Curtain Call by Brianna Stark

Author:Brianna Stark [Stark, Brianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stark Publishing
Published: 2020-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

16

My mouth is dry and my head is pounding. My body aches, a familiar feeling, and shit, I have to run. I slip on yesterday’s clothes, run a comb through my hair, squeeze the toothpaste on the toothbrush while throwing a few things into my dance bag, and wash down a couple of painkillers. It’s three minutes to nine, and I run the last few blocks from the subway to the studio.

We have been rehearsing relentlessly all week, and everyone is either lying flat on the floor, limply stretching, or hanging off the barre zapped of life. Daniela walks in and scans the room.

“I think a coffee class is in order. These dancers look like crap.” She leans into her hip and adjusts her outfit in the mirror. It is awfully cesspool-like in here.

Katherine takes a vote. Somehow we’ve gone from a dictatorship to a democratic society, and all because we look like crap.

Coffee class is a ritual that occurs only a few times a year, when we are given permission to skip and go for coffee instead. Almost everyone ends up at Fuel, the coffee shop across the street. We order extra-large coffees of the personalized variety: soy, non-fat, mocha, anything other than decaf. There are a few people working on laptops or reading at tables, and I have no idea how they can concentrate with the noise in here. Maybe they are just hiding behind their devices like I sometimes do, reading the same page over and over again, listening to the conversations around them. The huddles in line are non-mixed: the apprentice dancers hang together, then the Corps, the soloists, et cetera, et cetera, and none of the managing staff would be caught dead with any of us except for Londyn, who really wants to be one of us, though she often isn’t at work in the morning. I wonder where Kent and Miss Katherine go for coffee. Kent doesn’t do mornings at the studio, and I hate to think Katherine drinks that horrible coffee we have in the lounge just to avoid us. It’s hard to imagine Katherine mingling with people in her free time. It’s hard to think of her as anyone other than the teacher devoted to the polishing of our stubborn vehicles.

Everything seems uncolored again; it’s a fuzzy haze of chitchat and moving through the motions, which will unlikely be resolved by caffeine. Because, I now know, whatever is going on between my director and me can never go anywhere as long as I so desperately seek to be his muse, which is really depressing. The thought of losing my ground as his muse for all eternity is depressing, that is. Sterling is flicking around on his phone, and Daniela is standing behind us not saying anything, as if we are all strangers. I start thinking about the time Daniela and Ariana—the bestie that came after me—stranded me at an underground nightclub at two in the morning without cab fare. That was the last moment of our friendship.

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