Silence. Were we supposed to laugh? You couldn’t tell by her sudden stone-faced expression, taking each of us in, maybe even daring us to. I tried to imagine her on the stage, doing a pirouette or a pas de bourrée, but instead I got an image of her lifting Deedee up and twirling him above her head, then dropping him across her knee, snapping him in two WWE style. “I’m totally kidding,” Rose said at last, breaking the silence. “Seriously? I mean, could you even imagine me in a tutu?” Wolf shrugged. Deedee giggled nervously. I shook my head—a little too emphatically, maybe—then looked at the clock on the wall and calculated how many more minutes until the bell rang. “Ballet,” Bench snorted. Rose Holland polished off another cracker in one bite and brushed the orange crumbs from her sweater. “To each their own,” she said. And for probably the third time since she sat down I became conscious of all the other students in the cafeteria who seemed to be looking our way, almost certainly getting the wrong idea. After lunch Rose said she’d see us around. Her tone was casual, like she hadn’t just contributed to twenty of the most
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