Dark Turns

by Cate Holahan

  Stares heated Nia’s face as she walked to the center of the room. These teens knew enough ballet to recognize proper technique, even if they couldn’t pull it off. They would judge her. If her movements lacked precision or wanted for grace, the teens wouldn’t trust her corrections.

  Nia tipped onto her toes and held herself en pointe, testing her Achilles strength. Her feet bore her weight without a shudder. The confirmation relaxed her muscles. She performed a series of chaine turns to reach the center of the room, spinning off her nerves like water in a dryer cycle. She assumed the required fifth position, right foot in front of the left, facing opposite directions. She pliéd and then extended her leg in the air while rising onto the toes of her supporting foot. She whipped the airborne leg around her side to touch the knee of her standing leg. Her arms mimicked the motion. Open, snap close, spin.

  Ms. V nodded approval. “See how she keeps her hip down? Everything arrives at once. Arms and legs retract together.” The instructor gestured toward her with the expanse of her arm. “Class, watch again.”

  Fouettés were typically performed in groups of four. Nia rotated on her toes again and again. Confidence surged through her muscles. For a moment, she forgot the class and the teacher’s ongoing commentary. Everything faded except for the music. She imagined herself the Black Swan, but her triumph was over her Achilles rather than a white rival.

  The lake whirled by as she spun, a shimmering blue that faded into the studio’s peach walls. A female voice whispered, “Twelve.” The lake flashed by again, and an image of the girl’s dead body assailed her. Nia forced herself to keep spinning. Sixteen. Thirty-two and she would perform the coda of the Black Swan’s pas de deux.

  Ms. V continued to point out proper form, allowing her assistant to twirl in front of the class while the students attempted the turn at the barre. Twenty. The lake swam in Nia’s vision. She pictured a net of hair falling back to reveal a bloated face. Her stomach churned. Something tugged at her heel. She stopped midset and landed back in her starting position. Until she got her mind and feet back in shape, she was no Black Swan.

  Nia touched her hairline, ensuring that the strands remained swept back in a tight bun. She scanned the students’ faces. The Asian girl beckoned with her eyes for instruction. The tall girls nodded approval. Lydia beamed before spinning herself, approximating Nia’s own form but with less surety. The girl’s hip raised, betraying that she had not snapped her legs and arms together fast enough. The heavyset student stared ahead of her, lips pressed together as she tried to maintain balance on one foot. Ms. V instructed the pear-shaped girl.

  Aubrey did not acknowledge Nia. The girl stepped from the barre and spun on her toes. Technically, she reproduced everything the assistant teacher had just done. But her movements missed beats, as if she were concentrating so hard on imitating Nia’s performance that she could no longer hear the music.

  Nia gave the Asian student a correction on toe position. She watched the girl try to spin with her pointed foot pressed against her knee, tongue protruding from her lips, brow furrowed. Next time, she would caution about expression. She moved to Aubrey. She snapped the rhythm as she approached. “Beautiful. Just remember the time. And turn.”

  Aubrey stopped. Her bow mouth turned down. Nia didn’t know whether the frown stemmed from the mistake or the criticism.

  “Really beautiful movement, though,” Nia said.

  “But not perfect.” Aubrey returned to fifth position and began the turns again. Her face betrayed no more emotion. Determination punctuated her movements, now in sync with the downbeat.

  The students practiced the turns until nearly the end of class. Ms. V retreated to her office for the last ten minutes, leaving the cool-down under Nia’s supervision. Nia helped the students relax their legs. She asked names as she pushed and pulled limbs. The Asian student was June. The tall girls were Tatiana and Talia. Nia knew she would forever associate them together: the T twins, though they weren’t sisters. The heavyset girl was Marta, the broad-shouldered one Kimberly, and the other girl who had largely blended into the background was Suzanne. The boys were Alexei and Joseph, though she found herself thinking of them as the Russian boy and the one Aubrey liked.

  With Ms. V gone, the atmosphere relaxed. The class split into conversations as students swapped pointe shoes for slippers, stuffing the former into cubbies beside Ms. V’s office. Lydia introduced herself to Marta, Kim, and Suzanne. Alexei joined the T twins and June by the windows in hushed gossip.

  Joseph gravitated toward Aubrey at the barre. He announced that he had missed her over the summer. Aubrey didn’t respond. Instead, she slid to the ground in a split before leaning forward until her chest touched the floor. She pulled her legs together in a push-up stance and flipped onto her back.

  “Stretch me.”

  Joseph dropped to both knees and lowered his head, a boy begging mercy from a queen. He placed both hands on her foot. The pink ballet slipper disappeared in his palms. He pushed Aubrey’s long leg to a ninety-degree angle.

  “You can do better than that.” Aubrey said.

  Joseph’s hands moved to her calf. Aubrey’s leg ticked a few more degrees. Her lips parted.

  “Harder.”

  His hands slid to her thigh. He pushed the leg to her chest, splitting the girl like a scissor.

  Nia clapped her hands. “Okay. That’s enough. Let’s all sit up and massage our feet. Come on, everyone. Sit up.”

  Joseph’s hand recoiled from Aubrey’s thigh, as though burned. His eyes looked glazed.

  “You don’t want those tendons to tighten up,” Nia continued, moving closer to the other groups of students. “That’s how injuries happen.”

  June, Alexei, and the T twins sat in a circle. They obediently rubbed their arches and ankles without breaking conversation. When Nia neared, their voices dropped to whispers. But their words still pierced the air: Dead. Drowned. Devastated.

  Nia sat a few feet from them, massaging her own ankle as she eavesdropped.

  “My little sister, Darya, hung with her,” Tati said. “Lauren’s dad just shows up outside Dar’s room last night, fucking furious. Ready to kill someone, you know? Totally freaked her out. He wanted to know if Lauren had problems with anyone.”

  “She seemed so sweet . . . I just can’t believe it.” June’s tiny face fell into a cartoonish sad expression. Eyebrows slanted. Mouth turned down. She hugged her arms to her chest and rubbed her forearms.

  “Did you guys know the girl that died?” The question slipped out before Nia had thought it through. The police had cautioned against talking about the murder. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. These kids had information, and knowing why the girl died might erase the horrific images in her head.

  Alexei’s eyebrows raised at the interruption.

  June reddened. “Um, yeah. I kind of knew her. We took Mandarin together. Did you know her?”

  Eyes turned on her like spotlights. She had to say something. “Director Battle and I found the body.” She offered June a penitent smile. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to be.” June waved off the condolences. “I mean, I didn’t really know her.” She turned back to Alexei. Her hands fell into her lap. “Poor Theo. He must be beside himself.”

  “Maybe,” Tati mumbled at the floor.

  “So you found the body?” Alexei’s wide-eyed expression lacked real concern. “Did it look like she’d been murdered or like she’d jumped into the lake?”

  The necklace of red welts flooded Nia’s vision. Whatever had happened to that girl, she hadn’t just drowned.

  Alexei continued to stare at Nia, willing a juicy detail to fall from her parted lips. Nia closed her mouth. The dean wouldn’t want her “speculating.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t get a good look.”

  Alexei frowned. His brown eyes continued to beg for more information.

  Nia shifted her view to Lydi
a. The little prima stood in the center of the room, folded like a pocketknife. Her hands lay flat on the floor, elbows bent. Her head rested by her shins. Lydia was certainly limber. A few feet away, just in front of Ms. V’s door, Aubrey sat in a Russian split. She pointed and flexed her toes as Joseph talked to her—or tried to. It was impossible to tell from Aubrey’s expression whether she was listening.

  “You must have seen something,” Alexei said.

  Nia returned her attention to the boy. “Why do you think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “The girl you found, Lauren, had problems with an ex.” Alexei glanced sideways at June. “Everyone knows about it.”

  “No, she didn’t.” June shook her head. “They always seemed so happy.”

  Alexei chuckled. “Come on.”

  “They were totally into each other, always kissing and holding hands, giggling.” June turned to the T twins for support. “Totally in love, right? Romeo and Juliet style.”

  Tati and Talia each fidgeted with their feet, stroking their arches without really working them.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Alexei said. “You didn’t see it? I thought everyone did.”

  “See what?”

  Alexei laughed. Talia glanced over her shoulder toward Ms. V’s shut door.

  “What?” June asked again. She wasn’t even pretending to stretch anymore. “I was in China for the summer, sans Facebook.”

  Talia spoke like she wanted the whole room to hear. “China, really? What were you doing?”

  “Um, oh, improving my Mandarin. My parents think I have an American accent.”

  Alexei touched June’s arm in mock flirtation. “Oh my God. You have to see it.”

  The gossipy tone of the conversation made Nia uncomfortable. She cleared her throat, and Alexei’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Over the summer, Theo met up with a certain someone I won’t name right now. He made a video of him and this person being . . . amorous.” Alexei wagged his eyebrows. “He then texted said video to his buddy, which of course got forwarded to the whole crew team. Then the school. Then the world.” Alexei stifled a giggle. He elbowed June. “You can probably even search that shit in China.”

  Nia frowned at the boy. A girl was dead and he joked as though he’d seen an embarrassing celebrity story on TMZ.

  Talia rolled her eyes. “Some people can’t shut up about it, even when they should.”

  “A sex tape?” June more mouthed the words than said them. “Theo’s not that type.”

  “Add alcohol and every guy is that type,” Alexei said. “I always thought he was a jerk.”

  “He’s always been nice to me.”

  “Because you’re a pretty girl. He was never so nice to me.”

  “I would have been, like, utterly devastated if I was Lauren,” Talia said. She dragged her lower lip beneath her top teeth. Sad eyes looked up at Nia. “Some people think she committed suicide after she found out that he cheated.”

  “People jump off bridges for less,” Alexei said.

  “Who was the tape with?” June whispered.

  Alexei trapped his left tricep in a bent elbow and turned behind him, as if stretching his shoulder. Nia traced his gaze. He stared straight at Aubrey.

  “Little Miss Perfect,” he chuckled. “In the flesh.”

  4

  Ligne [LEEN-yuh]

  Line. The outline presented by a dancer while executing steps and poses. A dancer is said to have a good or bad sense of line according to the arrangement of head, body, legs and arms in a pose or movement. A good line is absolutely indispensable to the classical dancer.

  Nia limped down the hall toward her apartment. The pain that had nibbled at her heel during her demonstration of fouetté turns was now chomping on her swollen tendon. She shouldn’t have taken the long way home, but she’d wanted to avoid the lake.

  Her fixation on the drowned girl was aggravating her injury. She felt anxious. Jittery. Tight. And the conversation in class had only made things worse. Rather than soften yesterday’s images, knowing the girl’s name had sharpened her mental pictures. The bluish face hiding behind her eyelids no longer seemed an out-of-focus photo from the nightly news that had flickered into her real life. The face belonged to Lauren.

  Nia hoped a long soak would soothe both her mind and body. She thought of the box of Epsom salt in her vanity while feeling for the key in her sweater pocket. As the metal jangled in the lock, she noticed a letter tacked to her door with a yellow pushpin. She examined the note. Wallace’s script monogram was stamped in the left-hand corner of the cream-colored card stock. She flipped over the paper to see words scrawled in blue ink:

  Please meet in my office during first period to discuss a matter of utmost importance.

  –Dean Martha Stirk

  Pain relief would have to wait. First period started at nine, following morning electives, which only some kids opted to take. There was a twenty-minute window between the end of dance class and the first academic lecture, enabling her students to change into their uniforms and head to the main campus. But the time had already expired thanks to Nia’s lumbering walk back to the dorms. She was late.

  Nia hustled back down the stairs as fast as she could. Dean Stirk’s office sat above the registration building, across the courtyard surrounding the girls’ dorms and back up the hill to the main campus. She had never been inside, but she’d seen signs during move-in weekend when she’d collected her orientation packet.

  The sun beat down on her bare neck like a broiler. She was baking in her sweater. Still, she didn’t remove her cotton pullover. The microfiber tank beneath hugged her body, and while form-fitting attire was appropriate for the studio, it wasn’t for a sit-down with the big boss.

  By the time she reached the registration office, sweat beaded beneath the tight bun affixed, like a button, to the top of her head. It dripped behind her ear and on her forehead. Her underarms felt damp.

  She dabbed at the perspiration on her face with her sweater sleeve. Nia regretted not bathing for the umpteenth time. An hour of dance instruction followed by a half hour of dragging a bum foot across campus in eighty-degree weather would make anyone sweat. Still, she doubted Stirk would give her appearance a pass. The woman took pains to look proper.

  Nia entered the building and ascended a wide staircase that led to an open second floor. The architecture reminded her of a television courthouse. Greek columns framed a waist-high bronze banister, enabling visitors to look over the railing at the checkered tile below.

  She scanned navy walls and white wainscoting for an office. Bright white double doors marked the center of the room. A bronze plaque mounted above them read Stirk’s full name and title: Martha Elayne Stirk, Dean of Students and Faculty, Principal of Academics.

  A secretary’s desk stood outside the dean’s office. The accompanying chair sat empty, as did the blue upholstered seats pressed against the banister. Nia hesitated before knocking and then went ahead, rapping firmly on the door. She didn’t need to sit outside. She’d been summoned.

  The knock reverberated in the high ceilings. A voice came from behind the closed doors. “It’s open.”

  Nia stepped inside like a mouse peeking from a hole in the wall, unsure of what she’d find. The office looked like a formal living room. French blue walls. More wainscoting. A pair of linen chesterfield sofas flanked a dark blue Persian rug with a white-and-pink starburst pattern at its center. At the far end of the room, Dean Stirk sat behind a masculine, mahogany desk.

  The dean looked over the top of her frameless glasses. Her gray-and-blond bob shook around her cheekbones. “Ms. Washington. Good. My secretary delivered my note.”

  The dean put down a pen atop an open book in front of her and gestured to one of two slipper chairs facing her desk.

  “Please shut the door behind you.”

  With the door closed, Nia realized how cold Stirk kept her office. Air conditioning blasted from vents in the floor and the ceiling. Her s
weat turned icy against her skin. She pulled her sweater tighter around her chest and sat on the edge of the indicated chair.

  The dean folded her hands atop her book. “You’re a new teacher here. So I wanted to make you aware of the school policies relevant to yesterday’s incident.”

  Incident. Was that what the dean was calling a student’s death?

  “We here at Wallace have a duty, not only to individual students, but also to the well-being of the school community as a whole. As such, we must handle any issue involving law enforcement with the utmost caution and care.”

  The dean paused, waiting for some kind of agreement. Nia nodded. “Of course.”

  “Tragically, the young woman whom you discovered yesterday was a returning student. Lauren Turek was fifteen and would have been a sophomore this year. Her parents have been notified.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Stirk cleared her throat. “Yes. We all are very sorry for her loss and our sympathies are with her family.”

  The dean removed her glasses and folded them on top of her desk. She leaned forward until her shoulders hovered above the book. Her body language said the time for pleasantries had ended.

  “The police have not yet determined the cause of Lauren’s death. We must take care not to speculate and unnecessarily alarm the student body or parents.”

  Nia shifted uncomfortably, glad she’d kept quiet when Alexei had asked about Lauren’s body.

  The dean cast another grave look across the desk. “Unfortunately, I am aware that Mr. Turek’s grief-stricken actions have spurred discussion of his daughter’s death as a homicide or a possible suicide. But police may yet determine that what occurred was a terrible, freak accident.”

  The dean’s brow wrinkled. Her chin lowered. The expression indicated that the most serious part of the conversation was yet to come. Nia braced for a scolding.

  “I understand that you saw marks on Lauren’s neck and that you believe they indicate she was strangled. However, we do not yet know if the body was damaged in the lake or if the marks were from some other, unrelated injury.”