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Chapter 2
January 15th
Katrina heard the door close and flopped, exhausted onto her bed. The "Great Move" was finally over and the last moving man out of her apartment taking his cigarettes with him. It was a shame; she could have done with a cigarette. The floor all around the bed was littered with boxes, which right now she could honestly not be bothered to unpack.
"Man up" she said to herself "The sooner you start the sooner you finish." And with that rousing thought she picked up her Stanley knife and attacked the fist box, almost cutting her hand open in the process.
"Great" she said aloud. "Books." The next few boxes didn't yield many better results, kitchen utensils, dried food and flour, shoes, bedding. After an hour of patient unpacking, one fight with a flat pack dresser and she was just about done. All that remained was to get her clothes together for the next day, take a shower (once she figured how to get the hot water working) and call her best friend Casey.
You really made it! Thought Katrina doing a little jig around her kitchen in excitement and almost spilling her fresh cup of tea down her front. Tomorrow was her fist day at work as a soloist with the Pittsburgh Ballet. Junior soloist she reminded herself, then grinned involuntarily stopping incase someone looked through the window and thought she was a lunatic. She then remembered that she'd just been dancing around in front of the fridge so the whole lunatic thing was already in the bag.
Katrina had finally made it out of the corps de ballet position at the Joffrey Ballet Company this year owing to a stroke of luck, in truth, luck for her and misfortune for the last Pittsburgh ballet junior soloist who'd been hit by a car. Luckily for the soloist, she'd only broken her leg in one place but was still out of the company for at least two seasons.
Luckily for Katrina, instead of promoting one of their own dancers to the coveted spot of junior soloist the Pittsburgh Ballet had advertised for an open audition. Seeing the advertisement online Katrina hopped on the first Greyhound bus she could find from Chicago and auditioned.
She hadn't expected or even dared to hope to get the job, she didn't even let herself think about it, she was too young, too inexperienced, she wasn't even a soloist at the Joffrey. She didn't hope or pray for a letter of acceptance, just filed the audition away in her mind under "Learning Experience". Then two months ago, in the middle of her lunch break as they were rehearsing for that night's performance of The Nutcracker she got a call on her cell phone from an unknown number.
Fifteen minutes later she'd handed in her notice for the end of the season and was searching for affordable flats in Pittsburgh.
Her friends made her promise to call as soon as she'd arrived and settled in. It was hard to leave them, the girls she'd grown up with whilst attending the Joffrey Ballet School and later working with them in the company, but Katrina was excited to be striking out on her own.
The sun was starting the lower in the sky, casting long shadows across the city. From her fifth floor apartment Katrina could see a pretty good view across the center of Pittsburgh. She wondered if she could see the ballet center from here. The apartment, though having a good view, also had a cheap monthly rent owing mainly to its miniscule size. Made up only of two rooms; a bathroom and a living room with kitchen area and an open mezzanine level for the bedroom, which was really just a platform near the ceiling with a bed on it. The space under the stairs cleverly concealed clothes storage and a boiler. When she was running her bath Katrina had noticed a strange rattling coming from the boiler and promptly moved her best clothes out of the cupboard and into her dresser incase of a leak.
Suddenly she jumped up and ran up to her bedroom. Grabbing her cell phone she started going through her contacts looking for her friend Casey before realizing that she was on speed dial. She rang and heard Casey's jokey ringer ID of the "Spice Girls" play for five minutes, before giving up and vowing to call later.
Typical of Casey to not pick up when she'd made Katrina swear to call on pain of death. Her bath, she decided, must be full by now. Going down stairs she turned off the water and got out her shampoo, it was a hair washing night.
Katrina turned for a moment and gave herself a good look in the mirror over the sink. Dark brown eyes stared back at her from a tanned and freckled face. Her thick brown hair fell, slightly greasy from the day's efforts, just to the points of her shoulder blades. It was really the only length she could have it anyway, too long and it wouldn't go into a bun, too short and she needed a whole can of hairspray to control the fly-aways. She ran a hand threw it and immediately regretted it; her hair really needed a wash.
A/N Thanks so much for reading! Please R&R XXX