I killed my sister and felt nothing.
I woke up this morning disappointed to be alive and was given ballet shoes by a man who makes that disappointment harder to justify with each passing day.
I am wounded and cold and tired and empty and standing on a stage in shoes that fit like they were made for me because they were, waiting for music to tell my body to do the thing my heart no longer remembers how to do on its own.
Feel something.
Be something.
Even if only for three minutes and forty-seven seconds.
The first note has not yet sounded.
But I am ready.
Because whether I’m worthless to the world or not, whether the clock is ticking down to dismissal or death or some fate in between that I haven’t imagined yet, whether the girls in the wings think I’m a marionette or a mannequin or a ghost that refuses to accept its own haunting?—
The show of existing in the heart of Knot Academy goes on.
CHAPTER 6
Completed
~VICTORIA~
The music finds me before I find it.
The first notes emerge from the auditorium’s speakers with a warmth that the space itself doesn’t possess—rich, unhurried, carrying the particular resonance of a song recorded by someone who understood that silence between notes is as important as the notes themselves. The sound fills the empty seats and the high ceilings and the dust-filtered columns of light with something that almost resembles tenderness, which is a dangerous thing to introduce into an environment built for anything but.
My body responds before my mind gives permission.
That’s the thing about dance—the thing that no amount of emotional fortification or practiced numbness can account for. The body has its own memory, its own language, its own relationship with music that operates independently of whatever psychological architecture you’ve constructed to keep yourself from feeling things. My spine lengthens. My weight shifts. My arms begin their ascent from my sides with the slow, deliberate grace of something unfolding after a long compression, and the new ballet shoes—Hawk’s impossible, beautiful, Parisianballet shoes—grip the marley floor with a whispered promise of movement.
Back like we never left
Been waiting on the better version of you
The lyrics arrive like a letter addressed to someone I used to be.
I move into the opening sequence—a series of slow, sustained port de bras that transition into a controlled développé, my right leg extending from passé to full height with the measured precision of a limb that has performed this motion ten thousand times and can execute it now without conscious instruction. The extension is clean, the line unbroken from hip to pointed toe, and the stretch pulls at the bandages beneath my bodysuit with a dull reminder that the body currently producing beauty was bleeding on a kitchen floor twelve hours ago.
I don’t care.
The pain is background noise.
The music is everything.
You used to be tethered to an old truth
We were worn like leather in an old shoe
The lyrics settle into my bloodstream like the pain medication I swallowed this morning—chemical and efficient, bypassing the rational mind to reach something deeper.Tethered to an old truth.The phrase catches in my chest and holds, because it’s accurate in a way that the songwriter could never have intended and that I could never have predicted when I pressed Shazam on a cracked phone screen while bleeding against concrete last night.
I was tethered.
To an old truth.
To the truth that being born an Omega in the Sinclair family meant being born into a war I didn’t declare and couldn’t opt out of.
