Free You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) by Sophie Ranald

night out; now, I found my consumption
creeping up to two or three, then five a day, then more. I noticed myself
becoming slightly breathless when I ran up the stairs, but I wasn’t bothered – by
smoking instead of eating, I was losing weight, my body becoming leaner and my
line cleaner. A thin dancer, even one who wheezed after a series of grands
jêtés, was a good dancer.
    And
a fat lot of good it did me, because I wasn’t the only one in Felix’s
entourage. The number of cigarette-smoking, Pret-drinking metal fans in the
company had increased exponentially since his arrival. The weight had dropped
off Lisa, too, and I noticed her casting resentful glares at me when I seemed
to turn up in the same place as her all the time, because it was the same place
as Felix. Even some of the soloists seemed to have succumbed to his allure – the
normally taciturn Briony, who rarely cracked a smile when she wasn’t on stage,
became positively skittish around him, chatting away and asking him for lights,
even when I’d seen her spark up a fag with her own Bic lighter just minutes
before.
    Mel
and Roddy mocked me mercilessly. For Roddy, Felix was an object of envy, not of
desire.
    “Poncy
git,” he said. “Okay, he can dance, but he’s got an ego the size of the
Kremlin. Good luck with getting a shag there, Laura – not that you aren’t hot
or anything, but you’ll have to take a number and get in line. Even if he does
every girl in the company it could be months before he gets round to you.”
    “God,
Laura, you reek of smoke,” Mel said one night as we flopped on the sofa in the
flat after a performance of Giselle , working our way through a bottle of
Rioja to take the edge of our post-performance adrenaline so we’d be able to
sleep. “What are you trying to prove, hanging around Lawsonski like a dose of
athlete’s foot?”
    “Don’t
call him that.” I dug her in the ribs with my elbow. “He’s the man of my
dreams. I’m allowed to have a crush, aren’t I? And besides, I think it’s
working – he smiled at me in class today.”
    “Whoopee
twang,” Mel said. “He smiles at everyone. He’s a right Mr Happy, that one. Mr
Happy Lawsonski. If you want him to notice you, you’d be better off getting
Marius to notice you first, so he gives you a good part. Lawsonski knows which
side his bread’s buttered.”
    “I’m
not sure I want Marius to notice me,” I said.
    We
paused, and exchanged a mutual shudder at the idea of shagging Marius, the
company’s all-powerful Creative Director, who terrified and fascinated us in
equal measure. His lean, black-clad figure had a way of appearing in our
peripheral vision just when we’d fucked up a step, were corpsing with laughter
or were shovelling doughnuts into our faces after a particularly brutal class. Being
acknowledged by him, even if only with the smallest nod, could mean we were
about to shoot stratospherically through the ranks to stardom – or it could
mean we’d been found wanting and our card was marked.
    “I
do,” Mel said.
    “What?
You never fancy him.”
    “Marius?
Good God, no,” Mel said, but there was something about her tone that wasn’t
quite convincing.
    “Mel
and Marius, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s…” I began.
    “Oh,
fuck off, Laura.” She lobbed a cushion at me, just as she always did when I
teased her, but she sounded seriously annoyed, so I changed the subject.
    “Speaking
of bread, do we have any in? I’d kill for a piece of hot buttered toast.”
    “There
are some Ryvitas in the kitchen, I think,” Mel said. “Want one?”
    “Nah.”
I poured more wine into our glasses, half-heartedly mopping up the bit that
splashed on to the sofa with my sleeve. It was so stained already, a bit more
damage would make no difference to our chances of seeing our deposit when we
moved out – if we ever did.
    We’d
been living in the flat for three years. When we first saw it, we’d been so
elated at the prospect of living round the