CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next day I realized that Dani viewed our friendship as pretty much non-existent. She purposely sat on the opposite end of the classroom that we normally sat at, and at lunch Nobuko and I couldn't find her anywhere. She stopped showing up to dance practice altogether, and I took her place in her dance group for the winter show. I tried to tell myself that I was fine with that, but the only time I could really believe it was when I was with Dane.
Over the next few weeks we entered fall, then the beginnings of winter, but life itself didn't change much. I tried my best to come up with dance moves to teach the four girls that were chosen to dance with me, and every Thursday we worked on the routine we'd perform at the winter show. It was decided that I'd be featured in two dances - one on my own, somewhere in the middle of the show, and one as the finale with the other four girls. I didn't feel I was so good at dancing to deserve two numbers of my own, but Dane and about half the club insisted that it was absolutely necessary.
I spent time with Dane almost every day, and Friday became our unofficial date night. He was a wonderful gentleman, too – he never once got touchy, and while he was a fantastic kisser, his kisses were always sweet, short and simple. We never ran out of things to talk about. We agreed about how silly the stereotype was that all people from Colorado wear cowboy outfits, we critiqued our favorite bands and movies on a critical, intellectual level, we even debated the right way to eat an ice cream cone. We talked about serious stuff, too. I told him all about my life (barring the paranormal stuff) - the earliest move I could remember and how it felt when I realized that my family was different for moving so often, how I felt about all my siblings and what their personalities were like, my regrets over not keeping in touch with some of the friends I moved away from, but how my philosophies about constantly moving saved me so much pain. He told me about how he only lived in one other city his whole life, and how it crushed him when he had to move when he was twelve. His parents had divorced at that time, and he chose to live with his father. His father had remarried when Dane was a sophomore to a woman much, much younger than Dane's biological mother. It was really weird for him at first, but she grew on him. She was currently 5 months pregnant and Dane was looking forward to having a younger sibling. The whole school viewed us as a couple and I was teased about it occasionally, but it was always friendly, and I ended up forging new friendships with some of the people Dane knew.
I almost never wore my necklace any more. I trained myself to know when I could feel myself losing control of my emotions so that I could either retrieve it or find a moment to dance, but I was dancing on almost a daily basis, so I felt fairly secure in leaving it home most days. I felt like I was living a new, fresh, vibrant life, even though my routines didn’t actually change on a day to day basis.
Not everything was rainbows and sunshine, though.
Dad just got worse. Soon he was losing weight and his skin was getting paler, and it was difficult to tell if it was that which made the skin around his eyes and mouth seem darker, or if it was because they were, in fact, getting darker. We eventually got a couple of letters from mom, containing vague statements about her work and how she was doing and they never gave a definite return date. Terra and Alvin were excited to receive the letters, but I suspected that it was a situation like you see on crime shows, where the kidnappers allow the victim to make a phone call so their family knows that the victim is still alive. I felt like a coward – I didn’t want to ask Dad about what was going on and how I could help, and I was still afraid to ask for help from the other few supernaturals I knew. It took all the courage I had due to my paranoia about being attacked, but at one point I did sneak out to the graveyard to ask a couple of ghosts if they had seen Jack or if their network knew if something had happened to my mother, but they answered negative on both counts. I felt stupid for bothering them and didn’t return.
I had pretty much given up on Jack, too. I resigned myself to the fact that he was a supernatural being, and that as such he probably had to leave at a moment’s notice to help someone somewhere else. After all, my parents had to constantly move us because of their connection to the world of magic.
As much as I tried to tell myself that, though, there was the fact that Mina taunted me on a regular basis. She never spoke, never even laughed, she just made sure to catch my gaze and give me a smug smirk or walk super close to my desk and leave that awful, sticky-sweet smell hovering near me. It just didn’t add up – she knew that Jack and I had become close, so it had to be the reason she was tormenting me. I knew she liked chaos and that there was the possibility that she was just tormenting me for her own sick amusement, but I had a hard time seeing her going to all this trouble if she knew that Jack had stopped caring and left for some greater reason.
...
I’m a liar, by the way. I hadn’t given up on Jack. I tried to keep it locked up in an origami box I had up on my wall, but the fact was that I missed him more than I had missed anyone else in my whole life. There was a dull, aching pain in my heart every time I thought of him. Dane was the perfect boy friend, but I couldn’t ever consider him my best friend. Not when I couldn’t talk to him about why dancing was so important to me, or how worried I was about where Mom was and how my dad was slowly growing corrupt.