“Stella”

I guess the teachers brought Stella in because they were disappointed with us. We were all hitting thirteen and becoming kind of puffy, our stomachs swelling into visible lumps over our ballet tights, our bodies beginning to jiggle with even the softest leaps.

“You know, you are now this age where you can start getting fat,” Maria, the teacher from Russia, told us sternly. We all stared at her, and past her, at ourselves in the mirror. “You must be careful.”

She made it sound like a mission of life or death. During breaks between classes, we sat on the floor and drank water, pretending it tasted rich and solid and delicious. The sound of a bag of chips crinkling became a tantalizing melody, a warning. We really tried not to get fat, we really did. We did sit-ups together before class began, barking out the numbers we’d reached, and ate tiny cubes of apple from a ziplock bag after class ended, and we poked and pulled at each other’s bodies so ruthlessly until we might have wanted to peel our bodies right off. But still, we became soft and large. It could not be stopped. Maria and the other teachers poked our thighs as we stood at the bar, and I swear under Maria’s touch I felt 100 times heavier.

So the teachers brought Stella. She came one day in the winter, when snow was just starting to fall outside the large windows in the studio; and it was 5pm and already growing dark. I always stood by the window, so that I could look outside when we stood at the bar. I would have died of boredom without that window. I knew that Maria hated this–she glowered at me as she walked by, and would say, “looks like you’re really engaged, Lisa.”

Stella walked in, making no sound, and smiled at all of us. She was a bit taller than I was, but so slim it was amazing; she looked like something out of a cartoon, like all of her bones and organs were shrunken and stretched, and she had a sort of blue-ish glow of light about her. You could faintly see through her to what was behind her. She said hello to all of us; we stared and some of us said hello back.

Stella could jump higher than even the teachers and when she came down she floated, and landed without a sound. Her limbs drifted through the air with heartbreaking grace. Nothing she did looked effortful. Maria always told us that we should imagine we had strings attached to the top of our head, the tips of our toes and fingers, and that we should always feel pulled tight, pulled to our maximum. Stella did look pulled tight, like the tips of her body were shooting away from her. She could lift her leg all the way up to her head and even behind her head, and I was sure that she could pull it all the way behind her, in a perfect 360 degrees, if she wanted to.

“Notice how little sound she makes when she jumps!” Maria shouted at us as we watched Stella demonstrate her grand jete (in the past, one of us might have been chosen to demonstrate, but now, it was only Stella.) “She jumps so high but still makes no sound. That’s what I’ve been trying to get you all to do. You sound like big fat elephants.”

We all hated standing next to Stella on the floor. Looking into the mirror and seeing yourself standing next to her, you might as well have been a pile of meats, stacked one on top of the other, bulging and lumpy in your leotard, next to that tree-twig of a girl. And it was unfair that she glowed, too, and was so ethereally translucent; you felt dull and smudged, next to her. So Stella would take up almost a third of the floor space, alone, and the rest of us would cluster unhappily to one side.

During breaks, we would all run into the dressing room and slam the door so Stella couldn’t come in, and we would gossip about her.

“Where do you think she’s from?” Caroline said.

“I heard they do these experiments in Russia, where they can do a surgery and turn you into a sort of spirit–”

“I think she’s the ghost of Maria’s childhood.”

“I wonder if she can walk through things, or turn invisible.”

“What if she’s in here, now?” we all started screaming, quiet at first and then louder, driven hysterical by the sound of our own screaming.

Maria liked to shove her hand between our legs to see if we were squeezing our inner thigh muscles tightly enough. We never were. She never shoved her hand between Stella’s legs.

Stella didn’t sweat or seem to get tired. She did everything with the same serene smile on her face, and she would stand there beaming around vaguely as the rest of us collapsed, gasping, after a particularly hard class. The skin on our toes would shred, we would bruise and tear things within our muscles, but she never seemed to hurt. I woke up in the morning with aches roped along my body, and somehow knew that Stella would never feel the same thing. I hated her for that.

I was the biggest, lumpiest, puffiest girl in the class, and this was because I couldn’t just drink water and eat three cubes of apple during breaks. My stomach screamed so loudly with hunger that emptiness opened inside me and made me dizzy. There was an ice cream place next to the studio and sometimes I would wait in the lobby until all the other girls had left and then I would dart over next door, terrified someone would see me. I would go to the bathroom with my dance bag and pull out hidden bags of chips which I practically poured down my throat, cram handfuls of gummies that I’d bought from the vending machine downstairs into my mouth so that a multicolored, chewy, melting mass would form between my jaws. Sometimes rainbow drool dripped down my chin. I thought about Stella, and again, somehow knew that she would never do this; I doubted she ever ate. I would start to cry in anger, take my fist and punch it into my soft belly, as if I could punch a hole there, let the multicolored sugary gummy mass come tumbling out.

The ridiculousness of eating ice cream in the winter made me feel even worse. Once, in line at the ice cream shop, leaning over that cold-smelling counter filled with those huge vats of different flavors, I looked out the window and saw Stella standing there, watching me. I felt suddenly furious. I shoved my money back in my pocket and stormed out of the line. Stella put her hands up against the window, smiling. I pushed open the door, turning sharply to walk in the other direction, not looking at her.

“I’ve seen things like Stella before,” the oldest girl, Hannah, said to us one day in the dressing room, before class began. A lot of us came to the studio right after school, and did our homework sprawled on the dressing room floor barely dressed. Stella never even tried to come into the dressing room. I don’t know if she ever needed to get dressed or undressed.

“I saw a girl, a thing, like Stella in my beauty pageant a few years ago. She won, of course,” Hannah said. “And I’ve seen them hanging around the stores at the mall, trying on all the size 00 clothes, hogging the dressing rooms. They never seem to leave.”

“Where do they come from?” a girl asked.

“I swear, it’s from Russia.”

“No one knows,” Hannah said wisely. “They just start showing up here and there.” We speculated about how Maria might have come to know Stella.

“I bet Stella was one of Maria’s former students,” a girl said. This made me listen closely. Could we become something like Stella? Had she come from girls like us, girls who furiously fought against being solid and heavy, and yet could not defeat our own bodies–even those of us like Caroline, who said that all food made her feel sick now, and didn’t even eat the apple cubes anymore because they made her throw up in the bathroom afterwards.

One night after class, instead of running into the dressing room with the rest of the girls, I pretended that I had dropped something and waited for Stella to glide past me.

“Wait, Stella,” I said. She turned to me, smiling her vague and pleasant smile.

“Where are you from?” I asked. She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I’d asked.

“Hello, I’m Stella,” she said, after a moment.

“How did you get the way you are?” I asked. She just continued to smile at me, and I felt myself getting angry.

“Were you a girl like us once? What did you do to become the way you were? How does Maria know you?”

And Stella kept smiling at me, but I looked at her face carefully and realized how tired her eyes looked; they wandered back and forth across my face as if searching for words that were not there. I had never really looked hard at her face, and I saw that she had skin stretched tight over cheekbones that seemed to have risen out of her skull like mountains. I could see the bulletin board on the wall behind her through her faded eyelids. She slipped her hand into her coat pockets and pulled something out and held it out to me, and I realized that it was a wrapped packet of gummies like the ones I ate, but a really really old one, with the wrapper all faded and the formerly shiny plastic run through with papery white cracks, as if she had run her fingers over the wrapper over and over again in her pocket. She put it in my hand and smiled. I looked at my hand through her tiny, long, glowy blue one. She put her hand back in her pocket and drifted away. I stood there with my fingers wrapped around the gummy for a long time, saddened by how crumpled and worn the wrapper was.

The girls in the ballet class were fed up with Stella. But I had started noticing how brightly she glowed in class, when Maria asked her to leap and called her ‘spectacular’, and how her light dimmed as class ended, when she walked out into the snow alone, the snow falling gently through her.  But all everyone else was thinking was that this Stella had to go; she was ruining class for all of us.

“You know what?” Hannah said, one day in the dressing room. “Let’s figure out what she’s all about. Has anyone ever touched her?”

No one had. We all stayed as far as possible from Stella. I didn’t mention the gummies, which were still in my coat pocket, how my hand had almost touched hers.

“Do we know if she’s solid or if you can go through her? Does she have organs? We have to find out. We have to know what she is.”

The other girls, who worshipped Hannah, agreed with eager nods of the head. I said nothing.

After class, we waited for Maria to leave and then we stood around the door of the studio so that Stella couldn’t pass us. She looked at us, smiling, turning from face to face, as if there were some polite misunderstanding.

“Nuh-uh,” Hannah said roughly. “You’re not going anywhere.” She shut the door of the studio; we closed in on Stella. Stella did not back up or move; she hovered motionlessly, smiling around at us. I noticed, though, that her blue glow was almost imperceptible. It was Hannah who finally lunged forward and grabbed Stella’s wrists, forcing her to the ground and pinning her down.

“Someone hold her wrists, her ankles,” Hannah barked, and a girl scrambled to grab her ankles and I went to take Stella’s wrists, though Stella was not resisting.

“So we can touch you,” Hannah said to Stella. Stella looked at her directly, with the same smile. Stella’s wrists were cold and tiny under my hands. I tried to hold them gently, even comfortingly.

“Let’s see what’s inside you,” Hannah practically growled. She took her hand and placed it on Stella’s chest, and pushed, and we all watched Hannah’s hand sink into Stella’s body like Stella’s body was made of jelly, swelling and moving around Hannah’s hand as it moved down, moving aside to make room for this new hard volume. We watched and could not look away. We could see the shadow of Hannah’s hand through Stella’s translucent substance, pressing inward, like an ominous sea creature. Stella just kept smiling, her eyes very wide, and I thought I felt her wrists getting colder and colder under mine, and there were a few times where I accidentally fell straight through them–they seemed to become increasingly less solid–and I apologized, saying “sorry sorry sorry” over and over again and trying to catch her eye.

Hannah began digging around inside of Stella, her handing churning through Stella’s body like it was syrup. We watched the shadow carve circles around where Stella’s heart would be.

“Eugh, there’s nothing in here,” Hannah said. “There’s no heart, no lungs, no stomach, nothing. You’re empty. You’re just a piece of flesh. You’re disgusting.”

I moved so my head was right over Stella’s, her eyes staring blankly straight up at me, her smile pulling across her face, though she did not seem to see me. The floor seemed clearer through her frozen expression. I began babbling quietly.

“Are you comfortable Stella?” I whispered to her, quietly over the growing hysteria of the girls around me. “Am I holding you too tightly? Do you want something?” Stella said nothing, her face unchanging.

“Stella, why don’t we hang out and eat ice cream together one day. Stella, I can’t wait to see you demonstrate the andante tomorrow in class, you always look so beautiful. Stella, you’ll glow again tomorrow, Maria will tell you that you’re spectacular, because you are. You’re the best dancer we’ve ever seen. Stella–”

But Stella did not seem to see me or hear me, smiling up widely, Hannah’s hand deep within her, her wavering, vaporous body as dim as an obscured moon.

Samantha Xiao Cody is a graduate of Princeton University, with degrees in Physics and Creative Writing. She currently lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she works as a high school physics, math, and performing arts teacher.