Ballerina Tears

Ballerina Tears

Cedric...

They used to dance this way together. Now she is the only one left, left to top the dance classes on the holidays and perform with a tear in her eye, leaving the audience dreaming giddy fantasies of highflying ballet legs. An illusion, beautiful Chinese girl laying her soul bare in black leotards and stockings and blood-red Pointe shoes. She wishes she had have worn long gloves to disguise her pain, there for all to see in incriminating marks on her pale ivory wrists.

Cedric...

The music starts and she hears the crowd whisper.

"A solo performance."

"I wonder what happened to her partner."

They have never really seen her dance before; they have only seen her as his partner. Here come the tears, which are her trademark these days and she curses the fact that she cannot perform once without their accompaniment. The audience whispers again, that the music is too harsh for ballet. She does not give a damn what they think, because she is not dancing for them. She is dancing for him and his memory. All the horror pours into her dance, the fleeting love he shared with her, secret meetings behind the Hogwarts broom shed, kisses in the hall and then, when she saw his lifeless body for the last time. When they had to drag her from the room because she would not, could not believe he was lying there so cold, so still. They were horrified when she seized him by the shoulders, violently shaking him, willing there to be some life left in that empty shell. She loves that the now entranced crowd watched in awe, feeling her pain as she felt it first-hand, feeling it through her fluid movements, the arabesques, the flying legs. Then for a moment she looks at the audience and her graceful step falters. For a moment she thinks she sees him there.

Cedric...

She launches back into her routine with double energy purely because, even when she knows it is not possible she feels like he is watching her. This is the hardest part of the dancing now; she spins and leaps faster than before. People are wishing that they had not criticized her when she first took the stage. The lights enhance her slender form, all red, black and scars that tell stories. There he is again, in her imagination or the audience it is hard to tell, clapping, cheering. Most of all he is smiling. She tries to remember the last time she smiled. And that is when one of her Pointe shoes slips. She finds herself meeting with the polished wooden floor, looking wildly around for where he has disappeared too. Her ankle throbs, throbs and with the throbbing she realises he is gone. Forever. When they come to help her off the stage, out of the light she is crying bitter tears. They think she is weeping because she is hurting outside, but she knows it is because she is healing inside.

Cedric...

Cho is herself again. Her Hogwarts trunk sits at the door, full of spell books. Carefully she wraps the ribbon laces around her ballet shoes and places them on a shelf above her bed. Then she hangs her black leotard in her closet, where it can gather dust. Slowly she shuts her bedroom door, after three months at home. Before long she is on the train back to school. She never dances again. She never sees Cedric again. She never cries for him either.

Goodbye Cedric...