The pink woman in the high-backed chair tented her fingers against her chin and addressed the blonde woman she had glued to the wall a couple of hours previously. She no longer considered the blonde woman a friend, and she had certainly never been a girlfriend — the blonde woman was hideous and old — but as a person who had once helped her play a very funny joke before abandoning her, the blonde woman deserved a chance to be let off the wall.

Given that the blonde woman’s release depended entirely on her having an appropriately sympathetic reaction, Cerise thought she had better make the effort to tell her tragic story as dramatically as possible.

“I knew I wanted to be a ballerina before I even knew I was a girl, so I think it is fair to say my doom was sealed from the very beginning.”

Cerise glanced around the room to see how that landed. Most of her audience appeared to be listening but she couldn’t be sure how badly they felt for her yet. Tania seemed annoyed, but Cerise had just dumped her onto the floor and stolen her chair.

“Of course, I was five years old and a ballerina was a girl in my mind,” she went on, “so the two things were very closely intertwined. It was never going to be possible for me to have both. But at the time, my parents decided they didn’t have any trouble with me being a ballet dancer — they corrected my language and told me that was how I was supposed to say it. Boys are ballet dancers, not ballerinas. Well, I wanted to be a ballerina and I didn’t care what they wanted me to call it.

“So at the age of six, I started taking lessons at this wretched little dance studio in SoHo. That was what my parents could afford. The teacher was this awful old ex-dancer with dyed black hair and ruby lipstick who never amounted to anything because she was too fat. She smelled like cough drops and she used to hit us over the head with her cane. She said it would hurt less in the long run than what bad form would do to our bodies.

“She was right, but nevertheless I despised her. I learned to position myself properly out of spite. Spite is an excellent motivator, I recommend you all try it.”

“You poor thing,” said the woman glued to the wall.

“Hyacinth, I have two decades to go from here and I’m never going to get through it if every time something unfortunate happens to me you say ‘you poor thing,’” Cerise said. “Save your commentary for the end.”

Hyacinth rolled her eyes heavenward but refrained from any further commentary.

“I was doing so well with ballet that my parents also signed me up for flamenco and tap, which was all the old bat knew how to teach. It was at about this time that my father stopped buying me toys and candy, even when he bought them for my little brother, because I was expensive.”

Now she rolled her eyes and shook her head — the woman glued to the wall could not shake her head at the moment and Cerise hoped she was jealous.

“But he treated it like a compliment. ‘Charlie doesn’t need any of that, he’s having dance lessons. He’s expensive. He’s going to make something of himself.’ I think he was hoping Jacques would copy me and then he wouldn’t need to get us any toys or candy at all, but Jackie was smarter than that.

“I had to start doing odd jobs around the neighbourhood for pocket money and that is why I knew how to trim hedges when I ended up homeless back in San Rosille about ten years later — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“There was this awful boy who lived in my building…”

(Hyacinth was used to David’s speech patterns. She expected everything even remotely unpleasant was going to be awful, horrible, wretched, or some other twee adjective.)

“He was orange. He was the only coloured child my age in the neighbourhood, so of course I was expected to be friends with this boy.” She spread her arms and indicated the coloured population of the room, then spoke in an exhausted, sing-song voice. “You all know how it is.”

“If it’s a boy they want you to be friends for the rest of your lives and if it’s a girl they want you to fall in love and get married,” Steven explained, for the benefit of the white people.

“Just so,” Cerise said. “But I suppose it’s the opposite for those of us who grow up female. We’re supposed to be integrated now, but we still like to pretend. Especially our parents.”

“And Mrs. Taube,” Tommy whispered in Penny’s ear.

“I actually did like Maria,” Steven mused. “But I used to pull her hair to tease her, and one day she grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back and I decided I didn’t want to marry her anymore. I think we were twelve. Our parents used to send us to the movies together. They were thrilled when she moved in down the street.”

“Well, I was supposed to be a boy at the time, so they wanted us to be friends,” Cerise said, stamping out this potential tangent. “We loathed each other. He was the first person to ever believe me when I said I was a girl because he thought then maybe they wouldn’t make him play with me anymore. Of course it didn’t work. We didn’t want to be friends. He didn’t like me. I know he didn’t like me.”

She sighed. “But for whatever reason — this was just after I got accepted to the art school in Ansalem to have a real dance teacher and I was about to move away — this boy grabbed me and kissed me.”

She would’ve preferred if he twisted her arm like Maria. He grabbed her through her shirt, though she had been eleven years old and there was precious little to grab, then he yanked her near by the fabric and put his mouth over hers. His lips were hard and he smelled like bubble gum.

“He wanted to know if I liked it. I said no. He said, ‘Then you’re not a girl. You’re just a dumb boy.’ Then I walked back upstairs and I locked myself in the bathroom. But we shared it so I couldn’t stay in there or cry or anything. I washed my face and I went home and sat in the kitchen staring at the stove. Then Jackie came in and I made us peanut butter sandwiches. I was just little and completely stupid and I thought that boy had to be right. Girls like being assaulted by boys they hate, don’t they?”

“Not really,” said Hyacinth. “But the cars were fun.”

Cerise frowned at her a moment and then shooed her with a hand. “Nevermind. I don’t care. We’ll talk about you later.

“I went off to school and it was better, because they liked me. They accepted me. There were lots of boys who wanted to dance. But it was also total shit because now there were enough boys for us to have our own class. I got to learn with the girls before. Madame Souza was teaching me a little bit differently and I couldn’t have a tutu, but nobody had a tutu. I could pretend I was going to be a ballerina.

“Once I went away to Ansalem, I couldn’t pretend anymore. I was going to be a ballet dancer. A boy ballet dancer, like the other boys in my class. A lot of leaping and picking up girls so they could look like they were flying, but if I wanted to fly, I’d have to throw my own body around by myself. And awful old white ballet slippers the whole time.”

She scowled. “Some of the girls already had pointe shoes, and demi-pointes — for practice. It’s supposed to be bad for your feet, but they said they were ready. Nobody ever wanted to check if I was ready for pointe shoes.”

“Boys aren’t supposed to dance on their toes,” Tania said. She had decided to remain sitting on the floor, since the other nice chair was glued to the ceiling and the card table was occupied.

Cerise made a twisted smile. “You know, the hell of it is some of them do! I read an article in the Arts and Leisure section. Everyone was quite impressed with how strong and athletic he had to be to do it. He was a lead soloist and they were writing new choreography just to show him off. I cut out his picture and stuck a lot of pins in it but to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t been horribly injured or died yet.”

She stood up and spread her arms. She felt quite ridiculous in her gardening overalls and high heels, but they had to see her to understand. “I can’t learn pointe work now. Even if I could bang my feet into shape, I’d never be as good as the rest of the girls — they’ve been dancing en pointe half their lives by my age. The best I could hope for is being an ugly old teacher like Madame Souza.

“But back then, I had plenty of time to learn. Most girls don’t start until they’re at least twelve, and some of them even later, because you have to wait until the bones in your feet firm up. I had almost convinced myself I had to be a stupid boy, I even kissed a few girls and I thought that confirmed it, but I still wanted those damn shoes!” She stamped her high-heeled feet.

She sat down again with a huff and rested her head in her hand. Her expression was so jaded it appeared to by trying to slide off sideways. “I was good at it, you know. I was damn good at it, even if I had to pretend I was a boy. I quit flamenco but I kept up with tap for a while. I can still do both. The Novikov Ballet snapped me up from school a whole year before I was due to graduate.

“Do any of you know ballet? They’re very good. They’re from Prokovia — But they were from Piastana back then, because of the borders. We were friends with Piastana at that point so it was all right, and they wanted to grab me before anyone else could. I was in the corps, of course, but I know they wanted me for Rothbart in Swan Lake. Not the Swan Lake they were doing right then, but eventually. They were going to do it again later at some point, it’s a classic! The art director did a sketch.”

She tipped up her nose. “They liked my colour. Rothbart is an evil wizard so they wanted a coloured dancer and there aren’t a lot of those. Especially not male ones.”

“That seems racist,” Penny said, but she glanced at Tommy for confirmation. She wasn’t coloured. He gave her a subtle nod.

“I don’t care if it was racist, I would’ve been famous!” snapped Cerise. She turned away. “But I didn’t want to be Rothbart, I wanted to be Odile. Odile is the Black Swan. She’s evil too! There was this perfectly horrible woman playing Odile when I was in the corps. She was vain. She was stupid. Needlessly cruel. And so shallow you wouldn’t be able to drown a mouse in her. I didn’t want to associate with her. I certainly didn’t want to make love to her.” She sighed. “I wanted to be her.”

Nevertheless, starting a relationship with a woman whom she despised — a white woman five years her senior who had flat out told her she was only interested because she’d never been with “a magical boy” and who repeatedly expressed an intention to kick him to the curb when he stopped being amusing — had been as close as she could get at the time.

Every once in a while, when she was in a mood, she had tried to tell herself she loved that horrible woman and they were going to get married and have babies and maybe even be something approaching happy. Gods, what an idiot she’d been. But she’d already been trying to talk herself into just being a man for the sake of Rothbart, so she might as well have married a bitch and had children she didn’t want and made herself completely miserable.

She had thought about killing herself sometimes. Once, as a child, she had eaten five or ten fruit-flavoured chewable vitamins — the most ridiculous possible thing! — with the intention of finishing the bottle and seeing what happened. But then Jackie plopped down on the bed and wanted to listen to the radio and she hid the bottle under her pillow and never got back to it.

The closest she had ever come to wilful self-destruction was sitting in her shared dressing room, gazing at a photo of Pierina and a coloured pencil sketch of a pink Rothbart who vaguely resembled her, and trying to tell herself that it wouldn’t be so bad.

Despite her original intention to make Hyacinth cry, she did not share the thing about the chewable vitamins or Pierina.

“I might’ve stayed with the Novikov Ballet,” she said, unsure if any of the others had been talking while she had been thinking. “It would’ve been horrible for me, but I was sixteen and stupid and I might’ve done it. I didn’t get a chance to make that stupid decision because I made another stupid decision.”

She smiled and narrowed her eyes. “I did tell you about the pointe shoes. That I was running out of time to learn how to dance en pointe and catch up to the other girls. I did not steal Guiseppina’s stupid shoes!” She slapped a hand on the arm of the chair to punctuate it. “I bought some for myself in the same style because I liked her stupid shoes. But the dumb quiff lost hers somewhere, she was always losing things, and she saw mine sticking out of my dance bag and she called me a thief.

“I was practising by myself when the studio was empty and they were my shoes, they weren’t even her size, but she wouldn’t believe me. I couldn’t possibly learn pointe work by myself — and she may have been right about that, but that didn’t mean I was a shoe thief, it just meant I was dumb enough to try.

“I slapped her, and she kicked my legs out from under me. I hit my head on the dance barre and knocked out two teeth. I called her a cunt. I may have called them all cunts, I’m not sure. Then all the girls dogpiled me and they were kicking the crap out of me when the ballet master came in and he had to douse them with a fire bucket to get them to quit.

“I was sopping wet and missing teeth and pissed off, and that bitch Guiseppina was trying to tell the ballet master I had stolen my own shoes, and I remember what I said. I remember it exactly. I screamed it. I said, ‘Give me back my shoes, you bitch! I’m as much a girl as you are and you can’t have my shoes! I’m a ballerina and I want my fucking shoes!’”

Hyacinth was trying to stifle a laugh and not doing very well.

Sanaam glanced sideways to make sure the children who understood swearing were still in Room 102 with the door closed so they wouldn’t laugh.

Then Cerise laughed herself, a bitter one. “No, it really is quite funny. I know it. The silliest thing is, I’d spent all that time trying to convince myself I was a boy, but when I said I was a girl I knew it was true, and I’d known it all along, and I couldn’t pretend anymore. Like a spell broke. Poof. I’m not a swan, I’m a pretty girl.

“But nobody was happy about it. The orchestra didn’t kick in. I think at the very least they could’ve done me a leitmotif.

“The ballet master just took me up to the director’s office and they had a talk about me in front of me like I wasn’t there. They decided I was cracking under the strain and maybe the company had been a little hasty in recruiting me so young. They gave me a train ticket and sent me home with a letter that said they’d be happy to have me back when I finished school or psychiatric treatment, whichever my parents thought was best.”

Pierina hadn’t even said goodbye. Which was one of the many reasons you shouldn’t fool around with white girls!

“They wired ahead and told my parents I was coming home and why, but they didn’t come to meet me at the station. If Jackie didn’t get on the bus and come down, I suppose I might’ve got off the train and then laid down on the tracks, but that would’ve upset him, so I went home with him instead.

“I’d bought myself a dress on the way back from Skalka. It takes about a week to get here from there. The train stations have shops. I wasn’t any good at making myself up and I didn’t even have a corset. I looked terrible. He gave me a hug and then he wanted to know if I really was crazy or I just wanted to get out of the ballet and come home. Like I was a soldier trying to get discharged. I said, ‘I don’t know.’

“That was the last scrap of pretending I had left for a long time. I couldn’t even bring myself to wear pants. I was just so tired of it. It was like when you come off of a diet and can’t stop yourself from eating an entire chocolate cake and ruining all your hard work. Well, screw dieting anyway. When I got home I told my parents flat out. ‘I’m a girl. I’m your daughter. Are you happy to see me?’

“My father called me a waste. That’s what he said. A waste. My mother wouldn’t stop crying and when I tried to hug her she shrank away from me and knocked into the dining room hutch. This ugly talavera bird we had fell out and broke. But I always hated that thing.

“I stayed home for about two weeks, I think. I slept a lot. They weren’t going to send me back to school. They blamed the dancing. One night I got up to go to the bathroom and I heard them talking about putting me away. Not even anything so gentle as getting me treatment, putting me away. I knew they couldn’t afford it, so I wasn’t worried about that. But then my mother said, ‘Charles, couldn’t we call someone? Fix him?’

“My own mother wanted to go running to some god to scramble my brain. That, they could have afforded! And it scared the hell out of me. For an instant, I thought I’d better go get a god myself.”

Her audience had all gone quiet and she flicked a hand at them. “Oh, I didn’t do anything drastic, don’t get excited. I don’t care for gods, I just left.”

The tension broke as if she’d thrown a stone into a puddle. Tania laughed weakly.

Cerise went on, as if none of them had the ability to call a god and escalate a family squabble to mass murder any time they wanted, “I waited until they were asleep. I emptied my father’s wallet and I stole some of our nicer heirlooms to pawn. I left Jackie a lovely note…”

…I love you very much and none of this is your fault. I’m going to be okay, but I have to go. You’re a beautiful person and don’t ever let anyone try to make you into someone else…

“…I walked off in the middle of the night with no idea where I was going and I ended up sleeping in an alley. I found a pawn shop and a doss house the next day, but when the money ran out I had no idea what to do with myself.

“Fortunately, I was still terrible at dressing. I was obviously either some kind of molly or insane. This white boy — he had black lipstick and eyeshadow but I never saw him again and I’m not sure what his thing was — he noticed me at the doss house and told me about the Black Orchid.

“So!” She sat back and clapped her hands. “I was never going to be the Black Swan, but at age seventeen I became a Silver Swan.” She leaned forward again. “Do you know what that is, Hyacinth? Annie had no idea, but she had aged out by the time I met her.

“A Silver Swan is a molly in need of a meal who is too young to actually go inside the Black Orchid or work there, because it is a drag club with a bar and you must be at least eighteen with an ID. You knock on the back door, explain your situation or just say hello if they already know you, and someone will bring you cold leftovers for lunch or a hot dinner wrapped in swan-shaped foil. You may have chicken, steak or fish with rice or potato and seasonal vegetable, because they’re a supper club and that’s all they have.”

She paused and touched a hand to her face. “Raul used to bring us tortillas and salsa when he was working. We were hungry and we would’ve eaten anything, but gods bless Raul — sometimes I just couldn’t face another bite of cold fish. He was a dishwasher.

“A lot of Silver Swans age into being busboys, or girls, and dishwashers. Lalage and Barbara always have lots more of those than they really need. It eats up any profit they might be making, that and all the free meals, but I don’t think they ever intend to retire, and it makes them happy.

“I got lucky.” She laid a hand on her chest. “I got to be in the show. But not right away because not too long after I started getting my meals in swan foil, the siege started. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the war up until then. It was a bit of a surprise!

“The first year wasn’t so bad. The supply ships were even getting through for most of the first year. I probably could’ve got out of the city back then if I wanted, but I had nowhere else to go. I don’t know what my parents did. I don’t care about them, but Jackie was just fourteen so I hope they did leave and take him with them.

“Our block of flats was destroyed, I went back and checked when it was all over, but I don’t know if they were in it. I don’t know where to find them and they don’t know where to find me, and that’s all there is to it.”

She sighed.

“There were still Silver Swans for the first year. Lalage and Barbara were afraid of the police. But when it really started to get bad they decided they didn’t care anymore. They kept doing shows, but it was less of a business and more of a shelter with volunteer singing and dancing. I’d aged out of being a Swan by then anyway, but they just let everyone in.

“After the Grey Wall came down we didn’t even do shows. We mainly huddled in the basement and hugged each other. We burned the furniture and broke up the stage to keep warm.

“But after that.” She flicked her hand again, this time shooing away the entire war. “Then I got to be in the show! It’s not enough to keep me fed, clothed and housed, but I don’t really mind gardening. I do mind pretending to be a man again, but it’s not so bad now that I know it really is pretending. And I mind dancing with Pierre, because Lalage and Barbara think we look cute together and they keep making us do it. But at least I’m still a dancer.

“Then Annie came to work at the club, and she needed a big sister! Isn’t that right, Annie?” She didn’t bother to turn. She’d sensed a presence rather like when one feels the sun come out from behind a cloud.

The red-headed woman — almost a woman — was standing in the basement doorway with her arms folded. “You never told us we were Jackie’s age,” Ann said.

Now Cerise turned. “Are you?” She smiled and shrugged. “I never noticed. I’m terrible at math. The only reason I know any at all is I had to keep my scholarship. Then I did my best to forget.” She stood and turned to address Hyacinth again. “So do you feel as sorry for me as you do for a nest of vermin or would you rather stay stuck to the wall?”

Hyacinth frowned at her. “I don’t feel as bad for you as the mice because they’re going to die and you seem like you’re doing okay.”

Sanaam’s exasperation overrode his best effort to politely keep his opinions to himself and he burst out, “Hyacinth, for gods’ sakes! I know you know how to lie! I have seen you do it! She told you to pretend if you had to! When somebody asks you if you’d like to be unglued from the wall, you say yes!”

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” Hyacinth told Cerise.

Sanaam groaned and clapped both hands over his face.

“…I respect you, and I’m sorry for how I treated you,” she went on. “You would be a good friend, but I know I’m a bad one and you deserve better than me. I was trying to spare you some pain but I didn’t bother to ask if you wanted me to do that, and then I hurt you anyway. I’ll explain why later, if you want me to. I do want to be let down from the wall now, but it’s your decision.”

Cerise waved a hand and Hyacinth slid rapidly down to the floor. She dropped to her hands and knees and Sanaam helped her up.

“I don’t care,” Cerise said. “I can hide in the basement with Annie and Milo if I don’t want to deal with you. And Mordecai promised he’d make me a cheesecake. I don’t even care what it’s made out of, I’m not picky. Annie, is my tea cold?”

“I think it must be.” Ann said. She spread her arms for a hug. “I’m sorry, angel.”

Cerise put an arm around Ann’s shoulders and pulled her gently towards the basement. “It’s a magic storm, I can probably fix it. I’m practically an evil wizard at the moment anyway. I want to play with the radio. I never get to talk to… Well, you know who I mean.”

Ann followed her down the stairs.

Hyacinth brushed off her dress and straightened her skirt. There was some plaster dust and a little bit of crayon around the edges, but she didn’t seem to have picked up any of the wallpaper. There were tears and cut marks in the wall behind her, and Bethany had been outlining her in a rainbow gradient, but it wasn’t much different from the state of the walls in the rest of the house. They’d pulled out all the plumbing and electrical during the siege.

She felt with both hands and her hair was still on. She raked it back with her fingers and arranged the strap of her goggles to keep it out of her face. She had no idea where her hair tie had fallen out.

“All right,” she said evenly. She believed she might even be smiling. “Now about what you people have done to my house…”

Barnaby squeezed his way past the boxes and piles to look down at her. Multiple items, including one of the nice chairs, had been glued to the ceiling. Calliope and Chris had been deciding where to put Florian’s accidental sculpture for maximal artistic effect when they got distracted by Cerise. Chris had just picked it up again, but he also looked downstairs and froze. “Il siento, madame…” he muttered.

“Miss Haber?” said Barnaby. “Excuse me, Miss Haber? Or whoever you are?”

Kitty put down a box and turned. “What is it, Mr. Graham?”

He lay a gentle hand on her back. “Stop sorting and prepare to be sorted, Miss Haber.”