CHAPTER 1
We were desperate to be the girl who dies, always. Eager to show how dolefully we danced, how prettily we perished, in every ballet, at every audition. In every room was a chance to have our graceful suffering acknowledged.
Today was no exception.
The clock ticked toward auditions for Giselle, and the hallway air was thick with desperation, with hunger. Pale ballerinas swarmed the studio windows, elbowing each other to get a better look at the demonstrating soloists, the judges, the board of directors, and our instructors. People who held our futures in their frowns got acquainted with the teachers who had watched us both soar and plummet for eight years straight, six of which I spent at the top of my class. They always told us that dancing meant sharing a part of yourself with your audience—well, now we were ready to give them everything. Once we crossed that threshold, none of us would come out whole.
Take it, the palm prints on the glass pleaded. Have all of me, I’m offering.
Fighting the urge to gawk at my executioners, I squeezed out of the crowd. With our final year at the Ballet Academy of Paris drawing to a close, every audition was more important than the last. Today, it was for Giselle, our last production before graduating, and next, for the company, the Paris Ballet, swirling in luxurious satin and tulle on one of the greatest stages in the world. What we gave today mattered because it was all they’d remember of us tomorrow. The girl who claimed the heroine became who they craved in three months’ time as an apprentice.
So my shoes had to be perfect, because now wasn’t the time to overcompensate for a dead pair, and that mattered more than analyzing any judge. Madame Demaret, who taught for both the academy and the company, had said during our very first pointe class, “The shoe is an extension of your foot.” And the best shoes required a delicate balance—rigid enough to prop you up but beaten into silence and the shape you needed. Firm but still broken. And always beautiful.
Just like the perfect ballerina.
“Of course they brought Joséphine Moreau to show us how it’s done,” Vanessa remarked loudly from the window, twisting the twinkling diamond necklace at her throat. “As if we don’t get enough of her with Cinderella posters all over the city.”
Keeping my head down, I focused on the pair of new pointe shoes in my lap. The soft pink satin was still unblemished, the scored soles and darned box not yet darkened from scuffs or worn away, fabric still neat on the sides and back where I’d stitched elastic and silk ribbon. I’d started customizing them the night before, working my nerves out in the crack and pop of the vamp and shank, rapping on the floor and shutting the tip in doors to reach that sweet spot. I didn’t have diamonds or famous parents or a milky complexion to sway the world, but I had this. And by the end of the instruction period, when it was time for the judges to watch me, they’d be perfect.
And I’d be perfect too.
Girls like me didn’t have any other choice if we wanted to belong.
“Last week, I heard someone in the locker room say that Joséphine kills lesser ballerinas and drinks their talent.” Olivia, with her straight, dark hair in a neat bun, grinned from her place by the window.
“That’s ridiculous,” I muttered, turning the shoes over and giving them a shake. Stories of broken glass, thumbtacks, and pins hidden inside before auditions were too abundant for it not to be habit.
And every month, there was another rumor about the new étoile Joséphine Moreau and her rapid rise to fame, stories dark, wild, or twisted. She was an urban legend made flesh, where everyone knew someone who saw something untoward. Seducing board members, handling large wads of cash, drinking blood. The only thing we knew for certain was that every door was open to her, and she had more opportunities than she could carry. She’d even turned down Moscow last month.
But it didn’t matter what any of us thought of someone like her. Almost everyone who made it into the company also had a legacy name or an inheritance big enough to make you blush, while Joséphine had neither to pave her way. It was rare for a nobody to climb high society’s ladder, and for Joséphine to reach so high so fast … that was terrifying for them. Enough to inspire endless gossip. People always manufactured excuses to deny us our successes.
“Obviously she’s a witch,” my best friend Coralie Baumé grumbled as she shoved her way through the thicket without a glance inside. “There’s no other way. Even my mom loves her.”
Her nose wrinkled with disgust before she turned her attention back to the sticky toffee bun in her hand. She was the only one with an appetite, easygoing in her poreless, ivory skin as she flopped down in a graceless heap beside me. Times like these never got to her the way they did the rest of us. Wisps of golden ringlets sprang free from her sloppy French twist.
I declined her wordless offer for a bite and smoothed back my already gelled hair, resisting the urge to point out that Rose-Marie Baumé wasn’t capable of loving anyone but herself. In some ways, though Coralie descended from ballet royalty, she had it worse than I did being on my own.
Vanessa threw a scowl over her shoulder. “Coralie, you just hate her because your mom likes her. Your mom is wasted on you.”
The last part came out a dreamy sigh that made Coralie freeze midchew. No one saw the hesitation in her jaw, the blankness in her eyes, but me. It was there and gone in a flash.
“Anyway,” Olivia drawled, “I heard she’s a witch too. When she was in the academy, one of her classmates caught her stealing hair from a brush for a spell or something. She even tried to recruit Nina Brossard into her coven—”
“Was that before or after she was spotted bathing naked in the Seine under a full moon?” I quipped as I slid caps over my toes.
The hall fell silent, frosty. And when I raised my head, Vanessa, Olivia, and the others were glaring at me, making it abundantly clear that I wasn’t meant to be heard. Because I wasn’t like them, not in any way that mattered: rich, white, born with the moral high ground. Breaking the stark silence, Coralie threw her head back and laughed, exposing chewed, gross globs of toffee for all the world to see.
The metal door to the studio lurched open with a loud shudder just as I shoved on my shoes, and my heart skipped a beat. My classmates streamed out of the hall, chatter turning to whispers while I remained on the floor. The pointe shoes’ drawstrings and ribbons fell loose at my trembling fingertips.
“If Vanessa climbs any higher up my mom’s butt, she’ll get stuck.” Coralie sneered through a mouthful before licking the cinnamon and toffee from her fingers. “Ready to get this over with, Laure?”
I didn’t move. Too loose, not loose enough, ribbon bunching instead of lying flat, I stayed put, tying and retying my shoes, ignoring her and that open door, waiting for my pulse to steady so I could walk into that room and claim my future.
Small, warm hands closed over mine. Big, green eyes like a doll’s inched into view. Eyeliner clumped in her long lashes. “Hey! Don’t be nervous—”
“Easier said than done, Cor,” I snapped through gritted teeth. “You realize President Auger and Hugo Grandpré are in there, right?”
Coralie cocked her head to the side and smiled. So innocent and amused, like she knew some secret to the universe the rest of us didn’t, and it made me want to shove her. “I know. And who’s ranked number one in every subject?”
My eyes fluttered shut. A flush crawled up to my ears.
“Well?”
“I am,” I mumbled, unwilling to look at her and her smug grin. It wasn’t that I forgot my rank, or that I had any other choice but to outperform when my scholarship was on the line. The problem was the same as ever: What if rank wasn’t enough? And certainly my calves could stand to be stronger. “But—”
She wasn’t done. “And just this morning, who did Madame Demaret call ‘a joy to watch’ and ‘a vision to behold’?”
A knot untangled in my chest. Always did when Coralie was here, hands in mine, radiant in the afternoon rays like some angel with words of affirmation to soften my edges. It was just the two of us in the hall, sitting on the floor, just like the day we met twelve years ago. We’d waited for our parents outside an empty studio, alone, late into the evening, and though her mother’s driver was the first to show, she refused to get up until my dad arrived from the construction site. And look how far we came. Together.
I sighed and pushed to my feet. Though my hands were no longer shaking, my heart still raced in my chest, but we couldn’t put it off forever. “Let’s go knock ’em dead?”
“And then bury them.”
Coralie looped her arm through mine, and we faced the massive studio, inseparable. By the wall of mirrors, our classmates huddled with their things and took seats on the floor; and behind a row of tables, the board of directors perched stiffly in wire chairs, wearing bespoke suits, day dresses, and mostly pinched mouths. It wasn’t until I was settled with my legs outstretched in front of me that I finally saw them all, the demonstrating soloists and the people who would judge me.
“Sabine looks good considering she was cheated out of Cinderella,” one of the boys observed, sending my stomach into free fall.
There, stretching with an ankle propped on the barre, was Sabine Simon, a recently promoted première with the Paris Ballet, graduate of the academy, and my ex-girlfriend. There was no mistaking her pixie face and butter-blond hair, her small frame and sugary pink leotard with ruffled sleeves. For them, President Auger and Director Grandpré, Sabine was the blueprint for the ideal ballerina, and so they always picked her for demonstrations, but for me, she was an inescapable reminder of how love and ambition couldn’t seem to coexist. Time with her was time better spent perfecting my technique, and no love could withstand how ugly she was beneath the lacquer of ballet silks and perfect pirouettes. There wasn’t any love that could withstand the ballet but love of the ballet itself. Not family, not yourself, and certainly not a doll-like girlfriend.
And in avoiding that eyesore, my gaze found Sabine’s junior who had surpassed her, Joséphine Moreau. The newest étoile. In fact, the youngest ever to be promoted so, having managed to ensnare the judges and seize the honor of opening the upcoming season in Cinderella. Just before her rise, there was even an article interviewing current and former dancers from the company, some of whom moved to other cities because the board refused to promote any new étoiles for years. Former dancers blamed their departures on favoritism and bias, stalled careers, forced retirements, damning exclusion policies the ballet would never admit to. Anyone who had walked the gilded halls of the academy knew it was more than coincidence how the roster managed to stay gold-plated. And that’s what made Joséphine so noteworthy—she was the only new étoile in almost a decade, so special she couldn’t be denied, so commanding she just took it.
She looked just like her flyers that had gone up the day before: hardly older than us, milky white skin, long neck of a swan, pink rosebud lips, the slenderest hips, legs for days, shiny chestnut hair. She was so coveted, they’d pulled her out of the academy early to begin her apprenticeship, and now she was filling seats, Grandpré reserving roles for her while she guest featured in Saint Petersburg, London, and Milan.
And with every kind of murmur attached to her name.
Joséphine stood in conversation with a tall and slender man, face fine with East Asian features and long, full hair bleached ash white. He wore an expensive-looking white suit fitted nicely to his frame, and when she said something to make him laugh, it became undeniable how handsome he was. Model-esque and hard to look away from. The two together, in intimate closeness, drew the eye: two beautiful people fully absorbed in only each other, the gravity of the room tilted toward their glow.
“Okay, he’s not my type, but that is the most attractive man I have ever seen,” Olivia mumbled.
I rolled my eyes and swept the room.
The man in white easily ignored Rose-Marie Baumé, seated at the table and watching. Glaring, really. Coralie’s mother, with the same flax-colored hair but smooth and a heart-shaped face, decked in jewels and dripping wealth, hands clasped before her and round lips pursed in displeasure. A look I knew well, of a bad smell, that designated otherness, that conveyed you didn’t belong but it was uncouth to say so aloud.
Vanessa gasped. “That’s the new board member! Remember I said I ran into Joséphine at a bistro, and she was seeing a guy who looks like a model? Totally nouveau riche.”
“My mom said his name is Ciro Aurissy,” offered Coralie to our cohort with marked indifference, pretending to study her nails chewed down to stubs. “Won’t say what he does though. He just showed up one day, totally legit.”
“How could Joséphine have everything and not be a witch?” Vanessa lamented to a sour chorus of agreements.
What I found more interesting was that Joséphine never denied the tales of drinking blood and spells with hair, only adding to the aura of mystery around her. Fears of curses and dark magic psyched out her competition, making her nothing short of genius.
Ballet was warfare, after all.
Rose-Marie stared at both of them now: the guy far too young to be on the ballet’s board and the girl who skipped too many rungs of the ladder on her ascent.
There was an order to the ballet, a structure for who was featured and when. Étoiles then premiers, sujets then coryphées, and finally quadrilles, with apprentices in the gutter. When a role opened up, the ballet worked its way down the pyramid except where Joséphine was concerned. She’d sped through her apprentice and quadrille statuses in a matter of weeks instead of years, bypassing coryphée altogether as the youngest sujet ever. She made première and étoile look like a cakewalk with her competition cowering in her dust and Adonis incarnate at her side. Now together, they really got under Rose-Marie’s skin.
Suddenly I liked them a lot.
Because who were they, Ciro and Joséphine, but nobodies capable of upsetting the order of the ballet? How did they, so easily and completely?
Joséphine waved to a dark figure sitting behind the table. He was the only other brown-skinned person in the studio aside from me, with dark hair piled on his head in some haphazard fashion, his black suit neat and working hard to obscure how young he also was for his place there. He scrawled into a notebook in his lap, brows knit in a contemplative scowl, and when he noticed her, he nodded in acknowledgment. Light fell on his broad face, exposing the beautiful sculpt of a strong, wide nose and melancholic downturn of his eyes. Striking, even, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Which I wasn’t.
Strangely, all the room’s daylight appeared dimmer in that corner where he sat, like a photo gone fuzzy around the edges. Broken TV static and shade obscuring an image I had to squint to see.
I nudged Coralie. “Did your mother mention a second new board member?”
“Nope, why?”
“Does he seem off to you—?”
Turning back, I saw Ciro’s nameless friend had returned to his notebook, face hidden again, pen moving fast. The eye-straining dimness adorning his frame was gone, leaving just a normal boy dressed in finery, nothing for Coralie to see. Just my imagination then, dust or something in my eye.
President Fiona Auger clapped her hands and strolled to the middle of the floor. Everyone sat quiet and still, arrested by the timbre of her soft voice. “Welcome to the evaluations for level eight’s final production, Giselle. Let’s get started, shall we?”
Copyright © 2023 by Jamison Shea