Dance of Shadows

by Yelana Black

  “Thanks,” he said with a grin, and sipping from one straw, they shared her drink, no longer staring out at the city, but blending into it until they were just another couple sitting on a stoop, enjoying a warm autumn night. Afterward, Zep took her down the street to a cozy patisserie with hammered-tin ceilings and a long glass counter filled with trays of colorful cookies and petit fours. Cakes and meringues stood on tall platters by the register, where an old woman was arranging mugs and teacups. She smiled as Vanessa leaned down and peered at the cakes in awe.

  Zep bent down next to her, amused. “Does anything look good?”

  “There are so many choices,” she said. “I can’t decide.”

  He glanced from Vanessa to the cakes beyond the glass. “I think I know exactly what you want.”

  “Oh really?” she said with a daring look. “And what would that be?”

  Zep searched her face, as if trying to read her thoughts. “Do you trust me?”

  Vanessa hesitated. “I think so.”

  “Good,” he said, and stood up. “Why don’t you grab us a table? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Okay,” she said with a skeptical smile. She watched him from afar as he leaned over the counter, talking to the woman behind the register until she nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Zep ordered a café au lait for himself and a mulled cider for Vanessa, carrying them to a corner table where they shared a slice of almond cream cake, with frosting so delicate it melted away just as it touched Vanessa’s tongue.

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  “How did you … ?”

  “I’ve had my eye on you for a while.” He touched a strand of her long hair, letting his hand drop down to the pale freckles on her shoulder. “It’s hard not to notice you. You aren’t like the other girls here. Or anywhere, for that matter.”

  Vanessa gave him the beginning of a smile. “That’s not true,” she said, shying away. “There are a lot of girls like me.”

  Zep smiled. “See, that alone makes you different. Not everyone would say that.”

  Vanessa knew a lot of girls who would say that—Steffie, TJ, Elly—but she didn’t mention it. Instead, she inched her fingers closer to his until their thumbs were touching. “What about you?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  Zep raised an eyebrow. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” Vanessa said, pulling her hair over one shoulder. “Where are you from?”

  “A small town in Minnesota,” he said. “All snow and ice and factories. That was my childhood. Long, bleak winters and hard work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I grew up with my mom and my three younger sisters. My mom was a nurse, always working the late shifts, so we rarely saw her. All I remember of my dad are his hands—big and rough and chapped from the wind. He worked at a factory, I think, but he left when my sisters and I were really young.”

  Vanessa listened, licking her spoon, as he told her about growing up, how there was never any food. Once their heat got turned off in the dead of the winter, and their pipes froze. He had to drag his sisters a mile down the road to their neighbor’s house so they wouldn’t freeze in the night.

  “That’s what it was like, more or less. Even as a kid, I worked a part-time job after school at the local diner, cleaning floors and washing dishes. It was the worst job ever,” he said with a laugh. “You really don’t want to know what turns up in public bathrooms. But late one night, when all the customers had left, I turned on the radio and accidentally flipped to a classical station. The music blasted through the place, filling the air with Tchaikovsky, and suddenly everything changed and I felt the life seep back into me. My work passed by so quickly that I turned it on the next night, too, and then the next. The music became the only way I could get through the day. I remember looking out the window, the snow blowing across the ground in swirls, and thinking that it looked like an elaborate dance.”

  Something inside Vanessa’s chest swelled as she listened to him. He told her about how he had started dancing at the gym by himself, how the kids at school had ostracized him. “They’d call me ‘Billy Elliot’ and kick my ass, but I didn’t care. I asked around until I found a woman who was holding ballet classes in her basement. It was all girls except for me, and I think my sisters were mortified, but I had no other choice. Dancing was the only way I could be happy, the only chance I’d have to be successful and eventually support my family. There was nothing for me in that small town. So when I discovered the New York Ballet Academy, I knew I was going. I had to. There was no other option.”

  Vanessa leaned closer. She had never met anyone who loved dancing as much as Zep. Even Margaret hadn’t talked about ballet the way he did. It was as if it held answers for him, that ballet wasn’t just something he did, but it was the way he moved, the way he understood the world. Beauty, Vanessa thought, listening to the sound of his voice until the café slowly emptied and they wandered out into the street.

  “Do you ever get … nervous, though?” Vanessa asked.

  Zep glanced at her strangely. “What do you mean?”

  “Like you’re not good enough, no matter how hard you try. Like you’ll never be … enough.” Vanessa wasn’t sure where exactly that question came from, but there it was. She couldn’t take it back now.

  Zep paused for a moment, his face still. Then he touched her cheek. “You are enough, Vanessa. More than enough.”

  Vanessa felt herself blush. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she hadn’t thought about her family and Margaret, about Elly and ballet and Josef and The Firebird. But walking with Zep beneath the streetlights, Vanessa didn’t feel like a ballerina or a sister or a daughter or a friend. She just felt like a girl walking with a boy in the West Village, hoping that by the time they got home, he would kiss her.

  Zep hailed a cab, but just as it pulled over something caught her eye. A girl with a blond bob stepped out of a restaurant, her back turned. She wore a pale-pink dress, Elly’s color. Vanessa froze.

  Zep held the cab door open for her, but she didn’t step inside. “Is that—?” she said to Zep, just as the girl turned.

  Vanessa’s heart sank when she took in the face that was older and far more jaded than Elly’s. She watched the girl bum a cigarette from a man, leaning on a mailbox while she took a drag.

  “From the back, she looked just like Elly,” Vanessa explained, embarrassed, while she climbed into the cab.

  “I know,” Zep said, trying to make her feel better, though it didn’t help. There were probably thousands of girls in the city who looked like Elly from behind.

  “You were friends. You miss her,” Zep said gently. “I would feel the same way too. It’s a shame what happened to her.”

  Something about his tone made Vanessa pause. “What do you mean?” Vanessa said. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just that she disappeared so suddenly. It’s like she fell off the face of the earth.”

  “Disappeared,” Vanessa repeated thoughtfully. “It is like that, isn’t it?”

  The mood had become somber by the time the cab pulled up at Lincoln Center. Seeing it, suspended in the sky, Vanessa suddenly felt guilty for not thinking about Margaret all evening. And even though she hadn’t planned on telling Zep anything about Margaret, she somehow felt that she could trust him.

  “Did you know my sister?”

  “Margaret,” Zep said, as if he’d been waiting for Vanessa to feel comfortable enough to bring her up. “She was a beautiful dancer.”

  Vanessa stared at her feet, unable to look Zep in the eye while she told him about the day they got the phone call. The months of searching, of the police calling, telling her parents they had no news. Zep listened intently.

  “Did you think she was crazy?” Vanessa asked him, thinking about what Justin had told her.

  “I barely knew her,” Zep said. “I thought she was talented a
nd passionate about dance. She seemed fragile, but who isn’t before a big performance?”

  Vanessa nodded, somehow relieved. She didn’t want to think that her sister was crazy. “Elly’s disappearance reminds me of hers. Do you think that’s insane?”

  “No,” Zep said. “They both dropped out suddenly, and they were both close to you.”

  Vanessa bit her lip. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t just the circumstances that seemed so similar. It was something more intangible, a bad feeling she got every time she looked at Elly’s empty half of the room. But she said nothing. And while they walked back toward the dormitory, Zep took her hand. “Wait,” he said, and pulled her to the fountain.

  “The truth is,” he said softly, “I don’t want to go home.”

  Vanessa felt something inside her catch. “I don’t either,” she whispered. “But I’m already late for curfew—”

  “I know,” he said, putting a finger to her lips. “Just one more moment.” He pulled her toward him, his hand pressing into the small of her back. Her hair blew about her cheeks as he leaned closer, his breath grazing her lips. But before he kissed her, Vanessa hesitated.

  “What about Anna? Is she still your girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend?” His breath tickled her lips. “I don’t have one—at least not now. Though I do have my eye on someone if she’ll have me.”

  A gust of wind blew water from the fountain across the plaza, sprinkling them with cool droplets, and they both broke out laughing. When the wind died down, Zep wiped her cheek with his thumb.

  “Vanessa?” said a gruff voice. It belonged to a woman.

  Vanessa’s smile faded. She turned to see Hilda’s squat frame standing by the entrance of the David Koch Theater, squinting into the darkness.

  “We have to go!” Vanessa said. Zep grabbed her hand, and together they ran through the buildings and back to the dormitory.

  Chapter Eleven

  The weekend passed by in a slow ache. Vanessa went to breakfast with her friends and meandered up Broadway with them, until they finally settled down to study in a coffee shop a few blocks from school. Vanessa’s mind was far away, though, feeling the weight of Zep’s hand in hers, her cheek still cool from the sprinkle of water that the wind had blown between them, her lips still waiting for his kiss.

  TJ interrupted her reverie. “And you want an iced tea, right? One sugar or two?”

  “Actually,” Vanessa said, “I’ll have a mulled cider today.”

  A hushed giggle passed over the table.

  “I know where you are,” Blaine said with a wink. He pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and leaned forward. “Lost in a dream. A sexy dream.”

  Vanessa felt her chest grow hot. “No,” she protested. “I’m here, really. I just—”

  “Suddenly like mulled cider,” Steffie teased.

  “We don’t blame you,” TJ said. “Hell, if I could go on a date with Z—”

  “Shh!” Vanessa said. She had told them about the date but sworn them to secrecy. She didn’t want to think about what everyone at school would say if word got out.

  “With you know who,” TJ continued. “I’d be checked out of reality so quickly you’d forget what my voice sounded like.”

  Blaine raised an eyebrow. “You? Stop talking? Impossible.”

  Steffie and Vanessa laughed. TJ rolled her eyes and retreated to the counter to order their drinks.

  The four of them sat around the table studying in the afternoon sunshine, the buttery aroma of mulled cider filling Vanessa with memories: a lick of almond frosting, a hand buried in her hair, a tickle of breath on her neck.

  To keep her mind off Zep, Vanessa spent the rest of the weekend in the NYBA library, reading about Igor Stravinsky for her Firebird report and relishing the quiet. It was there, sitting on a windowsill overlooking Manhattan’s Upper West Side, that she read about the strange phenomenon that had occurred in Paris during the original opening night of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.

  According to historical accounts, when the orchestra started to play the opening notes, the audience began to shift in their seats. The sounds were odd, unfamiliar, the chords dissonant and unnatural. As the dancers contorted their bodies to the strange music, people covered their ears or looked away, unable to watch. Someone booed. Someone else shouted at the dancers. People were standing and yelling, throwing playbills at the stage. A group of women in the front row fell into a strange fit of hysterics.

  Vanessa shivered, staring at a drawing of the riot, the faces of the people in the aisles sending goose bumps up her skin. They looked wild, possessed, like something had taken hold of them and wouldn’t let go.

  “That’s dark stuff,” a voice said over her shoulder.

  Vanessa sat up with a jolt, knocking a stack of books off the windowsill. Trying to compose herself, she stood, only to see the tawny mess of Justin’s hair as he bent over her books, now scattered across the floor.

  Vanessa blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “Do you make it a habit of sneaking up on people, or are you just trying to sabotage my dancing by giving me a heart attack?”

  Justin looked up at her, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. “What, did I scare you?”

  “No,” she said, glancing over his shoulder. “Speaking of scaring, where are your bodyguards? I didn’t see them with you when you were spying on Zep and me in the plaza. Don’t you travel everywhere with them?”

  But just as she spoke she heard heavy footsteps, and Nicola and Nicholas Fratelli slipped out from the narrow passage between the bookshelves. They glanced at Vanessa, their faces solemn, and sat down to read just a few tables over from her.

  Vanessa shrank back, embarrassed.

  “Them?” Justin said. “We’re just friends. And as for the other night, I wasn’t spying on you. I was on my way to a date.”

  “A date?” Vanessa asked, surprised by how anxious the idea made her. “With whom?”

  “Now who’s spying?” Justin said, still grinning.

  “I—I’m not, I was just wondering. But never mind.”

  Justin shrugged. “Just a girl,” he said. His blue eyes lingered on Vanessa’s. He lowered his voice. “No one special.”

  Vanessa broke his gaze. “I, um, I should go.”

  Ignoring her words, Justin opened one of her books. “Russian Composers and Their Muses,” he said, reading the title. He picked up another one. “Dance Macabre and the Ballerina.” He chuckled. “Doing a little Firebird research, are we?”

  “Yes,” Vanessa said, grabbing the book from him.

  “You know that—”

  “It won’t make me a better dancer,” Vanessa said curtly. “You told me that before.”

  Justin leaned against the windowsill, the muscles on his arms flexing beneath his shirt. Catching herself, Vanessa quickly looked away.

  “I was going to say that if you want to know what Josef’s favorite ballet is about, you should probably ask the people who have danced in it before.” Justin picked up Vanessa’s pencil case and looked like he was about to open it.

  “Don’t go through my things,” she said, grabbing the case and stuffing it back in her bag. “I already tried that,” she said, producing the three-year-old cast list from her binder. “I can’t find contact information for anyone on the list. I even found cast lists from earlier Firebird productions here—it looks like the school has tried to put it on almost twelve times now over the past two decades—but I can’t even find listings for those dancers. It’s like after they left NYBA, they just vanished.”

  “You can’t find them because the old players aren’t around anymore,” Justin said.

  “What do you mean? What happened to them?”

  Justin fanned the pages of one of her books. “Who knows?”

  Vanessa slammed her palm down on the book cover, tired of the way he was fiddling with her things. “They disappeared?”

  Justin shook his head. “You, of all people, should k
now that when people disappear, it’s usually because they don’t want to be found. So call it whatever you want. They graduated and faded into obscurity, or—”

  Vanessa glanced at her watch, and Justin’s voice trailed off. Suddenly he stood up, his back rigid. A dark look passed over his face.

  Vanessa followed his gaze to the far end of the reading room, where Zep’s broad shoulders filled the doorway. The warm light seemed to bend around him as he ran his hands through his hair and scanned the room, looking for a place to sit. He was about to head for the east corner when his eyes rested on Vanessa.

  She felt her heart skip as their gaze met.

  “Dropped out of sight,” Justin said, finishing his sentence. “Which is exactly what I’m going to do now.” He gave Vanessa a disappointed look, but she was barely paying attention to him. Justin gathered his things and nodded to the Fratelli twins, who closed their books and stood up. “Remember what I said in class about putting me under a magnifying glass,” Justin murmured, but before Vanessa had a chance to process what he’d meant, he and the twins were gone.

  Zeppelin Gray was a beautiful paradox: his body rough yet smooth; his movements heavy but weightless; his eyes so deep and lustrous that they seemed to contain an entire universe. He walked toward Vanessa, his muscles shifting, sharp and lean, as if carved out of metal.

  Tearing her gaze away, she glanced at one of her books and pretended to read. He couldn’t be coming this way, could he? A looming shadow answered her question. Willing herself to stop blushing, Vanessa looked up.

  “Vanessa,” Zep said, his voice deep and buttery. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, Zep, hi,” she said, trying to sound unfazed. “I’m just reading.”

  “I would have thought you would be out with your friends,” Zep said, placing his hand inches from hers on the windowsill.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You just seem like the kind of girl who’s always busy. I’m glad I found you alone.”

  Had he been looking for her? She felt her heart swell.

  Zep lowered his voice. “Is that revealing too much?”