Deleted
Scene: Joy learns how to waltz
We ended up in a small,
white room. “Strauss,” Fabian said, in a
deep baritone, and the white walls turned into—well they said it was a
ballroom, and it certainly looked like the couple of pictures I vaguely
remembered from history lessons. Or at
least, I thought it did.
Fabian arranged me to his satisfaction—right hands clasped,
his left at my waist, my left on his shoulder.
“Music,” he said, and a slow three-quarters tune began playing.
Well it was sort of the waltz that people—mostly older
folk—did at the dances back home. But
somehow it was more graceful. At least
it was more graceful when Fabian was doing it.
And it took me a bit to get the hang of—
“Hunter,” Fabian chided me more than once. “I am the man. I lead, you follow. You will be dancing with Josh and Straussing
is formal. That means you have to be a
girly girl.”
And I would flush with chagrin and we would start again.
It turned out there was more than one kind of waltz. There was the slow one that I was used
to. There was a fast kind that nearly had
a big fellow like Fabian swinging me off my feet, we were moving so
quickly. There was one that had little
skipping steps in it. And then, once I finally started getting the hang of it,
there were fancy moves like twirls and reverses and a sort of double-spin where
we’d join crossed hands and pivot around a common point, and even a sort of
place where he did pick me right off
my feet and into the air.
But it wasn’t just steps I was getting from him. Once I started being able to follow him, he
started talking to me.
“The rest of the people there will all be Cits,” he said,
as I listened and worked to keep my feet from tangling. “They’ll ask you about Hunting, or about
yourself. They may ask you things that
seem highly personal; you can answer or not, as you choose, but do so
politely. Keep things light. Remember, above all, don’t say anything that
might make them anxious.”
“Talk about my Hounds?” I suggested faintly. He nodded with approval.
“No one has ever seen Hounds like yours before. That’s a good, neutral topic.”
I nodded.
“Many of them will be high-stat, and once word gets out
where you’re going tonight, there will be rankers there too. Actors, very likely. Possibly musicians. Probably one of the Faces—those are people
who are famous for being famous. The
cams won’t all be on you.”
“Oh thank glory!” I said in relief, and that teased the
tiniest of smiles out of him.
“I was going to caution you not to do anything to try and
get the attention back, but obviously….”
He picked me up and swung me around, and this time I landed perfectly on
the correct foot. “They’ll want to dance
with you, and you’re supposed to let them.
If you sense the conversation weighing too heavily on Hunting, ask them
about themselves. What they do, how they
do it, what’s life like in Apex—“ He
smiled again, when I nodded eagerly.
“—won’t hurt in this instance to be a little bit of a starry-eyed turnip
very grateful to be here.”
That wouldn’t be hard.
Only last night, hadn’t I been wishing I could see one of those parties
for myself?
