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Pete's voice was in the walls, it ricocheted off of the corners and came from peeled wallpaper in whispers that left as quickly as they came. He stood in the doorway and watched over her. He set the mugs in the drying rack for her. He reminded her of her quizzes on the calendar. He pecked her cheek as her eyes shut to sleep. Peter Bell was there — he was somewhere, he was somewhere and the only way Angie got her mind to shut the fuck up about it was to slide on her pointe shoes. Worn out past how long she should have been using them, but customized to her liking perfectly; they were another part of her, she felt bare without them.
When she danced, she wasn't nutty Angelica Bell with the missing druggie brother and deathly ill mother. When she danced she became whatever she wanted: a swan, a princess, a heartbroken villager, one half of star-crossed lovers — she could be whoever she wanted for as long as her cassette tape of Tchaikovsky and Adolphe Adam played throughout the small bedroom. Angie wanted to dance forever, until her feet couldn't bear her weight and her head spun with exhaustion.
She wished to be a ballerina in a pretty little box, and she would be, eventually.
As much as she liked her quaint little dance studio in the center of Hawkins, Indiana, Angie longed for something bigger, something better. A place where she could meet her match and be pushed to the furthest of her abilities — Angie planned to go into the dance program at the University of Chicago — and maybe they didn't specialize in ballet, but it made sense that it would help her achieve her goal of playing Giselle. Even just once.
Angie would embody the youthfulness of Giselle, she'd excel in the representation of heartbreak and sorrow, and most importantly, the girls who liked to pick on her at the studio would eat her fucking shit.
Don't get her wrong, she tried to be kind to people — she tried, but Angelica Bell was a spiteful creature at heart, and Hawkins had yet to see the brunt of her teenaged malice. She'd step all over Carol Perkins and her stupid red hair, and laugh in the face of Vicky Carmichael as she would always be stuck in the stupid little town full of the same people with their perfect nuclear families. Bits and pieces of her wanted to see the entire town crumble at its foundations, it was the reason her life went to shit anyway, but no — good people stayed in the dreary hell hole, too.
