The Icebreaker

Chapter 3: The Picture-Perfect Girl

The dance studio on the second floor of the Cedar Falls athletic complex had mirrors on three walls, which meant there was almost nowhere in the room Cameryn Ross could stand without seeing herself, and most days that suited her fine. She liked the mirrors. She liked knowing exactly what she looked like from every angle, because looking a certain way had never once been an accident for her... It was a skill, practiced the same way anyone practiced a routine, until it stopped feeling like effort at all.

"Again, from the top!" she called out, clapping twice to cut the music, and the twelve other girls on the dance team reset into position without complaint, because Cameryn didn't have to raise her voice to be listened to. She never had. It was one of the things people said about her most often...

The routine ran clean the second time. Cameryn nodded, satisfied, and let the girls take a water break while she checked her phone out of habit.

"So, what's up, girl?" Deja Whitfield suddenly sat beside her onto the floor, with a water bottle and the particular bluntness that made her one of the only people on the team Cameryn actually trusted.

"Well, everything's great!" Cameryn lets out her usual million dollar smile.

Deja took a sip of water, studying her. "Has Marcus texted back yet?"

Cameryn's jaw tightened, just slightly, in the way it did whenever his name came up.

"He's actually busy with stuff you know... There's this conservatory things and recitals."

"He's been busy for two months, Cam."

"People get busy."

"People also break up with other people by voicemail, apparently, based on what you told me at two in the morning after four seltzers." Deja said it gently, while Cameryn and knowing look.

"That's not---!" Cameryn started, bu she decided to stop at midsentence because Deja knows her really well.

The voicemail had actually come nine days ago. Cameryn had listened to it twice, standing in the hallway outside her own dorm room with her key still in the door, and then never once replayed it again, because two listens had been more than enough to memorize the parts that mattered. Marcus hadn't been cruel about it.

And that was the worst part. He'd been reasonable, articulate, the same calm tone he used when he talked about music theory, explaining that he needed someone who took things seriously, someone who wasn't so wrapped up in... And please write then he paused, like he was searching for a word that wouldn't sound insulting...

But in a nutshell, what he was trying to say was she wasn't intelligent enough to have a boyfriend like him. Cameryn had known it instantly, the way you know exactly what an insult means even when someone's careful enough not to say it outright.

"I'm fine," she told Deja now, while trying to keep a straight face to keep her pride.

"You don't have to be fine in front of me. That's the whole point of me being your bestfriend." Deja said in return.

Cameryn managed something close to a real smile, small and tired. "I know. I just don't really know how to be anything else aside from being Cameryn Ross, being built up by your own mother as if you are a product to sell or something..."

She meant it half as a joke, but it wasn't really a joke, not entirely. Cameryn's mother had been on this same dance team twenty-two years ago, had gone on to coach two states over, and had spent Cameryn's entire life treating composure like a currency. A kind of special currency that you need to spent carefully, never wasted, definitely never showed cracking in public. Cameryn couldn't remember the last time her mother had asked how she felt about anything without immediately pivoting to how she'd performed...

Practice wrapped forty minutes later, and Cameryn stayed behind to close up the studio, turning off the sound system, straightening the cubbies where the freshmen never bothered to put their shoes back correctly. It was the part of her day nobody saw... No mirrors reflecting an audience, no phone to check for an audience of one who'd stopped answering. Just her, alone, in a room built specifically to make sure she was never unseen.

She sat down on the floor in the middle of the room, back against the barre, while trying to calm herself and just being herself. She closed her eyes, feeling the moment of peace and quiet...

After five minutes, she finally opened her eyes again, she wiped her face on the sleeve of her hoodie, checked her reflection in the mirror out of pure habit, and found nothing out of place. She then gathered her bag, flipped off the studio lights, and locked the door behind her. The hallway outside was empty except for the hum of the vending machine near the stairwell, and Cameryn let herself walk slower than usual, in no rush to get back to a dorm room that would only remind her, in its own quiet way, of how much space one absent person could still take up.

Outside, the September air had turned properly cold, the kind of sharp evening chill that made the whole campus smell like the beginning of hockey season. Cameryn pulled her hoodie sleeves down over her hands and started the walk back to her dorm, passing clusters of students headed the opposite direction toward the rink, laughing about something she wasn't part of and didn't try to be.

She thought, not for the first time, about how strange it was to be one of the most recognized faces at Cedar Falls and still feel like nobody actually knew her... Not the real version, not the one who cried for exactly three minutes on a studio floor and then wiped her face and went back to being fine.

Everyone knew Cameryn Ross the dance captain, the athletic department's favorite poster girl, the one who never seemed to have a bad day. Almost nobody knew the girl underneath all of it, the one who still checked her phone out of habit for a text that wasn't coming.

She let herself have that thought for exactly as long as it took to reach her dorm building, and then, the way she did most things, she put it away neatly and let herself back into a version of the evening where nothing was wrong at all.