Dance of Shadows by Yelena Black Read Free Book Online Page B

said. If Margaret were still here, she would have been a senior.
    “She was an amazing dancer, and so pretty,” Justin said, eyeing Vanessa as if he were talking about her, not her sister. “But also pretty vacant. Always scared of failure.”
    Vanessa flinched. “Vacant?”
    But Justin didn’t seem to realize that he was insulting Margaret. “Toward the end she couldn’t be bothered to talk to regular people. She kept warning us that she was writing everything down in her journal, but nobody ever found it.”
    Journal? If her sister had ever written one, it would have come home with all of her belongings.
    Justin shook his head. “I think the journal was all in her mind. Though she kept saying everything would come out in the end somehow.”
    “What would come out?” Vanessa searched his face, as if the answer to what happened to Margaret were hidden beneath his heavy brow.
    Justin threw his bag over his shoulder. “I don’t know.”
    “But you must have an idea. It sounds like you were close to her, at least for a short amount of time.”
    “Look, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your sister wasn’t … all there. There was a point when nothing she said made any sense.”
    His words stung. “Right,” she said tersely. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”
    Justin walked outside, falling in step with a girl who was about his height and heavyset—a rare sight for ballet school—with wide hips and bushy chestnut hair. She leaned in to hear Justin’s whisper, nodded slightly, then glanced at Vanessa over her shoulder.
    Vanessa glared at her. She had seen the girl before; she was hard to forget in a school where most of the students were half her size. She was always hanging around another boy who looked just like her.
    Vanessa looked away. When she looked up again, Justin and the girl were gone.

    “Nicola. She’s one of the Fratelli twins,” said Steffie as they filed through bright hallways on their way to a class with Hilda. “Her brother is Nicholas.”
    “She can’t be a dancer,” said Vanessa, trying to imagine the large girl in a jeté. “She’s so … big.”
    Steffie pressed her books to her chest. “Apparently, they’re supposed to be pretty good, even though the witless call them the ‘Fat-elli’ twins.”
    “That’s so not funny,” Vanessa said.
    “And yet,” Steffie said, “it sticks.”
    Her thoughts returned to her sister. Had she really gone crazy? If something terrible had happened at school, why didn’t she just tell someone? Why hide it away in her diary? Could Justin have been right, and Margaret had run away—not because she
wanted
to be lost, but because she already was?
    “Vanessa?” Steffie said, breaking into her reverie. “What are you thinking about?”
    “Nothing,” Vanessa said, and followed her to the studio at the end of the hall. The room was blond and polished, with wall-to-wall mirrors that made it look far larger than it actually was. Most of the freshman and sophomore class was already assembled by the barre, wearing the school uniform for dance class: black leotards and pink tights for the girls, white shirts and black tights for the boys. Vanessa was about to join them when she spotted Justin by himself, warming up.
    She must have been staring, because suddenly his eyes met hers. Quickly, she looked away and lined up next to Steffie, TJ, and Blaine.
    Hilda paced at the front of the studio, favoring her left leg—she had a slight limp. On her command, the students went through the basics, so familiar to Vanessa that her legs moved almost reflexively.
    “Tendu!”
    “Dégagé!”
    “Grand battement!”
    “Plié!”
    Hilda observed the students, the arrhythmic sound of her limp punctuating their steps.
    Vanessa could see the back of Justin’s head bobbing up and down ahead of her, his sandy hair matted to his neck with sweat. His form was pretty good, she thought. So why was he in the underclassmen rehearsal if he was a senior?