Read Online Drenched in Light by Lisa Wingate - Free Book Online Page A

I wanted to put everything I had into making the cut with a professional ballet company.
    When I was chosen for the corps at the KC Metro, Jonathan’s ring became a noose. He was concerned that I was pushing myself too hard, trying to compete with dancers who were five and six years younger than I was, in my quest to move up to a soloist position. He wanted me to quit, to be realistic about the fact that, at twenty-six with a history of injuries, it was unlikely that I’d ever achieve the dream of being a soloist or a lead dancer with a large professional company. He thought I should “see someone” about all the weight I’d lost. He wanted to set a wedding date and move on with our lives. In July, I gave him back the ring and told him I thought we should take some time apart.
    He found someone else within two months. It was love at first sight. They ran off to Cancún in October and got married while I was in rehearsals for Swan Lake . I was so consumed with the upcoming performance, I found it easy to push aside lingering thoughts of Jonathan. I was understudying the Dance of the Four Little Swans, and one of the dancers was nursing an inflamed ligament. The evening of spacing rehearsal, I was to stand in for her. Then my parents, who always came to watch spacing rehearsal, found me on the dressing room floor in a pool of blood.
    I woke up in the hospital two days later, a monitor hooked to my finger and IVs pumping glucose and electrolytes into my veins. My secret was out, and there was plenty of time to think about what I’d done to myself, to my career, and to Jonathan. I felt as if someone had yanked the floor out from under me, and I was floating in space, just like Dell in her essay. . . .
    I looked up from my desk, and Dell was standing in the doorway, watching me through soft, contemplative eyes. I felt myself being drawn into the steadiness of her gaze before my mind kicked into gear, causing me to motion her in. Grabbing a Kleenex, I pretended to reach for something on the floor as I wiped my eyes.
    “Allergies,” I said, when I sat back up. Pulling the door closed, she moved along the wall and slid into the same chair she’d occupied the day before.
    “Oh,” she muttered, ready to accept the excuse or the fact that I was crying in my office in the middle of a school day. Whatever, her look said.
    “So . . .” I tried not to imagine my appearance from her point of view: bedraggled and off-kilter. “I guess you missed the Red Day assembly.”
    She winced, her attention darting around my office as if she were looking for a hole to crawl into. “Am I in trouble?”
    “No.”
    “Are you gonna tell anyone?”
    “No. I guess Mr. Verhaden didn’t see you, and you made it to your next class on time?”
    Sagging with relief, she nodded. “I don’t think Mr. Verhaden cares. If I go in the storage room, I mean. Sometimes I go there during lunch. He doesn’t say anything.”
    “You spend lunch in the instrument closet?” I said it with a little more shock than I meant to, not because the idea surprised me, but because I’d done the same thing myself during my years at Harrington— not for the same reasons Dell probably did. For me, hanging out in the instrument closet and sometimes the practice room or the library was a way of avoiding the cafeteria. I ate with my friends just often enough to keep anyone from becoming suspicious, but when I could get away with it, I slipped off to someplace quiet, where there were no food issues to deal with.
    Crossing her slender arms defensively, Dell drew back. “Sometimes. Not all the time. Just when I have a sack lunch with me, and when . . .” Sighing hard, she focused out the window. “Some days there’s too many people. They’re all around and it’s too loud.”
    I thought about the girl in the river, standing silent in the sunlight, or curled tightly into a ball against the rain, always alone. I realized again how different it was for her