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And then the music, abruptly being pulled.
The utter callousness of that single act by a teacher I’d hated. The coldness of switching something off so abruptly when you’re embedded in that frame of mind, of forcing you to re-enter a cruel reality when all you want to do is sink into the music and the synths, and bathe in the jagged emotions coursing through you — emotions you’ve failed to translate onto stage, into your body.
Every time I’d walked had been a reminder of that day, of that sick, twisted day, when I’d let my emotions control me. When I’d been deemed a laughingstock.
They hadn’t even hated me in Greenvale — it had been worse. I’d been ignored. I may as well have not existed, and for someone who’d had their sights set on being a famous dancer, this had been heartbreaking. But after that day, I was the girl who cried. The girl with the drunk mom. Not the girl who lost her dad or anything remotely sympathetic. I was the girl who lost it. The girl who failed.
They’d tittered at their friends, watching me pass by with furtive or open glances. They’d mimicked my limp months before the gremlins ever did. They’d shouted out,Jessa, it should have been you, and howled with laughter at the originality.
That failed performance had fed into everything.
That failed performance had led to me placing a length of ribbon around my neck.
If it’s what my mom had wanted, if itshould have been me, then I’d have given her that happily.
Whatever waited on the other side — heaven, hell, the fucking blankness ofnothing— would have been better than the daily torment, the daily humiliation.
And then I’d cried with the ribbon still around my neck, the ribbon dangling down my front like a tie, because I couldn’t even do that properly.
Just like on stage, I couldn’t take that final leap.
And the next day, I heard I’d been successful for the Lochkelvin scholarship.
I was going to Scotland. I was going away from all these assholes, leaving them all in the dust to attend a political academy that only the brightest were chosen for.
Instead, I’d entered another realm of hell.
“I think that’s enough of that.”
When the ocean of noise from Rory’s phone breaks through to me, he ends the video.
The sound of my sobs echoes through the air.
Rory gives me a frank look.
He’s still gripping my wrist, but all I feel is dullness. Lethargy. A heaviness, now that my past has caught up to me, the way I’d almost expected it to.
Rory doesn’t know the full story, and with any luck he never will. But he knows pieces of it, and that’s more than I ever wanted him to find out.
“Dance for me,” Rory says quietly, and I stare at him, wondering at the strange finality in these three words. But then he adds, “Dance for me at the talent show the way you would have done here. And if you don’t, then I’ll send this footage to everyone in the school.”
