Dance for Me (Fenbrook Academy #1) - New Adult Romance by Helena Newbury Page B

for a pretty good conversation filler if you were on a date that wasn’t going well, or could lead to full-on group movie karaoke if you were with friends and a movie from your teen years came on.
    Jasmine and Karen were sitting at one of the small, black tables. I could tell they’d argued over where to sit and reached a compromise. Jasmine would have wanted to sit in the very middle of the bar, while Karen would have pleaded for a corner. They’d wound up against the wall, but midway along it so there was plenty of passing man-traffic for Jasmine to look at.
    Karen was a musician. In fact, she was the most musiciany musician I knew. Let me try to explain.
    Fenbrook was divided into three camps: dancers, actors and musicians. Now of course we all got along just fine and had plenty of friends in all three disciplines, but there were still stereotypes and prejudices. They were gently mocking rather than cruel, but they were still there.
    Every discipline thought it worked the hardest. We dancers pointed to our aching legs and sore feet, and the fact we were physically fitter than anyone else. The actors liked to say that their emotional toil was the worst (“I had to live being a drug addict for a week—do you know what that’s like?” ). Musicians moaned about the endless practice they had to do.
    If Fenbrook was a high school, then actors were the cool kids everyone was jealous of (seriously, how many famous dancers do you know?), we dancers were the jocks and the musicians were the geeks. Like I said, it was a gentle, loving stereotype. We all worked our asses off and we knew it. But musicians did have a reputation for being the quiet, studious ones and Karen was the living embodiment of that.
    She was a cellist—I swear, her cello case was bigger than she was—and generally regarded as the best musician Fenbrook had. Possibly the best student the academy had, period. She was a bit of a control freak, practicing before anyone else arrived and staying long after everyone else had finished. She was also seriously posh. Her family might not have had as much money as Clarissa’s, but her accent was pure upper class Boston.
    Jasmine and I had taken care of her since we all met as freshman. She was friendly enough, if a little intimidating, but I sometimes wondered if she understood the concept of having fun. It felt like she begrudged every moment she spent away from her music, until we almost felt guilty asking her to come out with us. She’d remained single, despite our best attempts to set her up with guys. Even as I walked up to their table, I could see Jasmine eyeing up guys for her.
    “What about that one? No, not him—eww!—him!” I turned and followed her eye line. There was an actor there I vaguely knew—Billy something. Good smile, good body...and he knew it.
    Karen shook her head quickly and looked up at me, hoping for rescue.
    “Leave the poor girl alone,” I told Jasmine. “She’s happy single.”
    “No one’s happy single. The happy singleton is a myth put about by a conspiracy of happy couples, to make unhappy single people feel even worse. We should be proud of our unhappiness.” Jasmine thumped the table with her fist. “Now fill us in. What’s the latest from the batcave?”
    I bit my lip. There was so much to tell...falling off the stage, the kissing, the—I flushed. Not to mention that we were going on an actual, proper date on Monday. I’d told Clarissa, who’d hugged me and told me to be careful, still blissfully unaware that I’d seen her and Neil kissing. But I’d told her in the car, right after it happened, and now that I’d had time to think, it was harder. Things with Darrell felt too magical, too fragile...like a soap bubble. On the other hand, I couldn’t not tell them....
    “Do you want another one of those?” I asked, trying to change the subject. Each of them had just finished a Pretty Woman—all the cocktails in Flicker were named after movies. Pretty Woman was