HAD No. 5: To be the best.
The slipper had worked for Natasha, and so far Skye had managed to keep all her HADs alive. For the past week, the elimination
assembly the Jackie O’s all feared had not materialized. Shira had been called away on urgent business, and school had chugged
along as usual in her absence. Paranoia was running high, what with the additional eyes glued to every ceiling, but Skye had
kept her head in the game. She had earned Charlie’s forgiveness for bringing dancers into the tunnel by promising to come
clean to Shira and take the blame if it ever came up.
The hardest HAD to honor was actually a spectacular success. For the past week, she had ignored Taz’s endlessly flattering,
dangerously tempting stream of text messages. Shira’s most kissable son, famous for dating models and starlets, was cryogenically
frozen in Skye’s heart; she would only thaw him out once she had proven herself to Mimi. The only thing Skye needed to do
now was earn the title of best dancer at the Academy. Triple had Mimi wrapped around her calloused toes, but today all that
was about to change. The new, disciplined Skye was about to demote Triple Threat to Double Trouble.
Two earsplitting hand-claps and the jangling of twenty thin gold bracelets announced Mimi’s entrance. Intimidating and gorgeous
in a low-cut black leotard and an electric blue dovetail skirt that showed off her burnished caramel skin, Mimi inspired awe
and fear in equal measure. Skye plastered a toothy smile on her face and stood at attention next to the barre, trying to look
nonchalant even though her future at Alpha Academy depended on today’s performance.
A few more dancers had arrived moments before, still in chat mode as they unzipped their hoodies. Mimi narrowed her golden
eyes at them, her mouth pursed in a glossed, furious
O
.
“Mouths closed, toes pointed! If I wanted to hear what you had to say, I would have become a shrink and not a choreographer!”
Mimi made eye contact with Skye and acknowledged her with a slight tilt of her chignoned head. “Show me how you feel with
your bodies! Music… on! Up-tempo, major key, updated funk!”
A half second later, the studio’s voice-activated music library made its selection, and the room was a swirl of drums, horns,
and booty-shaking soul. “Positions, please!” Mimi yelled. “Sleeves, far right, front corner! Let’s see what you can bring
to the sequence. We’re picking back up from the step-ball-change, dancers! Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one two three four!”
The floor of the studio bounced with the pressure of the sequence, a series of jetés and leaps combined with the hip-pops
and boom-shaka-laka drop-and-recovers in a kind of hip-hop-meets-classical-dance hybrid. Skye felt the rhythm of the dance
reverberate through her legs and spread through her whole body. She knew every twirl, every flip of the hand and roll of the
hips, because she’d studied them so carefully while sitting on the sidelines. Her muscles twanged like the strings of a guitar.
She could make them sing any song she wanted today. And she wasn’t even tempted to throw in a Skye-style flourish. Out of
the corner of her eye, she saw Prue and Triple hip-thrust-and-turn and up-two-three-four in perfect synchronicity with her.
Her body and spirit soared with the music as she matched her fellow dancers step for step. Mimi’s appraising eyes rested on
her, but she continued to look straight ahead, smiling.
She was back
.
When the music stopped, Skye let her shoulders roll back and planted her feet in second position, panting from exertion. She’d
nailed it.
“Sleeves, again. Solo this time,” said Mimi. “Music, repeat!”
On top already!
Skye danced the sequence again, careful not to incorporate any of her usual head bobs, extra hip swivels, or anything else
where her desire to express herself overshadowed the routine. Finally, she was doing the thing that set her free, that made
her feel beautiful, like she was on this earth for a reason beyond boys, beyond besties. It was the way she always felt at
Body Alive, her old dance studio, where she was such a huge star that her instructor, Madame P, left her in charge of the
entire class during pee breaks. The drums throbbed through her, guiding her switch-twirl, her body as stretchy and pliable
as a rubber band and as strong as a racehorse, powering through every move.
When the music stopped and Skye dropped her arms, a smattering of grudging applause erupted from the dancers.
That showed them.
Skye smiled, trying to look modest while soaking up admiration she knew she had earned. She raised an eyebrow at Triple, feeling
cocky and letting it show. Triple looked away, and Skye could almost smell defeat oozing from her invisible, exfoliated pores.
Ha!
“Nice kick at the end, Skye,” said Prue, flashing her a thumbs-up.
Skye thought she heard her aPod flash from the corner of the studio, where she’d left it stuffed under her hoodie. Couldn’t
Taz leave her alone for half an hour? She quickly replanted her gaze on Mimi.
“Sleeves, can you tell us what you were thinking about while you were dancing?”
That I was onstage at Madison Square Garden with a hundred thousand people chanting my name? That I was kicking Triple’s conceited
butt? That I was the best?
None of these answers would do, obviously.
“I was thinking about how much I still had to learn from everyone, from you, and how I wanted to stick to the essence of the
routine. And I thought about the
tradition
of jazz dancing, the
fundamentals
, and how important it is to master those core moves before I make my own additions.” It was butt-kissy, but it was the kind
of answer Mimi would eat up. Skye smiled brightly at her instructor, anticipating long-awaited words of praise.
“And that,” said Mimi, turning on the three-inch heel of her Capezio Salsa Moderna, facing the dancers gathered on one side
of the studio, “is why Sleeves is out of sync with the music.”
What?
“The mind should be quiet when dancing.
Feel
, don’t think! Your answer was still all about
you
, Sleeves, about where
you
fit in. It needs to be about the
dance
, about your spirit, not your ego. Andrea is the only one of you who dances with her spirit.” Mimi looked over at Triple Threat,
who was suddenly all smiles and noticeably puffed up like a person with a shellfish allergy who’d just downed a sushi boat.
Andrea? Triple Threat?! But she’s a dance-bot! She has no passion!
Skye blinked back tears and swallowed a mouthful of rage.
“Andrea, please dance the sequence solo. Music, repeat!”
As the bass pumped out of the speakers and Triple moved in her usual robotic, uninspired style, Skye’s eyes wandered toward
her sweatshirt crumpled in the corner of the room and then returned to the somber group of her fellow dancers, all of whom
nodded as if they actually saw a difference between the two dancers, as if Triple really
was
better.
Traitors! Philistines!
That was when a realization hit Skye, more powerfully and offensively than the reek of two weeks of unwashed leotards: No
matter what she did, no matter how hard she worked or how much she tried to suppress her own style, she would never convince
Mimi that she had passion. Triple would always be number one, because Mimi had already made up her mind.
Then what’s the point in trying?
Skye watched Triple dance, but instead of music, she heard the beating of her own heart thundering in her ears. Mimi hated
her, and dancing at Alpha Academy was nothing more than adapting to new forms of humiliation. Skye would never achieve her
HADs from within these transparent walls. She wasn’t going to make her mother proud and become a world-famous dancer.
And just like that, as if a jangly hand-clap from Mimi had stopped her in the middle of a routine, Skye reset her priorities.
You win, Triple. You can have all of this.
“Class dismissed!” barked Mimi. “Work on it, Sleeves!”
Skye looked at the floor and nodded, vowing that nobody in this room would get the satisfaction of seeing her cry. By the
time she had crossed the room to retrieve her pile of warm-up clothes and check her phone for forbidden texts, it was obvious
what the next step was. If Plan A fails, move on to Plan B.
Plan Boys.
JACKIE O
ALLIE A’S BED
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH
8:46 P.M.
The sleeping quarters of the Jackie O House reverberated with the soothing sounds of Peruvian wind instruments, but Allie
A. Abbott was anything but soothed. Next to a nightstand littered with gum wrappers, Allie lay curled up like a comma on her
bed. Her Alpha-issued gold nightgown was more than warm enough for the September night, but Allie shivered as her mind ran
through the events of the past two weeks. She rolled over, trying not to think about it.
Allie looked around at her fellow Jackie O’s, each girl sprawled on her canopied bed in a posture of pseudo-relaxation. After
nearly three weeks on Alpha Island, Allie felt certain that nobody ever
really
let their guard down at Alpha Academy. The girls chosen to attend Shira’s new school had grown up working their butts off
to be the biggest fish in their small ponds, and now that they were gathered together, the place was a shark tank.
Skye lay in the bed to Allie’s right, her blond wavelets reaching almost to her butt, cracking her wrists in bed and brooding
about dance class. Allie could hear her muttering,
“One-two-three-four, I’m not dancing anymore”
under her breath as she flexed and pointed her feet. Skye’s champagne-shiny cami and boy shorts skimmed a perfect dancer’s
body, lean and toned like a cheetah, capable of executing any combination of moves. Allie knew she was mega-talented—Skye
was just going through a post-injury setback. To Allie’s left sat Charlie, cross-legged and serious, hunched over a laptop
and absorbed in a furious bout of pre-sleep coding for one of her ingenious technological projects. She chewed her lower lip
in concentration, and Allie marveled at how well she pulled off her geek-chic style: Charlie’s mahogany-brown hair, piled
high on her head in a messy bun, perfectly complemented her nerd-core rectangular black plastic glasses. Luckily, she only
needed them for close-up stuff like coding and reading.
Whether it was an innate talent from birth or from growing up around Shira, dreaming big was something Charlie knew how to
do. It had been Charlie who had arranged for Allie to meet up with Darwin in the island’s secret underground tunnel for the
best few minutes of Allie’s life so far: kissing Darwin’s pillowy, cinammon-scented lips. It would be Charlie—the girl who
had made life at Alphas not just livable but truly fun—who she would hurt most of all if the secret of her middle initial
was revealed.
Allie
A
, aspiring mall model, had faked her way into Alpha Academy by pretending to be Allie
J
, the famous eco-songwriter pop star.
And as of two weeks ago, Shira knew all about it.
In a fit of paranoia, Allie reached up and patted the kohl-mole above her upper lip, a crucial part of her disguise that she
had to stealthily redraw with eyeliner every morning. Patting her mole was one of the many nut-job tics she’d adopted since
she started masquerading as Allie J, whose acceptance letter had been mistakenly sent to Allie’s house in suburban Santa Ana,
California. Allie J was Allie A’s only ticket into the Academy. No way would Shira Brazille ever invite a bubbly blonde whose
greatest skill was an encyclopedic knowledge of celebrity culture.
Allie sighed and looked past Charlie to the next bed, home to the sleep-obsessed Andrea. Andrea, aka Triple Threat, came with
enough diva-tude for three, but at the moment her energies were devoted to highlighting passages of
From Outback to Riches: The Shira Brazille Story
.
What a kiss-up
, Allie thought, rolling her contact-lens-enhanced eyes.
Finally, Allie’s eyes landed on the last bed in the room, where the soap actress Renee had slept before getting kicked out
of the Academy for flirting with the Brazille brothers. Renee’s empty bed was a daily reminder for Allie that her neck could
be next on the chopping block.
Thalia, the Jackie O house muse, stood in the back of the bedroom and pushed a button on the touch-screen projector embedded
in the wall. The windows that moments ago revealed a clear, dark ocean; the tops of açaí palm trees; and all twelve constellations
of stars were suddenly filled with Thalia’s carefully curated photographs of inspirational women. Allie leaned against a stack
of pillows and watched Princess Diana working with land-mine victims, Oprah hugging African children, Queen Noor of Jordan
giving a speech at the UN, Diane von Furstenberg sketching a design on a huge piece of butcher paper. Each picture came with
a tagline trademarked by Brazille Industries for use in Shira’s wildly popular Female Empowerment Workshops (FEWs).
Allie watched the slideshow absently, hoping nobody else could hear the frantic sounds her jaw made as she chomped on piece
after piece of cinnamon gum.
A
bsolute focus!
(Chomp chomp chomp)
L
eaders of tomorrow!
(Smack)
P
ositivity leads to excellence!
(Crinkle—new piece)
H
it your mark!
(Slobber, drool)
A
spire to greatness!
(Pop—oops!)
The slideshow was nice in theory, but the only words running through Allie’s brain were
fraud
,
fake
,
liar
, and
busted
.
Allie looked up at the glass-domed ceiling and felt like a creature on display in a human-size terrarium. Not for the first
time, she pictured everyone she knew back home—namely her ex-boyfriend, Fletcher, and her ex-bestie Trina, but her parents,
too, even her old teachers—watching her squirm in a hidden-camera mocumentary called
The Joke’s on Allie
.