She started down the hallway. “All right, but I can’t promise I’m not going to make you get up and dance.”
He stopped, and his expression turned.
She laughed. “I’m kidding. I’ll save that for later.”
They walked into the noisy studio, a bit more chaotic than normal. She drew in a deep breath, shot Cole a wish me luck look, and called their rehearsal to order. Cole might’ve seen the team dance a few weeks ago, but now, after hours of rehearsals, they’d nearly perfected their number. She couldn’t lie—she was proud of them.
“Why don’t we show your coach what you’ve been working on?” she said above the din of their laughter.
“Why don’t you and Coach show us what you’ve been working on?” Dunbar called out.
The other guys responded a lot like her friends might’ve—with obnoxious teasing, and she felt her cheeks turn pink.
“Or are those dances private?” Hotchke added.
Cole’s pointed look shut him right up, and Charlotte tried to compose herself. Was it obvious she was flustered?
“All right,” she said. “Let’s take it from the top. The performance is tomorrow, so give it all you’ve got.”
“If we do it without any mistakes, will you and Coach show us your dance?” Whitey called out.
“Coach and I aren’t dancing,” she said. “He’s dancing with his niece, and I’m dancing a solo.”
“But you know the dance,” Asher said. “You made it up.”
That was true. And while normally she wouldn’t turn down a chance to be in Cole’s arms, she couldn’t imagine he’d agree to these terms.
She glanced at him and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Coach?”
“What are the odds they’ll win this bet?” he asked.
“Slim,” she said. “Whitey has two left feet.”
The boys reacted loudly at her joke, and she winked at Whitey, who shook his head.
“It’s on, Miss Page.” He removed his hat, then put it back on backward.
She grinned. “Show us what you’ve got.”
She started the music and the boys turned serious. They’d amped up the personality, and two of them had even inserted some breakdancing moves she had not approved.
The song ended, and they hit their final pose.
Whitey slammed his hands on the floor and shouted, “Take that, Coach.”
The whole group erupted in laughter, but before Charlotte could tell them if they’d won the bet or not, Brinley stormed in from the hallway. The beautiful, young blonde had everyone’s attention.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But Charlotte, you have to see this.” She handed her phone to Charlotte. On the screen was an article by a critic named Maude Delancey, a woman who’d always been kind to Charlotte.
Until now.
The headline read “Prima Ballerina Abandons the Company That Made Her a Star.” Charlotte skimmed the article, enough to get the gist. Maude, and apparently many others, were upset with the way Charlotte had left the ballet. She’d been too abrupt, and her departure was like a slap in the face to all the people who’d supported her throughout her long career. It sent the message that she was ungrateful, spoiled even, and nobody at the ballet had come to her defense.
Now we learn from a small-town newspaper’s website that the former principal dancer of the Chicago City Ballet will don her pointe shoes once again. But this performance is only a step higher than an elementary school talent show, the kind thrown together by the math teacher.
“Ouch,” Charlotte said, handing the phone back to Brinley. “I guess Maude isn’t a fan anymore.”
Brinley only stared. “Isn’t this the equivalent of a burned bridge?”
She shrugged. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on going back so, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“But, Charlotte, you didn’t really think you were going to stay here forever, did you?”
The words landed squarely on Charlotte’s shoulders, and something that could only be described as panic settled inside her. That feeling only worsened when she remembered that her plan to buy the studio had been a faulty one.
Had she simply been prolonging the inevitable?
Seconds later, Cole was at her side. “Is everything okay?”
She forced herself to nod, but the fear that had found her wasn’t going away. She’d been confident in her decision to leave, but that was when she thought she had a plan. If she’d burned her bridge at the ballet and she wasn’t going to be able to buy the dance studio—what was she doing here?
She scanned the room and realized the entire Harbor Pointe High School football team was staring at her, waiting for her to get back to their rehearsal.
From the corner, her phone rang. “Brinley, could you supervise while they run through this a few more times?” Charlotte asked.
Brinley nodded and moved to the front of the room while Charlotte grabbed her phone and slipped out into the hallway. Her hands were sweaty and her mouth had gone dry.
Her mother’s face stared back at her from the screen of her phone. She declined the call.
She found the article on her own device and read a little more closely this time.
Quotes from her mother, from the other dancers, from Martin—all expressing surprise and hurt that she’d left the way she had.
“We really had no warning,” Artistic Director Martin DuBois said. “She was here one day and gone the next.”
“She really let us all down,” one of the dancers in the company said. “It was a selfish thing to do.”
Anger rose up inside her. Selfish? She’d given everything to that ballet—everything! And they were calling her selfish?
And then Maude mentioned Julianna.
The recital in which Page will perform honors Julianna Ford, a former ballerina who left the professional dance world as abruptly as Ms. Page appears to have done. Ford was killed in a car accident in May, and Page’s mother, renowned dance instructor Marcia Page, speculates that her death may have contributed to her daughter’s rash decision.
“I can see no other logical explanation,” Marcia Page said. “I only hope that when she comes to her senses, there’s still a place for her in ballet.”
Charlotte had been ignoring these kinds of comments from her mother since the day she drove out of Chicago—why were they hitting her so wrong now? Because text messages were personal and this was out there on the internet for everybody to read?
She didn’t like people commenting on her personal life. Especially people who didn’t really know her. To Martin and the other dancers and Maude and even her mother, Charlotte was a dancer, nothing more. What gave them the right to say anything about what she was doing now?
What gave them the right to make her fear her choice was the wrong one? Or rather, to confirm the fear that had been niggling at her for weeks now.
“You okay?”
She turned and found Cole standing in the hallway behind her.
Her phone buzzed, and Marcia’s face lit up the screen again.
Her mother had more quotes in the article.
“I really thought my daughter was smarter than this—throwing away her career after she worked so hard to get where she was—well, maybe I’ve been giving her too much credit.”