Katarina Ballerina & the Victory Dance by Tiler Peck & Kyle Harris

Author:Tiler Peck & Kyle Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

LATER THAT DAY, after he got home from playing football with Alberto in the park, Ricky found himself still thinking about his avó’s story of sneaking off to dance in the Carnival. It must have been so hard for her, feeling like she couldn’t tell the people she cared for about her passion for dancing, afraid that they would judge her. He felt the same way sometimes when he went off to dance class, always giving some excuse to his friends about why he couldn’t hang out after school, instead of just telling them he was on his way to ballet.

He went downstairs and grabbed the old family photo albums off the bookshelf where they lived. He settled onto the sofa to flip through them and eventually found what he was looking for: pictures of a Carnival parade. He had seen these old photos before but had never looked at them too closely, his eyes skimming over the crowds of people in the street; the musicians and vendors; the giant, colorful floats. For the first time he noticed the young dancer in a huge headdress of red and purple feathers. She appeared in almost every picture, including one that was just of her with her arms held open wide, showing off her colorful costume decked with jewels and fringe, her smile so big and bright that Ricky couldn’t help smiling back at her. Her face was younger, of course, but the features were unmistakable.

“Hi, darling, what are you looking at?” his mum said as she walked into the room, with a cup of tea and yesterday’s mail in her hands.

Ricky held up the photo album. “Look at Vovó! She looks so happy, doesn’t she?”

His mum sat down beside him, looking at the picture. “She sure does.”

“It must have been hard keeping her dancing a secret from her parents when it made her that happy,” Ricky said with a sigh. His own secret weighed heavily on him; he knew he couldn’t keep lying to his friends on the football team forever about his dancing.

He flipped the page and found another picture of his avó with her arms around two other girls in feathered costumes and headdresses. In fact, all the dancers in the pictures from Carnival were women, just like how most of the dancers at World Dance Camp had been girls. Was this why he was scared to tell his teammates that he danced? Of course Ricky knew that ballet wasn’t just for girls, and you had to be just as tough to be a dancer as a footballer, if not more so. But he did worry that his friends wouldn’t understand that. Right now they thought of him as one of the best athletes they knew, a star player for the Lions, someone they came to for football tips, but would that change if they knew he was also a dancer? What if he went from someone they respected to someone they made fun of? It made him miss the days he had spent in DC with the other members of the Pen Pal Pack.

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