CHAPTER THREE
A couple of weeks passed. The first few nights after seeing the ghosts I didn’t sleep very easily, but after about the fourth day I felt peace in my room again. I could fall asleep by ten like clockwork, and I was never stressed to make it to school on time. I didn’t see anything happen in the graveyard any more, though there were a couple of nights where all noises stopped and I was surrounded by that tense silence I felt on that second night, when I witnessed Jack killing those monsters. It was okay, though – even though I knew what was happening, I didn’t bother to get up, instead reaching out for that peacefulness that was now ever-present in my room. Eventually the silence would pass and I would fall asleep.
Just as I had predicted, I didn’t become very good friends with Nate and Jennie. They were the typical high school couple – obnoxious about the fact that they had a relationship when the majority of the student body didn’t, and always trying to dish out relationship advice to anyone that mentioned any interaction with a member of the opposite gender. Dani only hung out with them during her lunch because the school split lunch into two groups to keep the lunch crowd down, and all of her friends were on the second lunch schedule. Nate and Jennie were friends of friends, and, not wanting to feel like a loser with no one to eat lunch with, Dani chose to hang out with them.
I did become friends with Dani, though. She was an average height and pretty slender, with chestnut hair she kept at a short pixie cut. While she wasn’t extremely outspoken, she was extremely opinionated, which meant that she only had a few close friends instead of a lot of superficial friends like Jennie seemed to have. While I didn’t agree with her all the time, I got along with her well.
She kept pushing me into checking out the dance club, and I surprised myself when I finally agreed to sit in on a practice. Dancing wasn’t exactly my thing, and while their style had sounded interesting the way Dani described it, I still cringed at the mental picture of me in a frilly ballet outfit.
I was glad she pushed me into it, though. These girls - and even a couple of guys -kicked ass. They didn’t wear leotards and tights to practice, instead opting to wear whatever was comfortable for them – yoga pants and tank tops, gym shorts and tee shirts, or anything they didn’t mind getting sweaty in. Every practice started with twenty minutes of classical dance training – usually ballet or a cultural dance, though Dani told me that once in a while they bring in boyfriends and girlfriends for ballroom dancing, and once they even did tap dancing. After that was ten minutes of – I kid you not – kickboxing. While ten minutes was not a lot of time, they were really intense. The first time I joined in I was exhausted and ready to call it a day, whereas the rest of them were only barely breathing a bit harder than usual. I noticed how toned they all were after that and realized that these guys saw this more as an athletic club than an arts club. The last half hour to forty five minutes was devoted to their modern dancing. They split into two groups: one was devoted to a slower, more fluid form of dance; graceful, hypnotic, and mesmerizing, like ballet, while the other looked almost like a martial arts routine; intense, fast, and combative. They practiced on opposite sides of the studio, though twice a month they shared the routines they had come up with and tried to teach them to the opposite group. Since I was new they let me switch between the two whenever I felt until I decided which one to stick with.
While things were starting to fall into place, the fact that I was apparently the only person aware of the existence of monsters still bugged me.