Following a failed pickpocket attempt, a fall from some stage rafters, and an audition that she never imagined in her wildest dreams, Mare Barrow, street felon by day and wistful ballerina by night, one day finds herself as a dancer for Manhattan's...
I hope that in these hard times, everybody's finding their way of coping with social isolation and possible loss of loved ones. Whether or not you've been directly impacted by the COVID-19 virus, my thoughts go out to all of my readers and your families. I hope you can find some happiness to your day in my writing. :)
As most of you have, I've had a lot of time off due to the virus. I've made a lot of changes to the first part of my fanfiction, a list that I will later be posting on my profile. Now that I have fully edited my story to my liking, I will be posting at least once a week; let's go with every Saturday and a potential second update in the middle of the week.
Before break, my Graphic Arts class designed logos. I made one for my fictional company, The Manhattan Dance Academy. Here it is!
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Part 2 — The Rise of the Fighters
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"So your family's been in the Hamptons all week, and you've been in your penthouse all alone?" I ask Maven to clarify, spaghetti noodles dangling off my fork.
Maven only shrugs. "More or less. Our security guards might as well be family, so my parents have had a few extra stay in the guest bedrooms. Some of my friends from my old school and their parents offered to take me in for the week, but my mom wanted me at home. She knows how they can be."
Crossing my legs at the ankle, I sit back in my chair at the restaurant Maven and I walked to for lunch. It's become a tradition of ours to go out once a week, ever since we discovered the two of us have more in common than one would think.
Save for the first time, we always come to a consensus on where we go and split the bill in half. Today we decided on a crowded Italian restaurant bedecked in wooden chairs, brick walls, and hanging lights, sandwiched smack in the middle of Times Square. For all that this neighborhood is, the restaurant is a simple one, though Maven's told me it has the best pasta I'll ever eat.
"What?" I say. "Are the boys there that bad?" Though I suppose I don't need to ask, considering Maven went to one of the most elite private schools in the state until he had to switch online to manage dance. Rich boys are always spending up their money the usual way: parties, drugs, and sex.
He shakes his head, but his cringe indicates otherwise. "I don't think they're . . . that bad, but my parents do. I'm not sure who else they expected me to make friends with at that school, though. They're all full of themselves and spend their every breath trying to impress each other so they make it into the right social circle by the time they graduate. It's pathetic."
Though I've lived in Midtown for almost two months, his lifestyle is still the most foreign thing. The way Maven talks about the parts of his week I don't see—his old prep school, the studies at Columbia he crammed in before he became a Corps dancer, the galas and dinners he's been forced to attend over the years, his father's dynasty—makes it all seem like something out of a fiction novel half the time. But the other half . . . I swallow another forkful of spaghetti, laden with fresh tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella cheese, and smile at him.
