He glanced in the same direction. “Not that I ever saw. Although the sight of you lying crumpled on the floor took most of my attention.”
Missing shoes, the apple gone . . . Moira transformed into something dangerously fey. Hayan thought if she tried to explain, even to Ken, it would sound like something out of a drama series. For a moment she wondered if her mind was breaking. It had happened to some of the other refugees she hazily remembered from her time in China, when things had gotten so bad that getting lost in dreams was infinitely preferable to the miseries that reality provided. After all, what reason would her classmate have for wanting to kill her? Or to overtighten her bodice, or to push a tiara so deep into her scalp that she thought blood was running down her neck?
It must be in her head. It must be the pressure she felt to perform, to prove that the long-ago committee had been correct in choosing her over all the others. That they had seen potential and strength of will and heart in her.
But, the shoes existed. She had felt their intoxicating power and paid a tithe of the price they clearly demanded. And she had seen what hold they had over Moira.
Hayan sprang to her feet, almost knocking Ken over, and began pulling woollen leggings out of her bag.
“Hey, what?” He grabbed her elbow, steadying them both as she wobbled on one foot in her hurry to dress. “What’s up, Snowbird?”
“We have to get back to Central.” She pulled away, seeing not his face but the last glimpse she’d had of Moira’s, lit with feral triumph overlying soundless, uncontrolled fear.
“Well, yeah, I know, but not that . . .” Ken’s words trailed off as she entered the staff lounge and sat on the side of the pull-out couch to gather up a few stray belongings and pull on her snow boots. He followed her. “What’s wrong?”
Hayan didn’t know how to explain. “Moira.”
Ken’s quiet presence at her shoulder steadied her as they approached the front door of the New York Central School of Ballet. She drew courage from him and from the brightly striped and colorfully embroidered bag crushed in her hand and deeply sunk into her jacket pocket.
Ken took her other hand as she hesitated on the front step. “Hey, oppa has your back.” But he didn’t say it with quite the same tone she had used all those weeks ago. If she had been less frightened that Moira was waiting just inside the door for her, less nervous that it was all a lie and she was returning only to be dismissed from the program, and less shaky as it slowly sank in that the other dancer had tried to kill her . . . if not for all those things, she might have identified his tone. There were three main situations in which a boy might be called ‘oppa’: in a true sibling relationship, or in the friendly tone she had used when they first met, or—even more commonly—in an affectionate way to someone who was, or who might be, an important and romantic feature in a girl’s life.
As it was, Hayan nodded without recognition. Ken smiled and squeezed her hand, walking in step with her up the stairs.
The doors burst open before they reached the top. Moira stumbled out, her arms flopping loosely, and fell back to lean against the doors as they closed.
“You!” she cried out, raising a trembling hand to point at Hayan. “I knew you weren’t dead. I could feel it gnawing at me.” Her cheeks were hollowed, her eyes deeply shadowed. “I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never felt anything. It was always easy. I was the best, and I left them behind.”
The red-haired girl seemed shrunken, her face almost at the same level as Hayan’s, her tights hanging loose from her legs, their pink clashing with the red ribbons tied at her ankles. “You are protected—those leotards you were wearing. But even when you weren’t. Nothing seemed to work. Even when I got my shoes back . . .” She took a deep breath, and for the length of that breath, despite the hollow, empty eyes, the matted hair, the bone-white skin, she was again the poised, perfect dancer.
Moira exhaled and became once more the broken doll. “I can’t do this. Not anymore. Take them. Use them better than I did.”
“I don’t want them.” Hayan felt her heart ache for the other dancer. There was so little left of Moira, but perhaps there was enough yet . . . “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how I can help you!”
She thought Moira was trembling and bent to pull a woollen wrap from her bag. With her eyes lowered she realized, confused, that Moira was on her toes, moving in a rapid bourrée—the small running steps almost on the spot. Her legs moved faster and faster, her feet a blur of red silk. “Take them, please!” the red-haired girl gasped. “Make it stop!” The last words came out almost as a wail as she was carried past them, down to the sidewalk.
Hayan and Ken both reached for her, but their grasping hands missed, their momentum twisting them to collide face-to-face. They turned quickly, but not before there was a squeal of brakes and a loud crunch. Even before they reached the base of the stairs, the truck driver had climbed out, a look of horror on his face.
“She just leapt out in front of me!” he cried. “A big jump, like dancers do.”
Ken gripped Hayan’s hand even more tightly as they followed the driver around the front of the truck. “She was right there,” the driver mumbled, sounding even more distressed. “I swear I saw her, red-haired little thing.”
Together, they bent down. There was no body. Just a pile of fine ash, already disappearing into the road slush, and a pair of blood-red ballet slippers, undamaged by use on concrete or the wet ground, the ribbons tied as if still around a pair of feet.
Once upon a time there was a young dancer who was not what she seemed.
In her first lifetime she had been a student. She was praised by her teachers, and if she had no friends, well, that meant fewer feelings were hurt when she inevitably was chosen for the lead role in the end-of-year shows, when her grade was higher than the others each term in their dance exams, and when the company directors lingered a little longer in her presence at the final year gala.
She was skilled, she was stubborn, and she was smart enough to find the promise, the kernel of truth hidden in the legend whispered in the dormitories of the junior school—to the one who could bear it, there was a great treasure to be snatched.
When she limped into the studio in her blood-red shoes, she still didn’t fully understand what she had been given, or what she had become.
Unending lifetimes stretched before her, and the perfect shoes to spend them dancing in. As long as she was the best, as long as she rose to become the principal of each company, as long as she suffered no rivals. But gifts of this kind are fickle, and humans, even if they no longer be completely human, are frail. Her predecessor could have told her, had she been around to ask.
Some bargains are better not made, and if made, are best broken, if one wishes to retain at least a part of one’s soul.
Coda
Jeong Hayan closed her eyes and squeezed Ken’s hand tightly.
“Ready?” he asked, and she knew from his tone that he was grinning, teeth glinting brightly in the dim light on the theatre side of the stage door.
She nodded firmly, and as he pushed on the bar that held the doors shut she opened her eyes to a bright wall of coats and faces made hazy by the tumbling snowflakes. The noise was incredible, and she was tempted for a moment to flee back into the calm dark of the theatre.
“Hayan! Jeong Hayan!” Doc, Robin and Honey waved wildly. She barely recognised them, dressed as they were for an evening out rather than class.
“You were amazing!” Honey held out a bright bouquet of red and yellow roses and blue irises.
“We wanted to be the first with flowers!” Doc shouted. “Your solo was great! Come and teach it to us after the season?”
“Good to see you too, Ken.” Robin smiled at him. “We spotted you in the Russian variation, but anything else?”
“Hiding behind a terrible beard! In the party scene!” He had to shout as some of the Company soloists came out and the crowd roared again, waving programmes and posters as they tried
to attract their favourites to sign them.
Ken wrapped one arm around Hayan’s waist, pulling her against him. “You did well, jagiy.”
She smiled up at him. “So did you.”
“Oh! Someone for you.” He broke his hold, turning her toward the barrier and a young girl with her black hair in an ornately decorated dancer’s bun. As Hayan approached, the girl held out a marker pen. And—Hayan felt her mouth dry at the sight—a pair of antique-looking deep-red pointe shoes. Moira’s, she remembered, had gone with the police. Surely, they weren’t the same ones?
“She’s not going to wear them.” The woman standing next to the young dancer said quickly, noticing Hayan’s hesitation. “She knows better than that. She’s just been so excited about meeting another Korean dancer, and we found them at a thrift store, so she . . . How about you tell her,” she instructed her daughter.
“Miss Jeong Hayan,” the girl recited carefully, though her excitement was clear, “would you please autograph my shoes?”
Hayan could feel the shoes’ interest in her, the sudden increase in intensity of desire to keep them, wear them. She could rise quickly in the company, become the dancer that every student aspired to emulate.
She smiled. “Certainly, Miss . . .?”
“Seo-yeon!” The answer came quickly and was accompanied by a nervous giggle.
“That is a very pretty name,” Hayan told her. “Can you read hangul?”
“A little. Mom’s teaching me.”
“All right then.” Hayan uncapped the pen and carefully wrote the angular letters across the firm toe of one shoe. With each line she felt the shoes’ influence fading, and as she handed them back, it was diminished to a dull muttering on the edge of audible. She gave the shoes and the pen back to Seo-yeon. “Lovely to meet you. Perhaps one day I’ll stand here and get your autograph.”
Seo-yeon looked up at her, eyes wide and star-filled.
“Thank you,” her mother prompted.
“Thank you,” the girl whispered.
They turned away and were quickly lost in the crowd.
Hayan turned her face toward the distant clouds and falling snowflakes, her collar tucking itself more closely around her neck. She poked the tip of her tongue out, tasting the salt and oil of city snow.
Beside her, Ken snorted. “I saw that.”
She moved closer, resting her head on his shoulder, “I know.”
Rachael Wallen lives in New Zealand, with her husband Andy, in a house full of books.
She is a full-time Christian and Paramedic, a part-time ballet student, photographer, and world traveler. An alumni of Writer's Window, “Snowbird and the Red Slippers” is her first published work.
Visit Rachael at: www.rachaelwallen.blogspot.com
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