EVENING HEMINGWAY, CAPITOL

She danced once. Just once. When she was little and they'd just come home from the ballet. She'd pushed all the furniture in her large room to the side, little body struggling against the weight of the ancient antique vanity, only just managing to scrape it along the wooden flooring and creating two long scratches that never really went away in the process. She'd put on the record of Swan Lake that she had insisted her parents buy for her, turning it up as loud as it would go. Then she shut her eyes and let her body do the rest, attempting grace despite the fact that she was six years old and was still in the stages more akin to a duckling.

It didn't matter. She'd felt a sense of beauty beneath her feet as she'd leapt around the room, jumping off of her bed, nearly climbing the walls in an effort to get the air that the girl in the show had gotten. She imagined that a handsome boy was lifting her up and she had her fingers out, arms slightly bent as he slowly spun her and she was elegant, a real lady in a tutu and tights.

She'd danced once. Just one time and she was hooked.

Her parents had put her into a dancing class the very next day at her tight-lipped request. Her mother was thrilled of course. She might have been a technician for the Games but that didn't make her all business all of the time. The fact that her daughter wanted to dance made her so excited that quite suddenly, Evening no longer had a choice in the matter. Despite how changeable children can be, she was a dancer from that day on whether she liked it or not.

It was lucky for her that it was something she did really want to do. Although young, she attended her lessons with gusto, intent on becoming the best in the class like her father insisted she be. He was a man always intent on appearances and images. His daughter's was of extreme import to him. If she was going to dance, she had to be the best so that he could brag about his little girl at the benefit banquets that he and his wife so often attended.

Somehow she knew this, despite the fact that she wasn't even ten years old yet. She had to be the best or die trying. It wasn't hard for her anyway. She had a natural grace to her then, it was akin to watching glass being spun to watch her dance. The passion in each step was evident, the certainty that this was what she had been born to do. She was desperate to be there, facing herself in the mirror, toes extended and arm above her, fingers splayed so gently that her hands alone could tempt a watcher.

When she was twelve years old it was agreed upon by everyone that she was too excellent a dancer for her class, she was moved to private instruction to study under one of the greats. A man named Arnold Thames, he was thin and spindly, a dancer too old to perform, forced to teach instead. He was bitter and had yellow fingers and teeth from all the cigarettes he smoked, his brown hair was often in a disarray, and there were always stains on his sweater from last night's meals but everyone always agreed that he was a genius who made dancers into stars. He charged handsomely but Evening's parents were certain at that point that their daughter would make her dancing into a profession and therefore nothing was too dear.

He taught her a lot about dance and the life one leads when they give up their lives for it. It's true that young people are the easiest minds to shape because they are so innocent. Telling a teenage girl that she has to stop eating so much if she wants to do well is never an excellent idea because when you are their teacher, they will trust you and believe you. Evening often thought about what Mr. Thames said about her weekly weigh-ins when she was sat across the dinner table from her parents. She'd put her fork down and feign contentment even as her stomach insisted that it could fit at least eight more mouthfuls.

It started off like that, him telling her that she was too fat. It stemmed into more though as time went on. At first she started losing weight fast and they were both pleased. Mr. Thames said that he preferred his students petite and balanced. Evening was never destined to be tall. She was beautiful in the delicate features she had inherited from her mother, she was no taller than five foot three. Mr. Thames told her that her smallness was what made him choose her as a student. She was lovely, contained like a doll. He made her smaller.

When the hunger got to be too much and she was thirteen years old, bent double of a stomach that yearned for a proper meal he gave her her very fist cigarette. He told her that it would numb the hunger pains, warm her up and take away the stress she felt. He told her that it would help her dance better, that they would find her more beautiful this way, that she would become famous if she stuck nicotine between her lips and puffed. He was her teacher and she was thirteen years old so she believed him.

It helped. She stopped feeling so much hunger because instead of hunger pangs she felt nicotine cravings. Instead of yearning for the taste of meat she began to love the taste of ash in her mouth to the point where she was numb from it and her teacher thought she was beautiful then, he called the emotion on her face impeccable, he told her parents that they should be proud to have such a hard working daughter and he insisted on extending her practice hours from two hours to three and a half, allowing for a short break in the middle.

She snuck cigarettes home and waited for her parents to go to sleep before opening her window and blowing her smoke into the wind, long black locks running free, straining to follow the trail of smoke.

It got to the point where her teacher decided to start teaching her holds and jumps. She had to know what to do when she gained a dance partner, how to rest her weight, how to jump high and if she had been older, if she had been wiser, she would have seen it coming. She would have understood that his looks which had always lingered had suddenly grown more intense, she would have understood that his hands around her fragile waste held her too tight, too snugly. She would have known that where he put his hands on the next practice was not a proper place for any man to put his hands, not without consent.

He took her there on the ballroom floor and her fingers scratched weakly at moonlit tiles and he held his hand over her lips as he nearly broke her in half that night, a hand holding the back of her head so gently so that she wouldn't hit it on the cold marble and he whispered praise and love into her ear that she had never heard from her parent and he told her that she was beautiful and that he loved her and that she couldn't tell her parents about it because he would make sure that she would never make the stage, he would ruin her career, all her hard work, everything lost so she couldn't. She couldn't speak and when he was finished with her

he left her there, alone and shaking on the floor with mirrors reflecting her all around just to show her exactly how disgusting she was and he'd ripped her tights and her hair was mussed but she was still in one piece so she pulled the cigarette out that she kept in her waistline and she lit it there on the marble floor and the moonlight hit her legs and she wept.

It was not the last time. Some nights he would be her teacher and he'd leave the lights on, acting like he had never touched her wrong in his life acting like they were nothing more than teacher and student. Other times he would switch the lights off and lock the door, she knew not to try and get away anymore, she'd wait. In the center of the room, where all the mirrors could see is where he liked it best. He liked to make her watch them in the mirror, he liked to make her see how disgusting she was. All the grace, the beauty that she had always thought she had seemed to leak out of her.

Wordless, she'd wait for him to leave so that she could have her cigarette, so that she could collect herself.

One morning when she was sixteen years old she did not get up for breakfast and her mother figured that she needed the rest so she did not wake her daughter up before she left for work, assuming that she was just having a lie in.

That was the first attempt.

Marney, the Avox who had raised Evening since childhood went to knock on her young charge's door at around two pm, wondering when she was getting up. She got now response to her knocking and she didn't put too much thought behind it. Evening was a happy young lady, if not a little bit private sometimes but she had no reason to worry.

When Evening's father arrived home from his job he had his cup of coffee and then prepared himself to take his daughter to her regular evening dance class. A feeling of pride rose in him at the thought of his hard working daughter. He was certain that one day her name would be well known, that her picture would light up the billboards in the shopping distract, people would come for miles just to see his beautiful daughter dance. He didn't mind driving her to and from dance every night, he loved his daughter so much. He just wanted her happiness.

When it was twenty minutes to her class and she still hadn't emerged, he became impatient. His daughter had never shown such sloth before. She was usually out the door and waiting in the car for him before he had time to tie his shoes. He couldn't fathom what the wait was.

At ten minutes to the class he decided to knock on her door in turn, deciding to get the spare house keys and unlock his daughter's door when he refused to respond to his calling. Frustration gripped him as he rooted around the key bowl, wondering just when it was that his daughter had become so ungrateful. He'd have some stern words for her when he got the door open. He didn't know what she was playing at, it was as if she wanted to be late.

When he finally got the door open, Marney waited respectfully behind him but neither were prepared for the sight that befell them.

Cigarette butts littered the floor. She had given up on trying to hide her addiction. The shades and curtains were drawn tightly closed, as if to keep the entire world out and the room reeked of smoke and vomit. She lay across the bed, one arm resting sadly over the edge of the queen size, the other flung across the duvet and an empty bottle of pills rested beside her hand.

The privilege of wealth is that when one rings emergency, they are always fast to arrive.

They pumped her stomach there in her room, her body convulsing as it was derailed off the tracks that it was travelling. They loaded her up into the ambulance then, her father climbing into the back, on the phone with her mother. They told him that she might die but that they could probably save her and that he shouldn't worry, her mother could stay at work, there was no need for her to leave her important job.

The night was sirens and screaming, blurred nightmares that stuck out like sore thumbs in the darkness of the loud night that surrounded her head. She whimpered in her sleep, her stomach hurt and there were people yelling, always yelling and it felt like maybe she was dead but she was afraid that she wasn't.

Whens she woke up it was to the disappointing florescents above her head and her mother having a nap in the corner of the room. It was three in the morning two days later and her body ached. There were tubes in her body and up her nose, her mouth tasted of sand and she threw up on her chest.

They put her in rehab for the nicotine and made her stay in hospital for the eating disorder. Her teacher come to visit often, assuring her parents that she would be fine to continue lessons whenever she was ready. They couldn't understand why she started crying whenever they mentioned dancing or the instructor that had been so good to them over the years. He'd become a good friend, despite his oddities. She was sent to therapy but she couldn't say a word because in her heart of hearts she wanted to dance and he told her that if she told anyone he would make sure she never saw the stage.

So she was good, docile. She did as she was told, ate what they made her, responded well to the absence of nicotine and even made herself smile for them so that they would let her go home. They asked her why she did it, why she took the pills resulting in her hospital placement and she told them that it was because she was hungry and scared and they believed her.

A month after her release from hospital, after four weeks of excuses she was signed back up for private lessons.

That first night, she told her parents she would walk and she hadn't lied because she'd started walking and hadn't stopped, walking right past the dance studio, small hands poking out of the sleeves of her overlarge sweater, bone white against the black strap. She walked purposefully forward, away from the building and she didn't stop that night, not for two hours, her parents must have been looking for her, her dance instructor would have contacted them by now but fear made her stride steady and she refused to turn back, to go to class and apologize for her lateness.

That night she walked to the ballet and didn't stop walking until she was in the audience and watching the dancers on stage and she was nearly in tears or how badly she wanted it that it felt like her fingernails were needles pricking her skin.

When the show was over and everyone was gone she waited, laying down between the stalls so that when the front of house came to make sure everyone had left, they would see no one. She waited until it was quiet before she emerged, the lights still blazing. They'd be back soon to turn them off but she had time. There was enough.

She dropped her dance bag with a thud and pulled her leotard and point shoes out of the bag, tying them up carefully, ignoring the fear that gripped her heart at the feeling of the ribbon tight around her legs, containing her. Leaving her bag in the aisle, she climbed up onto the stage, she shut her eyes and she danced there.

Music swelled in her head and she felt the stretch of muscle that had not done so for weeks because of her hospitalization. She felt the old wood of the stage floor creak beneath her weight as she jumped and twisted in the air, like she was six years old all over again and she'd pushed all of her furniture to the side. Somehow the beauty had not left her. It had gotten deeper, more pointed, thorough. She could feel it in the pockets of her bones, twisting outwards, looking for her, finding it again in the extension of her fingertips to the heavens, in the way that she pointed her toes outwards. She had been crafted for the stage.

They didn't catch her that first night but they knew that someone ha been there by the fresh scuff marks on the stage that had been wiped clean after the closing of the show. Some thought that they were finally haunted and were pleased about it, glad to have a ghost join their company. The more superstitious found it eerie.

She told her parents that she didn't want to dance anymore. They were angry and confused. They still loved her, they told her so. They begged her to reconsider but she did not give them a reason why so they soon gave up on changing her mind.

She focused on school and every now and then as she made her way home from the library she stopped by the ballet, pulling her point shoes out of her school bag, making new scuff marks on the stage to be found later. As her visits increased, so did the dancer's curiosity. They began to stay behind, hanging around on the stage, waiting for the ghost to appear, to dance. Evening would watch them from her place on the balcony, waiting in turn for them to leave. Sometimes she gave up and left first, other times she won the waiting game and she would get to dance again.

One night after she was certain that everyone was gone, she tied her dancing shoes on and took to the stage once again, muscles well back into the dance, body toned and beautiful, seemingly painless. She danced there, music swelling in her head, swelling in the empty theatre too, erupting across the stage until the muffled sounds of her dancing were not the only sounds in the theatre, but the music was too, and then clapping, whistles, an entire crowd cheering her on. The audience was in her head but when she opened her eyes they were still there. Women with careful buns and men wearing jackets and pants over their leotard watched from their places in the cheap seats, an older woman and man sitting in the best seats of the house, the pianist in the pit, fingers on the keys.

Six months later she was dancing on the stage with them. At first she had found it difficult to dance with a partner, she cringed anytime a man came near her, frightened that they were going to take hold of her in the same way that her teacher had. They were always gentle with her, kind, as if they could feel her fear. More often than not they'd sit in the practice room together and her first dance partner, Jack was his name, made her laugh with silly stories and never offered her a cigarette or asked her to spin slowly just so he could watch the way her body moved when she did it. Slowly she came to trust them. Something in her still flinched when they looked her way.

Two months after her first appearance with the company on stage she was handpicked to appear in a televised performance of The Nutcracker. Two weeks after that she was appearing in magazines and across the front covers of them, her face staring out sullenly or smiling at the Capitolites who suddenly wanted to be 'Just Like Evening'. She couldn't fathom why.

She had become famous overnight.

After The Nutcracker she got offers for more televised shows, more magazine covers until they were asking her to appear in movies as well, to play the romantic lead in the latest Games romcom, to play a fearsome tribute in the upcoming movie being made for the popular sport. Suddenly, her life was no longer so quiet, so empty of anything but dance, suddenly people followed her on the streets when she went out, people tried to take her photo without permission and leaving the house meant being besieged by fans. She felt like she was being slowly suffocated.

All she had ever wanted to do was dance.

Her heart ached.