The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Author:Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 19

− August 2004 −

Lindsay was running ahead, toward the sound of the gulls and the smell of salt on rock. Her hair fell out of its ponytail, bouncing against the small of her back, blond and half-frizzed in the humidity. The road curved sharply down, but her legs kept going, and her voice rose in a laughing war cry.

An elbow in my ribs: Margaux surged beside me.

“Move,” she gasped. “She’s going to win!”

But who cared? Lindsay had challenged us to the race and we’d played along; when we followed her crazy fairy-ideas, nights turned out better. She had a rough magic about her, a charm that made things just work. But winning didn’t truly matter to me. The sun was dying on our faces, we were twenty-two years old, and our legs were fast and free as we plummeted down to the sand.

Margaux and I collapsed onto the beach seconds after Lindsay, who was already stripping down. We wore our swimsuits under our dresses. If we’d been normal girls, we’d have been wearing sandals, too, but who wants to risk it? We wore sneakers. We were bony in bikinis, but we wore them anyway, because one-pieces were too much like leotards. The undressing itself didn’t faze us; it was a familiar act, down to the perfunctory dressing room looks at the others, the glancing comparison to your own body parts.

When you dance with somebody enough, you learn her body as well as your own. Perhaps even better: because while you only glimpse yourself in the mirror, stolen glances between turns and tendus, she’s always in front of you, beside you, behind you. I still remember the curve of Lindsay’s foot, how the arch was so high she could almost grasp it like a fist. If I close my eyes now, I can still count the bones on Margaux’s sternum, from her clavicles down to her stomach.

Thirty seconds in the gut-chilling water was enough before we ran back out shrieking.

“Make a fire,” Margaux said, her teeth bashing together as she chattered. Her dark hair was otter-sleek from the water. “We need to make a fire.”

We always did what Margaux said; I think deep down, we were just too scared of her not to. You never knew what was beneath the surface with Margaux. Delight? Rage? A kind of existential pain? When she’d offered to host us at her grandmother’s Normandy house for the weekend to celebrate her birthday, it hadn’t taken much to convince us. Margaux said we were going, so we went. Margaux said to bring our bathing suits, so we did. Margaux said to make a fire, so we started scavenging the beach for branches.

It took us a while to find enough dry wood, towels wrapped around our goose-pimpled shoulders as we pounced around the sand. Once we had enough, Margaux crumpled up pages of the Elle she hadn’t read yet for kindling and lit it. We watched the unseen fashions crumple and burn, and soon our faces were illuminated by the flames.

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