the brunt of it, wood a mallet to my tailbone. I expect stars, my eyes still pinched shut, but I see orange and yellow in fuzzy specks behind my eyelids. Merely the lights, shining right on me and putting me on a strange display.
No concussion, no death, which I should be glad for. I can keep on living my sad, impoverished life.
To think all of that—what just happened—occurred in a matter of seconds. The crowd is stunned into a pure silence, and for the second that none of them, not a single critic, say a word is the worst moment of my existence. My heart beats heavy, not comprehending it's still pumping my blood. Which I didn't spill on the stage. Good.
Forcing myself to crack an eye open, Ann is thirty feet above, peeking out from the space I fell through. Her gaping mouth is enough to make me want to vomit.
"Hey," Evangeline snaps, waving her hand in my line of sight. My gaze moves from Ann to her, towering and angry. The sharp planes of her face are made into something wicked with a glower. Her eyes appear to be black. "Were you planning on auditioning? Or was that an accident?"
"She's fine," Evangeline says in a horrible tone when a stagehand attempts to come forward. She holds her other hand out to the few stagehands in the wings. Preventing them from coming to me, helping me. She's absolutely terrifying.
Oh, she's a bitch alright. Not sure how to react, I bark out a dark laugh. To my delight, I don't cough up blood in the process. "I tripped," I simply say. A dozen audience members have the gall to laugh at the explanation.
"I noticed," she purrs.
How I'd love to dissolve into the floor. I sit up, survey the auditorium to my left. It's not packed, but three-hundred fill in the red-velvet seats, out of the six-hundred, seven-hundred spots. Enough for at least one of them to remember my face in a crowd.
It's a single-level theatre, but it travels far, cut up into three sections, divided by grey carpeting. The ceiling is taller than needed. The doors I saw on the way in are at the back, dancers filtering in to investigate who the screaming was from. And the lights...they carry on in their scheming, disarming me of every pretense I've built up.
I'm going to quit. Right after I run off this stage.
"You can leave, now," Evangeline says, concluding I won't be speaking to her again.
"So can you," a voice from the front of the audience retorts. "We all know you can do the turns, so your audition is complete."
I whirl my neck towards the source. Cal stands up, bracing his palms on the chairback in front of him. He sits next to a black, curly-haired boy who's a year or two his minor and man who must be his father, the one and only owner of the Manhattan Dance Academy, a woman with ashy blonde hair to his left. The four of them reside in the center section, five rows up and straight down the middle. Nobody sits ahead of them or behind them for a few rows, giving Cal and his family distance for judging.
Needing to get out of here, in dire need, I stand up. I wobble, from the fall or from the tension in my chest for whatever else Cal is about to say. I make to walk off to the wing of the set.
And I make it all of three paces before he says, "Wait."
Knowing full-well I don't have to listen to him, that he doesn't control me, I plant my shoes, curling my toes in. I plan on quitting. They can't fire me, but I follow his order anyway.
I face him, his bronze irises with a hint of sadness. "Are you alright?"
Nobody in this theatre, in all of Manhattan, for that matter, knows we've met before. It makes his asking painful, and I do my best to treat him as I would any other of his kind: "Fine," I state plainly.
In the background, Evangeline stalks offstage, arms crossed.
Cal's family glances at him oddly, wondering how long it'll take for him to kick me out, hand me over to the stagehands waiting to check for injuries.
"Well?" he asks.
"What?"
"Evangeline asked if you were planning on auditioning. Are you?"
One thing becomes achingly clear: he was the shadow in my vision when I finished my turns in the studio. On our walk to my apartment, I told him about my dance, my beloved dance; though he would never believe a poor girl like me is worthy of auditioning for the Calore Dance Academy, unless I proved myself to him. So I did. Unwittingly. The turns I did were not elementary, and Cal knows very well they weren't.
Prior to letting my mouth fly, cuss and make my final stand, I glare at him. He offers a crooked smile and a tilt of the head, implying a dare. Daring me to perform for these rich bastards, make every last one of them regret snickering at the maid.
Even if I did it, successfully auditioned despite not truly dancing in almost a year and a half, I don't have the money to pay for tuition. Not a fraction of it. Besides, I can't coexist with these people, and they would never tolerate me.
Cal nods over and over, almost begging me to accept his offer.
I press down on my lips, making my intentions clear.
He snaps his fingers, like some kind of entitled prince, and speaks again. "Somebody find her a leotard, tights, and a pair of broken-in pointe shoes." He holds eye-contact with me the whole time, as though he's worried about me running away. I consider it. Cal's not giving me a choice in this.
He must think I'm good, if he's pushing the issue this hard. Afraid of losing a talented dancer to an ordinary life.
"We have a break coming up in an hour." Cal's father is about ready to burst a vessel, by the way he holds his armrests and leers at his son. The boy who must be Cal's brother pales, surveying me. "So you have an hour, Miss—I don't believe I caught your name."
Cal deserves a slap, and if I have the chance...
"You can call me Miss Barrow."
A shout out to my new editor, BellonaetLibitina.
You're a great help to me!