Ashes & Roses

Chapter 13

Wynter Rose Monroe

The money did not look real. That was the first lie I told myself, kneeling on the studio floor with the zipper still caught between my fingers. Real money lived in envelopes and bank apps and the way my mother counted grocery receipts at the kitchen table. Real money did not arrive in rubber-banded bricks, stacked so densely the duffle had hit the marley with a sound I should have recognized as wrong the moment I dropped it.

I sat back on my heels. Hallway light cut a pale rectangle across the floor and stopped just short of the open bag, as if the building itself refused to look inside. My hands were still shaking. Mascara had dried in a thin film beneath my eyes. The inside of my mouth tasted like cheap vodka and the metallic aftertaste of panic. I reached in anyway. The top bundle was bound in a faded red band, the bills worn at the corners the way cash gets worn when it has passed through too many hands. I turned it over. Hundreds. Not the kind of money a freshman carried to a dining hall. I set it down as if it might bruise.

Then another and then another. I did not count. Counting would have made it a decision. I only lifted enough to understand the shape of what I had done, or what had been done to me, which felt, in that moment, like the same wound wearing two names. Beneath the cash there was nothing that belonged to me. No tights. No warm-ups. No pointe shoes with my mother's stitching. The thought arrived with a nausea so sudden I had to press my palm to the floor. I zipped the duffle closed hard enough that the metal teeth caught the edge of a bill. I fixed it. Then I sat in the dark with my spine curved and my forehead nearly touching my knees, and I let the night rearrange itself around the one fact I could not unsay.

Three hundred thousand.

Whitmore had said it. A conservative estimate. I couldn't possibly take it.

But if I did...

The thought did not arrive dressed as greed. It arrived dressed as survival, which made it worse. I could walk into that office with a fraction of what was sitting in my lap and watch the fake sympathy drain out of his face. I could keep the scholarship. I could stay. I could dance. I could call my mother and not have to tell her that the thing we had spent years bleeding for had been priced like a body. I wouldn't have to sleep with him. The fact that my mind had even gone there made my stomach turn. I could also disappear. People who carried bags like this did not misplace them by accident and then forgive the girl who ran out of a party with this amount in her hands.

The studio smelled like rosin and old wood and the faint sweetness of hairspray I had put in my curls hours ago, when the night still had the shape of a plan. I had run without anything but pure fear and a bag that did not belong to me. The air against my arms felt thin. I turned on one bank of lights. Not all of them. Enough to see that I was alone, and not enough to turn the room into a stage. The mirrors caught me in broken increments: smudged liner, red puffy eyes, and a bag identical to mine but pulling my shoulder down more heavily than it should have.

I wanted to dance. That had been the entire point of bringing a bag to a party I never should have attended. Ballet did not ask questions. It did not put a hand on my knee and call it help. I could not dance in jeans. I could not dance without shoes. I could not dance with a stack of money sitting against the wall like a sleeping animal. So I did the only thing left that still felt like discipline. I cleaned the scene. I wiped the floor where the bag had sat, though nothing visible had spilled. I tucked the stray bill back inside. I zipped the duffle until the pull tab bit my thumb. Then I slung it over my shoulder and nearly staggered. It was heavier than dance clothes.

Of course it was.

Money had a weight people liked to pretend was only moral. The hallway of the Performing Arts Center was dim and long. A janitor's cart waited near the water fountain, abandoned for the night. Somewhere above me, pipes ticked as the building cooled. I walked like a person who belonged there, because if I walked like a person who did not, someone would remember my face.

Outside, the campus had the emptied look of a place that had spent all its noise in one direction. Fraternity Row still throbbed at the far edge of hearing, a bassline without a song. The quad was mostly dark. A boy slept on a bench with his jacket over his face. Two girls crossed the brick path ahead of me, laughing about something that had not ruined them. I kept to the shadows of the trees and counted my breaths the way I counted music when I was afraid of a turn. In. Four steps. Out. Four more.

Our dorm came into view with its usual indifference. I climbed the stairwell instead of taking the elevator. Less chance of standing still under fluorescent light with a bag that could get me expelled, arrested, or worse....the category Whitmore had not named because he had not needed to. The hallway on our floor smelled like microwave popcorn and someone else's perfume. I stopped in front of our door with the key already in my hand and listened.

Nothing.

I opened it the way you open a room you have already broken. Geneviève was not here. Her bed was still unmade from the morning. A pair of gold earrings glinted on her desk beside an open compact. My side of the room looked exactly as I had left it, which felt like an accusation. The stained dance bag was still on my bed. I shut the door with my hip and locked it. Then I locked it again, because once did not feel like a language the night would respect. There was no good place to put five hundred thousand dollars in a freshman double. Under the bed was a joke. In the closet was a slightly more organized joke. I stood in the center of the room holding the strap and hated how small the space suddenly felt, as if the walls had leaned in to read over my shoulder.

I pulled my empty suitcase out from under the bed, a pink hard-shell one my father had bought because he said dorms were not kind to fabric and I set the red duffle inside it the way you lay something down in a place you hoped no one would look. I zipped the suitcase. I slid it back until only the corner showed, then I pushed that out of sight too. When I stood, my hands were empty, and emptiness did not feel like safety. It felt like I had swallowed something I would spend the rest of the week trying not to cough up.

My phone had been in my pocket. Tonight, I had told Geneviève we were not friends. The screen bloomed too bright in the dark.

I typed:

I'm sorry, Geneviève.

I stared at the message until it looked like it belonged to a braver girl. Then Sorry was true. Sorry was also a door, and I did not know how to stand in it without everything I could not say falling through. I sent it. It looked like a coward's postcard. I set the phone face down and stepped into the bathroom. Under the harsh light, I looked like a rumor that had gotten tired of circulating. I washed my face until the water ran clear. I took the pins out of what was left of my hair and let the curls drop heavy against my shoulders. In the mirror, I did not look like a thief. I looked like a freshman who had stayed out too late and would be punished by barre in the morning.

Barre.

The word landed late, and when it did, it took the air with it. My pointe shoes were gone. Not misplaced, just gone. In a bag that was not here but in a house that wanted me humiliated, in a house where I potentially lost my one and only friend. I braced my hands on the sink and breathed until the porcelain felt real again. I had another pair. An older pair. Soft in the box, too broken in for Professor Bennett's standards, hidden in the bottom drawer because I had told myself I was past needing a spare. I could sew the ribbons in the morning. I could walk into that studio and dance like I meant it while a suitcase under my bed quietly rewrote the cost of staying. I changed into an old shirt and sleep shorts and sat on my bed with the lamp off, watching the door as if watching could summon a different version of the night.

Sleep did not come so much as collapse. I dreamed in fragments that did not bother to be subtle: Whitmore's office stretching longer the closer I walked; a pool filling with paper; Geneviève turning away in a doorway that kept receding; a hooded figure at the edge of the marley, not coming closer, only waiting to see whether I would pick the bag up again.

I woke feeling a sudden drop in my chest. Under the bed, the suitcase did not make a sound, it did not have to. I already knew it was there. I already knew that somewhere across town a man with smoke in his clothes and blood on his mouth had been given a reason to look for what I had hidden in a freshman dorm like a child hiding a secret from a teacher. I turned onto my side and watched the thin light strengthen against the curtain. In a few hours I would sew ribbons onto a pair of shoes that were not the ones my mother had marked. I would walk into Professor Bennett's studio and try to dance like I meant it. I would pass the financial aid building without looking at the second door on the left, and I would not open the suitcase. Not yet. That was the second lie I told myself before the sun finished coming up.