Red Pointe Shoes

Chapter 1

AN: So yeah, I've been gone for literally ages. However, the other day I read through some of my old stuff for fun, and I saw this. Some of the comments literally hit me with muse and guilt. So here is a short chapter to settle my guilt c: I'm not sure when I can post again, due to school and a broken computer, but I will when I can.

Chapter 1

That was ten years ago.

Ten years without my mother, ten years without hearing her voice or feeling her gentle caress on my face. Ten long years without love. I don't blame my father for what he became after my mom died. I must confess, I was mad at him at the start, but as I grew I slowly understood that he loved her very much, and losing her completely shattered him. It wasn't that bad after the first eight years, because that was then I was enrolled into Richardson's School of the Sports and Arts. I fulfilled my promise to myself and my mother and trained hard to be the dancer I am today. I found friends and a name for myself, I found a different type of love.

The love of my friends helped me to pull myself out of the depression I was in.

One friend in particular became very close to me, and we knew each other's stories as well as our own. She knew about my mom, I knew about her brother. Natalie Sinclair became my best friend. I first met Nat during the orientation, two years ago. We were assigned room mates, and the first time I saw her was over a box of old posters and books. She was quiet, oddly so, but that suited me just fine. For a while, we moved around each other like all too efficient clockwork.

A term went by quickly, and everything was normal. That was until I walked into the dorm one night after a particularly wicked dance lesson and found her sitting on her bed, tears trickling down her deathly pale face. I was scared then- I had seen Nat laugh, I had witnessed her tempers, but I had never seen her cry. Not when she received news that her hamster died, nor when she sprained her ankle. It turned out that her elder brother was diagnosed with stage three brain cancer.

My heart went out to her. I mean, my mother had died from leukaemia when I was a child. I knew her sorrow.

"He might die," Nat had said, her voice thick with grief, "and I'll lose him." But she didn't, in the end. By some miracle, her brother had survived a operation, and was now on his way to recovery.

Now with our hearts much lighter than when we had first met, we opened up much more to become the happy go lucky pair people now know us as. We are the two inseparable Dancers, the ones with a constant smile on our faces and the ones with the lead roles in the end of year productions.

Smiles hide secrets though, and I know mine hides a lot. I'm not only Avery Lim, the Eurasian dancer of Richardson's, I am also Sentenial- one of the few female underground fighters in the school. No one knows about this, save for my mother, and not even Nat knows. There's only one reason to keep this a secret: Rivalry.

Within the pristine halls of Richardson's, there is an old bitter rivalry between the two faculties of Ballet and Martial Arts. Why? No one really knows, it has been around for too long. The Trainees think the dancers are every little bit the spoiled, stuck up brats most media portrays us as and the dancers think the trainees are all brawn and no brain, crude and violent. You get the gist. If I were to be found out as a dancer in the Underground, the fighting ring, the end result wouldn't be pretty. 

The Underground Championships and end of year production auditions are both a week away. This year, I am determined to walk away with both the Championship title and the lead role. It will be hard, I know, and it will require a lot of time. Time is something I do not have in abundance. Training, dancing, studying, sleeping. It has all become one big blur as time seems to speed up. I will pull through this, I know. How do I know? I am my mother's daughter- and if she didn't go without a fight, neither will I.