Broken Slippers. Deborah Sue Crews

created, believing that I was going to be a ballerina just like them. I would dance and dance and dance.

      Mondays had been my favorite days because I had dance class. When the music played, I would close my eyes and imagine I was dancing like Beauty and the Beast. The pink and gold bow in my blonde hair would shine in the light, and I felt so pretty in my pink tutu with matching pink leotards and my pink ballet slippers laced with gold. I flowed across the dance floor, twisting and twirling until my feet hurt and it would be time for me to go home. I couldn’t wait until the next Monday to do it all over again.

      When the car accident happened three years ago, paralyzing my legs, my dream of being the greatest ballerina had been crushed. I had lost my spark and I didn’t want to think about dancing anymore. So the music and dreams of dance were never the same.

      I don’t know what ever happened to my pink and gold ballet slippers. When we had moved to the country earlier this year, I figured the slippers had been lost in the move somehow. The priority of finding the ballet slippers was left behind me.

      I hadn’t forgiven my mother for drinking before she picked me up from dance practice and causing the car accident that left me injured. Mom had been so lost and upset when my dad left us a year earlier, and she started drinking to drown out her sadness. Mom had told me that drinking helped her to forget her pain.

      On the day of the accident, it had been a beautiful sunny, summer day with no clouds in the sky. Mom picked me up from dance class like she had done so many times in the past. All I could remember was screaming at Mom—“watch out!”—then everything went black. The next thing I remembered after I had woke up in the hospital was listening to the doctors trying to explain to a ten year-old that one day she would dance again. But I didn’t believe them.

      I knew it had been hard on my mom when Dad had suddenly walked out on us, but I was still there. I needed her just as much as she had needed Dad. She couldn’t see that through her pain. I had not only lost my father when he walked out, but I lost my mother too. So much had changed between Mom and me on that fateful day.

      “Jenny, come on out to the dining room,” Mom yelled above the commotion going on around her. “Some of your new classmates are here to celebrate your birthday. It isn’t every day that you turn thirteen.”

      I didn’t know why my mother bothered with a birthday party. No one really wanted to be here. They didn’t want to be friends with the cripple in the wheelchair. They just came to the party because their parents were friends with my mother. Plus, Mom was the head of the Art Festival Committee and their parents were hoping that their daughters would have a chance to be chosen for the festival’s dance recital this summer. There were limited spots, but many of the same girls tried out every year with only a few making the dance troop.

      They didn’t think I noticed the way that they looked at me, or the way they didn’t look at me—averting their eyes and looking anywhere else, instead of having to face me directly. It was so embarrassing. I hated birthdays anymore!

      “Here she is, Jenny, the birthday girl,” Mom said smiling.

      She didn’t see them looking at me, but I saw the horror and pity on the faces of the six girls gathering around the dining room table with the pink ballerina cake positioned in the center. The girls had been classmates of mine during the last three months of sixth grade. I barely knew any of them, because I had just met the girls when Mom and I had moved here and I was forced to attend the last three months of the previous school year. I only remembered a couple of their names because they were in class with me, but not one of the girls came up to talk to me in class unless they were forced to.

      Why wouldn’t my mother just let the dance dream die? I had. “Jenny, open up your present,” Mom gleamed.

      As I went through the motion of opening up the present my mother gave me, thoughts raced through my mind. Why wouldn’t she just forget about me and my birthday? She wasn’t there when I needed her and now she thinks that she can make it up to me. I was lost in deep concentration when the snickers I had faintly heard from the girls in the room brought me back to reality. I couldn’t believe what I saw when I looked down into the box that I had just ripped open. There was a pair of pink and gold ballet slippers, just like the ones I had when I was a little girl, but this pair was bigger and just a little more worn.

      “Why can’t you let it rest?” I screamed at Mom as I wheeled my way out of the dining room. I couldn’t stand the look on the girls’ faces anymore. I had to escape. I couldn’t get away from them fast enough. I could hear their laughter as I left in pain.

      “I hate her!” I sobbed as I threw the ballerina slippers at my bedroom wall. I couldn’t control the sobbing now, it hurt so much. The mocking giggles and smirks from the girls played over and over again in my head.

      The tears rolled off of my face and onto my lap. I tried to wipe them away, but I couldn’t stop them from coming. Through the haze I saw the music box sitting so peacefully on my old vanity. I wheeled on over to the vanity and picked it up. I gently lifted the lid and there was the broken ballerina, lying down inside the box. My tears rolled down onto her face, streaking through the dust.

      “Why don’t you dance anymore?” I cried softly as I looked at the tiny ballerina, trying to find the answer for her and for me.

      Not expecting to hear an answer, but wishing I would, I slammed the lid shut! Shutting the ballerina out just like I had wanted to shut my mother out of my thoughts.

      After I had heard the girls leave and go home with their laughter, Mom came to my bedroom to talk to me, but I wouldn’t let her in. I had locked the door and yelled at her to go away. I heard her breathe a heavy sigh and slowly walk away from the door. There wasn’t anything that she could say to me right now that would have made a difference. I just wanted to be left alone.

      Everything in my room had grown dark and cold, threatening to drag down anyone who dared to enter. Even my poster “The Easter Recital” had lost its beauty from the sad, bitter thoughts I continued to release into the air around me. The ballerinas faces in the poster were hidden or limited to just a glimpse of their profile. There was something that I could no longer quite grasp in the art that the ballerinas represented through the dance. It had been lost to me now. Those thoughts twirled around in my mind as I drifted off into my dreams of a troubled sleep.

      I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours before I heard, “Jenny, wake up,” whispering in my ear.

      “Mom, it’s still dark out,” I whined as I buried my head back under my pillow. “I don’t want to get up yet.”

      “I’m not your mother, it’s me, Becky Jones! Your tears brought me to life,” said the music box ballerina. “So get up and tell me—why am I here?”