Dark Turns Read Online Free PDF

dropped to a whisper.
    “Over the summer, Theo met up with a certain someone I won’t name right now. He made a video of him and this person being . . . amorous.” Alexei wagged his eyebrows. “He then texted said video to his buddy, which of course got forwarded to the whole crew team. Then the school. Then the world.” Alexei stifled a giggle. He elbowed June. “You can probably even search that shit in China.”
    Nia frowned at the boy. A girl was dead and he joked as though he’d seen an embarrassing celebrity story on TMZ.
    Talia rolled her eyes. “Some people can’t shut up about it, even when they should.”
    “A sex tape?” June more mouthed the words than said them. “Theo’s not that type.”
    “Add alcohol and every guy is that type,” Alexei said. “I always thought he was a jerk.”
    “He’s always been nice to me.”
    “Because you’re a pretty girl. He was never so nice to me.”
    “I would have been, like, utterly devastated if I was Lauren,” Talia said. She dragged her lower lip beneath her top teeth. Sad eyes looked up at Nia. “Some people think she committed suicide after she found out that he cheated.”
    “People jump off bridges for less,” Alexei said.
    “Who was the tape with?” June whispered.
    Alexei trapped his left tricep in a bent elbow and turned behind him, as if stretching his shoulder. Nia traced his gaze. He stared straight at Aubrey.
    “Little Miss Perfect,” he chuckled. “In the flesh.”

4
    Ligne [ LEEN-yuh ]
    Line. The outline presented by a dancer while executing steps and poses. A dancer is said to have a good or bad sense of line according to the arrangement of head, body, legs and arms in a pose or movement. A good line is absolutely indispensable to the classical dancer.
    N ia limped down the hall toward her apartment. The pain that had nibbled at her heel during her demonstration of fouetté turns was now chomping on her swollen tendon. She shouldn’t have taken the long way home, but she’d wanted to avoid the lake.
    Her fixation on the drowned girl was aggravating her injury. She felt anxious. Jittery. Tight. And the conversation in class had only made things worse. Rather than soften yesterday’s images, knowing the girl’s name had sharpened her mental pictures. The bluish face hiding behind her eyelids no longer seemed an out-of-focus photo from the nightlynews that had flickered into her real life. The face belonged to Lauren.
    Nia hoped a long soak would soothe both her mind and body. She thought of the box of Epsom salt in her vanity while feeling for the key in her sweater pocket. As the metal jangled in the lock, she noticed a letter tacked to her door with a yellow pushpin. She examined the note. Wallace’s script monogram was stamped in the left-hand corner of the cream-colored card stock. She flipped over the paper to see words scrawled in blue ink:
    Please meet in my office during first period to discuss a matter of utmost importance.
    –Dean Martha Stirk
    Pain relief would have to wait. First period started at nine, following morning electives, which only some kids opted to take. There was a twenty-minute window between the end of dance class and the first academic lecture, enabling her students to change into their uniforms and head to the main campus. But the time had already expired thanks to Nia’s lumbering walk back to the dorms. She was late.
    Nia hustled back down the stairs as fast as she could. Dean Stirk’s office sat above the registration building, across the courtyard surrounding the girls’ dorms and back up the hill to the main campus. She had never been inside, but she’d seen signs during move-in weekend when she’d collected her orientation packet.
    The sun beat down on her bare neck like a broiler. She was baking in her sweater. Still, she didn’t remove her cotton pullover. The microfiber tank beneath hugged her body, and while form-fitting attire was appropriate for the studio, it wasn’t for a