One

I have hated the majority of my life I could remember. My mother died in a car accident when I was young, on the day of my 10th birthday. From that day my father had blamed me for her death, all because I had thrown a tantrum over not having ice cream with my cake, so she went to get some and was struck by a drunk driver.

That was the day the horrors of my childhood had begun. My father had become a recluse drunk who lost his job and claimed disability to sit at home and drink. He would have flashbacks of my mother and get into a drunken rage, which usually ended with me as his punching bag and anger release.

I tried several times to tell an adult about it, I showed them the bruises on my legs and arms, but my father was the world’s greatest actor. Every time someone had come to the door under the suspicion something was happening to me in the house, he pretended to act like a sober and loving father, which in turn made me look like a liar.

So, I stopped telling people, and I waited for the day I could escape. I used to love dancing, my mother put me in ballet classes at the age of 5 and I fell in love with it, but that had to come to an end. It was nearly impossible to hide the bruises with a leotard on.

I had to give up all the things I loved and had become an entirely different person. It wasn’t until my teen years that the drinking and beatings got worse. I was 14 when my father struck me in the face for the first time and left me with a black eye. I turned to heavy make-up and hoodies to hide my face.

This only turned me into the weirdo at school, and no one wanted to go near me. No one except one person.

Ace Huxley. Star captain of the hockey team and my biggest bully throughout high school. He always found me in the halls and made fun of the way I was dressed or the way I acted. He loved to target my heavy make-up and baggy hoodies, taunting me about being fat and ugly, so I tried and hide it. When in truth I had received tons of compliments before I began to hide my face and make myself look hideous.

He was the popular kid, the rich kid, every girl wanted him, and every guy wanted to be him unless they were gay, then they most likely wanted him too. It was infuriating how no one saw the true asshole that he was because I was the only person he blessed with his time of day to bully.

But during the last year of high school, I had found my calling, and my answer to escaping my father’s wretched house. He never allowed me to get a job, the one time I did behind his back, he found the money hidden in my mattress and beat me until I confessed to where I had gotten it. I was given a curfew until 8 pm, even on weekends, and I wasn’t allowed to go over to friends' houses or have any over, which basically meant I wasn’t allowed to have friends.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to go out. I soon found that there was an underground club in our small town of Athens, one that hosted a lot of dance competitions. Since most of the contestants had come from the hip-hop style of dance, it was something new and refreshing when I entered with a mix of hip-hop and ballet.

I was winning competition after competition until I finally had enough money to get my own small place at the age of 18 and get the hell out of there. It was the most exhilarating and liberating feeling I had ever felt when I was handed the keys and walked into that empty apartment. I had only enough money to pay the first and last months' rent, and a group of guys from the club had come with me to get everything that was in my room.

But that was only a mattress and a dresser, it was all I was given in that room. But I didn’t care, I was free and that was all that mattered. Now, I had the opportunity to go to school for dance, it was the first thing I did while I continued to compete in competitions and saved as much money as I could.

Then had come the disappointment. Rejection after rejection of all the top schools, despite my great grades in high school, I had no experience in dance since I was 12 years old. The only school that was willing to accept me was a private school for all kinds of talent, whether it was arts, sports, media etc., they seemed to have a course for everything.

Although it wasn’t quite Julliard, it was better than a community college that would get me a job as a dance teacher at a rundown studio at best. That would barely keep me afloat, I might as well continue with the underground competitions. But I didn’t want to be doing that for the rest of my life, I wanted to own my own studio, a glorious and magnificent one.

I wanted to teach all kinds of dance styles and have my own dance club, one that wasn’t underground and could be out in the open. I already had a bunch of ideas for us to form dance groups and post on social media to get our name out there and compete in actual competitions, one that came with both wealth and fame.

It took about 6 months for all the bruises and burn marks to completely disappear from my body, I used all types of scarring creams and bruising lotions to get them down as much as possible and since my father had always used an open hand, there was never anything that broke or fractured in my body.

I was finally able to dress how I wanted and no longer had to hide my face, just in time for my first day of school. I made sure to keep my make-up light and wore my chestnut brown hair down in natural wavy curls, then threw on a simple pair of skinny jeans and an olive green tank top. I usually tried to avoid green colours as my eyes were also a light green colour, but an olive tone seemed to accent them nicely.

This was my first day and my first impression. Gone were the days when I suffocated myself in baggy hoodies and caked-on make-up. I could be free and who I wanted to be, a chant I had been telling myself since the day I got my apartment. Now, I was even more free to finally pursue a dance career and nothing was holding me back.

“Incoming!”

I turned and looked down the hallway just in time to see a hacky sac that was flying my way. Thanks to quick dance reflexes, I ducked but managed to catch it and went to throw it back to its owner but stopped cold in my tracks.

Stood in front of me was none other than my biggest nightmare.

Ace Huxley.