Come a Stranger

Free Come a Stranger by Cynthia Voigt Page B

Book: Come a Stranger by Cynthia Voigt Read Free Book Online
Authors: Cynthia Voigt
looked like a dancer.
    Mina smiled and sat down and pretended she didn’t notice the quick, worried glance Isadora sent to Tansy. Last year, when she had been asleep to what was really going on, Mina had mostly caught only the ends of those looks and had been puzzled. Now that she was awake, she could see what they were. They separated her from everybody else, from everybody white. She thought she could show them that wasn’t necessary.
    â€œHey hi. It’s good to see you.” Because it was. “Isn’t it fun to be back? Have you seen Charlie?”
    Isadora knew the answer to that. “She’s going to a drama camp, instead. Near Philadelphia. She said she’s gotten all ballet has to offer her.”
    â€œOh-ho,” Mina guessed without stopping to think, “and I bet we call her Charlotte from here on.”
    Isadora looked up at her and laughed. “How’d you know? Honestly, Mina, you wouldn’t have believed it. She came, Charlotte, to spend the night, sometime in April. We’d planned it for ages, and then all she could talk about was this camp, and the opportunities it offered. She was like—she was like she was twenty-two and talking about her career. The first thing she said to me was exactly that: I had to call her Charlotte. How’d you know?”
    â€œIt was a guess.” Mina smiled another hello at Tansy, noticing for the first time what a shy smile Tansy had. Her mouth barely moved.
    â€œAnd she was wearing stockings and three-inch heels to come spend the night.”
    â€œYou’ve got braces,” Mina said to Tansy, whose mouth was filled with silver metal. “Do they hurt?”
    â€œA little.”
    â€œI liked your Christmas card.” It had a picture of Tansy’s whole family on it, dressed up, standing in front of a big fireplace. Rich folks, Zandor had commented. “Your mother’s pretty.”
    Tansy nodded.
    â€œHave you made up any new dances?” Mina asked her. That got Tansy going, and Isadora drifted out of the room saying she’d be back to go down to dinner with them, so they should be sure to wait.
    It didn’t take Mina long to figure it out. They didn’t mind being friends with her, but they didn’t want to be roommates. They thought she wouldn’t notice, as if she could be smart about other things but not about this. It was pretty funny, when she thought about it. Most of the time it was funny, she admitted to herself, alone in her room at night; sometimes, especially alone in her room, it felt like teeth biting into her heart. Like sharp pointed teeth biting into where her feelings were and cutting off bites to chew on. “But what did you think?” she asked herself at such times. “Didn’t you know you were black?”
    She wasn’t going to let it trouble her.
    What did trouble her was that for some reason the classes weren’t going right. Mina had worked hard to maintain her dance, harder than she’d ever worked at anything. But she seemed to have fallen behind even so. What used to be easy washard now, as if she couldn’t do things everybody else could. Or as if her body couldn’t do what she wanted it to. When they had their dance classes, Mina would be distracted by the mirrors, because they reflected her blackness back and back, among the white skin of the other girls. That was the hardest place, the dance class, to remember not to see just the outside of herself, not to notice how different it was from everybody else. The other girls sat out in the sun to get tan, Mina thought; but she was darker than any of them, and it was funny that they didn’t see how funny that was. Mina felt trapped in her skin, locked in it, like a jail. She was always aware of being the only one.
    Miss Maddinton didn’t seem to think anything was wrong, even when Mina found herself sweating after doing what should be simple floor exercises. Miss Maddinton

Similar Books

Oblivion

Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lost Without Them

Trista Ann Michaels

The Naked King

Sally MacKenzie

Beautiful Blue World

Suzanne LaFleur

A Magical Christmas

Heather Graham

Rosamanti

Noelle Clark

The American Lover

G E Griffin

Scrapyard Ship

Mark Wayne McGinnis