CHAPTER 1

- September 1995 -

Margaux stumbled into my dorm room, groaning as she fell back against the wall. “I hate the yellow.”

“You love the yellow.”

She scanned my body. “It’s not fair. You’re so pale, you look great in pastels. So basically, you’ll be there looking perfect until we graduate, and I’ll be over here looking like—like—”

Like she had the stomach flu. But even at thirteen, I knew better than to finish the thought for her. Every year, we had a new leotard color, and every year, it was a pastel that washed her out. With her brown hair and hazel eyes, her warm beauty looked better in anything else: reds, golds, oranges. She was a Summer, one of our magazines had told us the previous year. With my black hair and blue eyes, I was a classic Winter.

“You’ll get to wear white in a couple of years.”

But we both knew it wasn’t as easy as just waiting. About a quarter of our class disappeared each year after exams. Those final summer days were both exhilarating and heartbreaking as girls—friends—sobbed outside the gates where the school posted our results. We hugged them. We patted their backs. And all the time, our insides were soaring because it wasn’t us. We were still the right shape and size, still good enough.

I threw down my brush with frustration. “Will you do my hair?”

Margaux came over and started scraping the thin black strands into a bun, then let it fall as she grabbed a bottle of hair gel. My hair was too fine to stay up all day without it, and none of us had time between classes to dart back to the dorms. Margaux’s hair never fell out of its bun.

We headed down to the studio together. Ready to see who was there, ready to dismiss them as temporary. Four of our classmates had been thrown out the previous June. The school didn’t have to keep the classes the same size, but they nearly always did, taking students who’d auditioned to fill the empty spaces. This would be the last year that anybody was added to our class, though, because the school didn’t take anybody older than thirteen. Past that point, it was too late; the Paris Opera Ballet style, that famous POB touch, would never be natural to them.

“Only three new girls,” Margaux whispered as I opened the studio door.

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “But if they’re any good, three’s enough.” Enough to jeopardize everything we’d worked for, to push us from the top of the class into the great mass of mediocrities.

There’s a compact between the company, the Paris Opera Ballet, and the academy. Around 150 dancers in the company and perhaps ten have trained anywhere else. But those are always midcareer artists, foreigners. The school trains the vast majority of POB dancers from the youngest possible age, then we join their elite ranks.

Maybe we join them. Maybe some of us will. POB takes ten times more students than it can ever accept into the company, in the hopes that just one will yield the desired results. Which means attending the school is necessary if you want to join the company—but it’s not enough.

Even at thirteen years old, each and every one of us was sure we would be among the chosen. But we kept a hunter’s watch on the competition anyway. We entered the studio with wary eyes and curtsied to the teacher, Marie-Cécile. There were Aurélie and Mathilde, Corinne and Talitha. Some new girl with an overbite so severe that they’d never let her into the company if she didn’t get serious dental work done, fast. POB likes them pretty. A mousy girl, on the small side, staring down at her legs as she stretched, unwilling to look back at us.

And then there was Lindsay.

Twelve, thirteen. It’s the age when everyone’s just legs and eyes, and her wary gaze landed on ours. Beautiful, I thought. It was the first time I’d ever consciously thought that about somebody my age. It was also the first time I recognized that someone was unequivocally prettier than I was. Lindsay had so much hair that her blond bun looked like it was containing an explosion; enormous blue eyes; velvety rose-petal skin.

Class began. She seemed good at barre work, but you can’t tell anything until you get into the center. It’s too hard to really watch someone else at the barre: you’re all lined up and you flip around to work both sides for each combination, the exercises of strung-together warm-up steps. I could actually study her technique only half the time.

I heard my mother’s voice. Focusing on others won’t get you anywhere. Focus on yourself.

But Lindsay was all I could see.

She took a place at the front of the class; she wasn’t ducking out from Marie-Cécile’s gaze just because she was new. Running through the sequences of steps, she had an easy grace. Unlike Mathilde and Talitha, she made it through even the hardest combinations without losing her breath. But it wasn’t until adagio that I saw how good her extension was: she could raise her leg within inches of her head with a pure, steady strength.

She was better than any of us. Better than either me or Margaux, who consistently ranked first and second in our class.

Then we changed our shoes for pointe work and I saw we wouldn’t have to worry.

“Ladies,” Marie-Cécile called, clapping her hands. “Back to the barre, please.”

We’d been en pointe for only a year by then, but we all had our routines down flat. Bandages around the toes—no, I prefer medical tape—put a blister pad there for prevention, but only after you have the callus—coat it all with lambswool. But Lindsay hadn’t mastered it yet. Piles of fluffy wool and American Band-Aid wrappers around her, she sat there frantically trying to stuff her toes into shoes that were just too small for all the shit she was trying to put in there.

“Stop dawdling, Miss Price.”

Lindsay looked up, eyes wide, as Marie-Cécile put her hands on her hips; Margaux and I exchanged glances. It was never good when Marie-Cécile called you out directly. That posture was the only warning sign you ever got before she really lost it.

We all watched as Lindsay tried to shove the overstuffed shoe onto her foot, to pull the back of it up over her heel. As it dangled uselessly off of her toes, she glanced up again.

“Well,” Marie-Cécile said. “Perhaps we should all come back in half an hour, once you’re ready?”

The giggle broke through the eight of us like a wave. And there: there it was. The first time we really saw Lindsay. Glowering up at us all—her gaze frantic, still, but hateful now, too.

Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Kapelke-Dale