Elle
“I’m so sorry,” Stassi says upon entering the room. Her wide, sympathetic gaze flies to my freshly bandaged feet. “… If I’d known what he was planning…”
If she’d known, would she have told me?
Over the past month, Stassi, Aria and I have been growing closer. We’d shared secrets like Stassi getting a mini gastric sleeve last summer, and that, according to her mother, it’d failed because she only lost a few kilos before coming to a standstill. She’s still insanely curvy and so beautiful it’s hard to understand why her mother can’t see it.
Then there’s Aria, who confessed her romantic feelings about her soon-to-be stepbrother to me. The very same stepbrother Rin’s been whispering to on the phone in the bathroom.
I’d spilled a secret to them too, that I had fallen in love with my bully, their childhood best friend. Rin thinks their split alliance is lost on me, but it isn’t. It’s the reason I won’t tell them about Rin and my plan to win because I won’t be a complete idiot twice, blindly believing anyone’s sweet words and sympathies.
Especially not their ‘sorries’. Not Gant’s. Not Jaime’s. Not Stassi and Aria’s, although they have nothing to be sorry for, unless their guilt is simply over having such a callous, manipulative beast for a friend.
No matter how badly it hurts to put a wall between me and the only female friends I finally have, I have to. They’re Gant’s friends first, and I can’t hold that against them, just like I won’t push them away entirely. I can’t be an island in this game. I need cards, pieces, and pawns to move around. Stassi’s the first piece I’m going to move. That’s why I’d texted her.
I shake my head and smile sadly. “You warned me about Gant on my very first day at Beaulieu. You told me to leave. I didn’t listen.”
“There’s no excuse. He doesn’t know when to stop.”
I don’t miss that she’s intentionally not using his name for my sake. She looks like she’s about to cry, but Aria…Aria looks the way her eyes sometimes make me feel. Frozen. They’re a mesmerising blue-green, but in the right lighting, they’re mostly blue, and today, they resemble glaciers. And yet she says something I don’t expect, given her frosty demeanour.
“I’m sorry too.”
“For what?” I ask, realising her expression isn’t for me at all. Something’s weighing on her because she isn’t looking at me; she’s staring through me.
“I got rid of the shoebox,” she says quietly, eyeing my feet. “I don’t know who got their hands on it and brought it to the theatre.”
My heart thunders to a stop.
I know that Aria’s closer to Gant than Stassi is, but unlike his horsemen, I never thought she was so close that he’d tell her his plan. Why does it shock me? Why does anything shock me anymore?
I can almost hear the invisible walls flying up even higher between us. Far higher than I’d been preparing to build.
“You knew about the box all along?” I ask, my throat so damn dry it could spark a flame.
Stassi looks at her best friend, horrified. “Ari… no.” She shakes her head. “You didn’t…”
“I didn’t know all along,” Aria says defensively. “I knew right before the play started when it was too late to tell you even if I wanted to, . You were about to go on stage and the last thing I wanted was to fuck with your head. With your performance. I know how much those scouts meant to you.”
“Would you have told me after if I’d never put them on? Or did you think it was okay since you’d intervened in his plan? No harm, no foul, right?”
Aria says nothing.
We both know the answer. Her alliance is with Gant. I knew that. I know that. So why does it still hurt?
“Why did you ask to come to the hospital with me?” Stassi asks quietly.
“What?” Aria pulls her frosty gaze away from me and blinks up at Stassi.
“It’s clear whose side you’re on,” Stassi says, her voice hollow. “Shouldn’t you be comforting his bitch ass instead?”
I can see the cracks deepening in Aria’s expression, cracks that started forming in the summer when Stassi went M.I.A without a word.
“Side?” Aria asks incredulously.
“Gant’s side. You said you weren’t taking any, but you have. His petty pranks are cruel but expected. But this…. Potentially ruining a dancer’s career? Even as an ice skater, you should understand how vile that is—”
“I did understand. Why do you think I took them?” Aria snaps. “Besides, I knew they were tampered with, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t see the glass in them.”
“Put two and two together,” Stassi hisses. “You saw he had a pair of pointe shoes the same colour as Cinderella’s for the finale. You were supposed to be Cinderella! You knew the costume. You knew!”
The ice trickling down my spine hardens into icicles. I knew that Gant was responsible for Aria dropping out of the play, but the fact that she’d probably planned to do so from the very beginning…
Why am I so stupid? Why did I think we could ever be friends?
“What did it matter if I’d already taken them?” Aria insists. “I got rid of them. Rid of whatever his plan was at that time. I thought I was doing the right thing.” Her eyes, full of sudden desperation, fly from Stassi to me as if pleading with us to understand her point of view.
“So you took them, and you were going to keep quiet about it while encouraging me to be with him?” I croak. “You’ve always encouraged me to be with him because it’s what he wanted.”
“No.” She shakes her head, her curls bouncing. “It’s because I saw how good you were for him, even when he couldn’t see it.”
“But did you see how awful he was for me back then? When he tormented me?”
“ — ”
“I get it,” I say, that iciness finally causing a numbness to spread through me. “On the first day of the academy, you said that we weren’t friends. You’re Gant’s friend first. Not mine. I can’t blame you for guarding his best interests.”
“I can,” Stassi says, the venom thinly veiled in her tone. “’s new to the group, but you didn’t tell me that you were liaising with him.”
“ Liaising? ” Aria asks incredulously.
“So what the fuck do you call it?”
“Being a friend! Someone to lean on in a time of need. Gant was cracking like a fucking egg, not that you noticed or cared. We were here, you were gone all summer, treating us like an afterthought. Yet you’re acting like you’re a better friend than me.”
“Because I am!”
“For who?” Aria hisses back with just as much venom. “? Why not me? The person you’ve known since childhood.”
Stassi slumps, backing down a fraction.“Last summer wasn’t anything personal, okay? It was complicated. You wouldn’t have understood.”
“You never gave me the chance to. What? You think I couldn’t handle the idea of you having gastric surgery?”
So she found out.
“I didn’t tell her,” I say quietly, long after the secret leaves her lips.
“But I was supposed to tell on Gant,” Aria says, looking between Stassi and me. “See how hypocritical that is? We all kept secrets.”
“That’s different,” Stassi grits. “Aria, your body’s perfect, okay? Some things I can’t share with you because how could you relate?”
“Perfect?”
“Yes! Fucking perfect.”
“Who the fuck are you to decide? Who are you to say what I can and can’t relate to?”
“ Please, you’re so perfect even Madame, with her impossible prima ballerina exceptions and delusions fawned all over you. Everyone always did. Everyone wants to be you. Every mother wants you to be their daughter! Not Miss Piggy.” Undeniable hurt etches deep between her brows at the last word that cracked in her throat.
Had her mother called her that? For the first time, I can feel the resentment laced in Stassi’s demeanour, and I can see that her secret surgery was about far more than Aria simply not understanding.
Aria scoffs, but her eyes are suddenly sheened with tears. “Oh, you want to talk about mothers? Fine. Yours is a bitch, and don’t flinch because you’ve called her that since we were ten. Now, let’s talk about fathers.”
Stassi doesn’t respond, but her shaking bottom lip slips between her teeth.
“My body’s so perfect. Is that why my father’s racist family won’t meet me because I look so perfect? So pale and blonde…oh wait, that’s you , but I’m perfect.”
Stassi’s clenched jaw loosens, the tension slipping from her shoulders.
Damn.
“I’m a darkie to them, and you think I wouldn’t understand how it feels to be rejected over something I can’t control? To have my own family see me as a creature, a thing , an it . An abomination that’s diluted his fair genes. I’m not even a person to them, just like your mother equates you to a mere dress size. But I’m that fucking perfect.”
Stassi looks horrified, her mouth dropping open. “Aria—”
“You’ve made up your mind about me. Fine .” Aria’s eyes, full of welling tears she won’t ever let fall in front of us, snap to mine. “I threw those pointe shoes down the rubbish shoot into the bin. Someone took them out. Someone followed me from Gant’s dorm, and they saw me put them in there.”
“Yeah, Gant,” I say, far more coolly than I feel.
Aria shakes her head. “It wasn’t him, and I’m going to prove it.”
“It’ll change nothing,” I say flatly.
“Nevertheless.” She turns on her heel before pausing, her gaze flickering to the bathroom door. “Oh, and I’m glad you feel that way about friendships. I mean, it’s not like I’d ask you to shift your loyalty either. Even after knowing how I feel about him and how badly it hurts, you still befriended…Your friendships are your own, so I’m glad we’re on the same page.”
I swallow hard, a lump forming in the pit of my stomach.
It hadn’t even occurred to me how my scheming with Rin could affect Aria. Here I am putting up invisible walls, and she’d been doing the same for weeks because somehow she’d found out.
We watch in silence as she disappears into the hallway. When the click of her heels tapers off, Stassi says, “What is she talking about?”
I shrug half-heartedly. “Not sure.”
Stassi doesn’t push, her tired eyes focused on the spot Aria disappeared from. “Are you ready to go?”
I nod before digging into the clear plastic bag of my belongings for the tiniest part of my costume the medical staff had taken off of me that night. I’ve been paranoid over someone stealing it, but the second a cool circle of metal slips around the tip of my finger, I know that not even Rin realised it was there.
Gant hadn’t just put a fuck ton of glass in my pointe shoes, he’d also slid a chunk of it onto my finger. Well, it resembles glass, anyway.
“Did you tell him we were coming?” I ask.
“You asked me not to. You didn’t think I’d actually listen to you.”
It’s not a question.
“Of course, I wouldn’t. He’d just tell…”
“You can say his name, Stas. I’m not afraid of it or him.”
“He’d tell Gant .” She sinks onto the edge of the bed. “Look, I’ve known and loved Gant since forever, but wrong is wrong. Keeping this from him isn’t the same as keeping a secret that could ruin his life. Not like he tried to ruin yours.”
“Thank you,” I say seriously. “Can we make a stop first, though?”
“Where?” she asks, brows knitted as I show her my hand. The ring Gant gave me on the night of the play shimmers prettily on my finger.
“It almost looks real,” I whisper, trying not to get distracted by the sparkle.
“It is real.”
“Twenty seconds!” a stagehand calls.
“What?!”
“I wanted to see what the real thing could look like… one day. So I swapped it out.”
“Why would you do that? “ I gasp. “It’s just pretend, remember?”
He kisses me again. “Pretend is just a warm-up.”
I tear my gaze from the gorgeous diamond sparkling on my finger and eye Stassi’s diamond studs.
“Do you know good jewellery appraisers?”
Stassi looks at it in awe. “Are diamonds a girl’s best friend?”
Yes, because this little shiny rock is my best ally.
For now.