Come a Stranger Read Online Free Page B

him more.” Charlie shook her head, pitying the stupidity of her mother. Charlie had no intention of going on with ballet. She wanted to be in the movies. “I’m photogenic, and—there’s never the same kind of life in ballet, even if you’re a success, not like movies, when you’re a movie actress. Ballet teaches you how to move. An actress has to know how to . . . move right.”
    Charlie’s roommate, Tansy, was a little plain girl, quiet and hard-working. Mina couldn’t imagine why the camp had put Tansy and Charlie into the same room. Tansy had even been homesick for the first week, even though she really wanted to come to dance camp.
    â€œHow can you be homesick?” Mina had asked, trying to comfort her. “Wouldn’t you rather be here?”
    Charlie and Isadora had exchanged a look at that. Mina caught it, out of the corner of her eye. It was almost the kind of look kids give one another across the classroom, when they know something the teacher can’t begin to understand.
    â€œWell, I would,” Mina said to the two of them. She didn’t know what they thought they knew that she didn’t. “Even though I miss my family too.”
    â€œYour family’s different,” Charlie pointed out.
    â€œI miss my dog.” Tansy snuffled.
    Mina chuckled at that, and the chuckle spread out warm into a laugh. The laugh lighted up the whole dormitory room, even the farthest corners of it, and pretty soon everybody joined in, even Tansy, sitting up on the bed and blowing her nose into a tissue. She looked at Mina as if Mina was strange and wonderful.
    The four of them were going to work together on the ten-minute performance that every dancer at the camp had to give for the final exercises. Their instructor, Miss Fiona Maddinton, had told them about it on the first day, after they each had an individual conference with her. In the conference, she had told each of the sixteen girls in her class what she had thought when she watched them during the audition or, in Mina’s case, when she looked at the tape Miss LaValle had mailed up to New York. Miss LaValle had rented a video camera up in Cambridge and Mina had performed in front of it, the barre exercises and a dance they had worked out to part of the Nutcracker Suite. “You have strength,” Miss Maddinton said during her conference with Mina, “and a certain rude grace. Even on that tape your presence made itself felt. A dancer has to have presence. But,” she went on, when Mina opened her mouth to ask what the teacher meant, “you don’t have discipline. It’s discipline I will teach you. Natalie?” she called, indicating that the talk was over, summoning up the next girl. In the long working days, the hours of practice, Mina was learning what Miss Maddinton meant. Miss Maddinton seemed pleased with her. She was surely pleased with herself: She had never worked so hard and learned so much.
    The performance, Miss Maddinton had told them, could be done in groups, or individually, but had to be prepared without any adult help of any kind. Even the instructors were going to take part in the final exercises, performing for ten minutes. A lot of the girls from the class had asked Mina if she wanted to work with them, but Isadora and Charlotte and Tansy had asked her first, and she would have preferred to dance with them anyway. They were going to do an original ballet, based on Narnia. The other three had decided that, because Mina had never heard of Narnia.
    â€œBut those books have been on every reading list since I was inthird grade,” Isadora said. “Aren’t they even on your summer reading list?”
    â€œI don’t have a summer reading list.”
    â€œThen outside reading.” But Mina didn’t have that either. “You mean, you don’t have to do book reports?”
    â€œWe do reports, sometimes, or projects,” Mina said,