"She's right here." Jazzy says.
"Thanks." I pass her and sit down next to Elena in the green room. "Hey, bookworm." I say.
"Hey." She mumbles back, finishing a sentence. I take her pen out if her hand and set it down.
"We need to talk." She bites her lip.
"I'm not very good at that sorta thing."
"Talking."
"Yeah." She turns her binder back to the front and pulls something out of the front pocket and hands it to me. "I hope you like to read." I laugh and unfold it. The letter is an apology. It's not very long but er handwriting and language are nice. She speaks fine but from what I've read of hers she has a way with words in writing.
"I appreciate this. I know I came down pretty hard on you and the school wasn't a great place to do that. I just hate to see you kill yourself. I looked at your transcripts and extracurricular activities, where you've worked, academic, art, and writing awards, performances, an internship last year, tons of volunteer work and I'm looking at you and I just see a girl breaking."
"I'm really okay, though."
"You can't fit that into a schedule, okay?"
"Lin. You have to understand that I didn't have home then. I was always doing something."
"What do you mean? You were in foster care and then with your brother." She tucks he hair behind her ear, grabbing her pen and starting to fiddle with it. "Lane?"
"I got unlucky. I didn't want to go through it all so I didn't go home. Not often at least. I stayed at the bookstore and friends houses and my brothers friends houses. The skateboard shop. Anywhere. And I just spent endless hours at the library and in school. I got a lot done. I've slowed down."
"What didn't you want to deal with?"
"Everything." She says, quietly.
"I'm gonna need a little more than that." She bites her lip again. "Okay." I say, moving on. "Let's go to the stage. The cast is meeting there before the show."
-
Elena sits in the edge of the stage, legs dangling off of it. I realize that she almost always wears black tights or leggings in her school clothes.
"Lane." Carleigh calls. I watch her get up and meet Carleigh near the center of the stage before I look back at my computer.
"Because I can't dance in a school uniform." I hear Elena comment a minute later.
"Sure you can."
"Hey don't you dance at school?"
"It's a combined arts literature and history course."
"But you dance?" She nods. "In you're uniform."
"They let us change for dancing but more that half the class is spent at a desk. So no, I do not dance in a uniform."
"That's a lie." Carleigh says. She rolls her eyes and looks back at her book.
