Glamour: Contemporary Fairytale Retellings
A.L. Jackson, Sophie Jordan, Aleatha Romig, Skye Warren, Lili St. Germain, Nora Flite, Sierra Simone, Nicola Rendell
Prologue
Cal
The pointe shoes were the first thing Cal noticed.
It wasn’t that the shoes seemed strange on their own. It was just that they were wildly out of place wherever the girls brought them. Slung over their shoulders when they bought their trenta iced green teas at Starbucks. Spilling out of tote bags as they floated in and out of the library. Tossed on the thick green grass as they burst out of the studio and flung themselves tiredly on the ground, like so many gazelles at rest.
The second thing he’d noticed was that they weren’t girls…not really. The youngest was just on the cusp of eighteen, and the oldest was nineteen. They were in that liminal space between girl and woman, a space made all the wider by their long, sleek bodies and barely-there curves, by their sheltered lives in Purkiss’s cloister.
The third thing he’d noticed was that Purkiss was a dangerous prick, which was unfortunate, because in a very real sense right now, he was Cal’s employer.
Cal tossed his binoculars onto the passenger seat and rubbed a tired hand over his face, feeling every week of his thirty-nine years. He’d been out late the night before chasing down a cheating husband, out even later the night before that to prove to an insurance company that one of their disability claims was spending his nights doing cash-only work for a chop shop up in Fredricksburg. He should’ve gotten some sleep before coming out to the ballet school, but Purkiss had hired him to find out where his students were going at night, and Cal was a firm believer that one couldn’t find what was done during the night without understanding what was done during the day. Thirteen years in the Army and four years as a private investigator had turned that belief into a religion. Violence, crime and lies didn’t come from nowhere; they were there on the horizon of hard-working, honest daylight, if only one knew where to look.
Which is why he’d spent the last three days watching the school and its dancers. Watching Purkiss bark at the ballerinas for every sin imaginable—bad turnout, weak legs, shallow arches, lazy, lazy, lazy. The dancers hated him. They never challenged him, never defended themselves, never acted sullen or sulky or hurt when he humiliated them, but they hated him, Cal knew. After his divorce, Cal had become something of an expert in the subtle art of hatred, and it was fairly easy to diagnose once you knew the signs. A glance over the shoulder when a back was turned. A flex of the fingers. A hard stare out the window.
It didn’t matter how prestigious Purkiss’s small school was or how many dancers found jobs in Washington or Boston or New York afterward, these girls were miserable. No wonder they were thoughtless with their pointe shoes. No wonder they snuck out of the dancers’ house at night.
“They’re going somewhere,” Purkiss had told him that first day. “They come in the next morning haggard and slouching and not ready to dance…and their shoes!” His nostrils had flared then, anger shaking his short, slender frame. “Their shoes get ruined, absolutely ruined. It’s a disgrace.”
Cal had sat in the chair in front of Purkiss’s desk, staring at the small white man in front of him. It was a trick he learned in Iraq—you stare long and hard and silent enough, and the other person cracks like glaze on an antique vase. Deeply and into a network of thousands of other cracks.
Purkiss had finally admitted his real worry. “Tamsin, the oldest. She’s my daughter.”
“Do you care what the other girls do? Or only her?”
Purkiss had scowled, but a scowl from an aging male dancer didn’t frighten Cal in the least.
“She’s an amazing dancer,” Purkiss had said. “The best I’ve ever taught. She’s auditioning for the ABT in two months. I can’t afford for her to slip now.”
Tamsin. Cal learned over the next few days that she was the one with pale hair and even paler skin. Gold and ivory. And when she danced, she closed her eyes, as if she could shut out the world around her. Like a music-box girl, twirling alone forever.
Night One
Cal
Louisa, Lael, Ling.
Daneice, Devorah, Nanami, Nina.
Ellie and Yasmine. Isabella and Mary Grace.
Tamsin.
Twelve girls. Twelve pairs of pointe shoes knotted and slung carelessly over shoulders as the dancers crawled one by one out of the second story window and onto a nearby tree branch. Cal had to respect their ability to sneak out undetected—even with his car windows rolled all the way down, the only noise that came from the dark house was the rustle of the tree branches as the girls crept along and dropped like silent fruit onto the grass below. They walked out past the school property and piled into two different cars, hybrids that made no engine noise until they turned off their street.
Cal put his car into drive and followed.
He had a plan, like he always did. He’d follow, get pictures, go home and sleep off this latest run of work. And then tomorrow he’d hand Purkiss the evidence, get his six hundred dollars, and move on to the next job. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was about what a divorced ex-soldier could expect. He was lucky to have stable work, however lonely it was.
And it was lonely. In the Army, you were never alone, not really. There was always someone to keep watch with you, always someone else who couldn’t sleep, always someone else squinting at the road alongside you looking for disturbed earth and foxholes. But there was some loneliness still. You missed your family, your friends, cold beer. You missed your own horizon, trees, snow, the Science Channel, 24-hour drugstores crammed with bright bags of junk food.
He’d stupidly thought coming home to his wife after his last tour would mean being cured of all kinds of lonely. How wrong he’d been; he’d never guessed that peculiar isolation of laying in bed next to a woman while remembering the pops and booms of desert guns, the scatter of bullets and the smell of gunpowder singed in the sun. The blood, the fear, the blood, the blood, the blood.
They’d told people they’d grown apart. But the truth had been that it was hard to keep a wife when Fallujah was your mistress. So his last tour hadn’t been his last tour after all, and he signed up to go to Afghanistan instead.