A Rude Awakening…
“Kait! If you don’t get out of bed right now I’m bringin’ out the squirt bottle!” I moaned at the sound of my mother’s angry voice, and the thought of leaving my warm haven for yet another day of school, and pulled the covers back over my head. I bought myself a few more minutes of solitude. Once again, abrupt coolness swept over my body. The scene looked like that of a crime. My mother stood over me, wearing a deadly look on her face. My small body looked mangled, clothes pulled this way and that. I looked through my snarled hair to see the fractured image of my mother, standing above me holding my beloved billowy blankets. Looking through the mess of locks the other way, one would have seen snakes, with minds of their own, stretched this way and that away from my head. I reached for my old friends the blankets, wanting nothing more but to crawl back into them. Then it came; the steady flow of concentrated water blasting into my face. I turned over to my stomach, falling to the floor unexpectedly. I curled into a ball and felt my small tired face stained with not only water from the bottle, but tears as well. “GO AWAY!!” I screamed, using all of the little energy I had.

After a few more motionless minutes, my mother came to pick me up, kicking and screaming. I was NOT getting up and going to school. Not without the usual fight. This wasn’t the first time mornings had been like this, and was certainly not the last.



A Little Powder For The Performance
One foot in front of the other. Just one more step, one more trudge. Picking up one heavy boot laden with snow to place it back in the knee-deep snow a few inches ahead. Nothing to cover my bony knees and wired shins but my performance tights, now speckled like the night sky. Attempting to see the path before me, I squinted through crystallized lashes to see a whirpool of white powder. I reached up in fear of my hat blowing away, feeling the soaked through wool of my favorite beanie and even my gelled back hair which felt like hardened corduroy. Ruby red cheeks and bone-dry lips, I slowly made my way to our car at the top of the hill.

Why I was here? It had been snowing for two days straight, no snow removal done on my driveway. (Which was really practically a street.) We could not get out of the garage, and nobody could get down the driveway. The piled up snow and more adding to it was like a huge troll, standing on the bridge which led to what I wanted most. Lucky for me, this was one of the most important nights of the year; my spring dance recital.
I would have turned around previous of this moment, had it not been for my burning desire to get into my costume and onto the stage where I belonged. “I can do it,” I told myself. “Only a little way more.” There was no way I would let even this treacherous hike keep me from it. Even so, as I traipsed up the road, I cursed the blizzard that was delaying my debut. As I finally clambered into the warmth of the car, exhausted, I ordered my dad to drive as fast as he could. I knew I would be late to my biggest performance of the year, but I was just thankful I would make it. All the way there, I could feel nothing but complete and utter disgust for the snow that hung around my town and did things like this to me for most of the year. I shuttered at the thought of more experiences like this to come, and could only wish now that my parents had chosen someplace else to settle down, somewhere with no snow.


An Odd Sight For Outsiders On An Ordinary Day
Laughing with the other girls, I pushed open the door of Steps on Broadway and stepped onto the filthy concrete of 45th and Broadway in the scorching sun. Sweat had already made itself at home in my neatly combed back hair, and everywhere on my black spandex dance apparel. Now new beads were dripping down my scarlet face like rain on a window. I kept up the pace with the group of other fit-looking dancers, making our way across the busy street. Finally, we shuffled wearily into our sanctuary; Starbucks. We had left a studio of countless emaciated ballerinas, and yet we could not wait to get our hands on those calories.
Each of us ordered an abundance of our favorite treats and walked to our normal table. We sat in that adored shop, resting our worn-out bodies and refilling them with sugar. To outsiders, it might have been an odd sight. The way we looked, how we were dressed, and where we came from seemed quite the opposite of what we were in the process of doing. We knew it was nothing out of the ordinary, if anything, under par to our usual. We also knew that the eating did not end there, that when we walked back into our hotel room, even more junk would be awaiting to make its way down our throats. This was very different from the people we portrayed while we were in the dance studio very far from what most people thought of us then.