That Summer

Evangeline was not a girl to be messed with.

Her life had a schedule. It was strict, it was constant and it was to be kept to.

She awoke at four-thirty every day to attend a two hour morning ballet class along with nineteen other girls. She would shower and change at the studio and proceed to catch a bus to school, eating her breakfast of fruits and grains on the way.

Once at school Evangeline would make her way to her small group of friends and then go about the school day, receiving straight A's and keeping up her perfect attendance.

As soon as the last bell rang she made her way back to the studio for a pas de deux class. From that class she would return home to eat dinner and complete whatever homework she had before her last class of the day back at that same studio; this class focusing specifically on Pointe and technique.

Evangeline was the kind of girl you would stare at in the halls with a mix of awe and disgust; envy and hate.

She was always dressed to a T, perfectly fashionable but never revealing. Nothing donning Evangeline's body could ever be mistaken for trashy, skanky or skimpy. Her grades were never anything but above satisfactory. Teachers sang her praises, and parents adored her.

She was the girl who dated the perfect boys; the ones who on the first date would tell her father he'd have her back by ten and his intentions were completely honorable. And the kicker was they were also the boys that were being honest when they said those things.

The studio that Evangeline would go to three times a day was not just any dance studio. It was the most prestigious dance school in the tri-state area; the kind you had to try out to get in to; the kind that was expensive; the kind a lot of girls would travel to and dorm at. Maybe this will come as surprise and maybe it won't, but Evangeline was also the best dancer in that school.

Her technique was perfect; extension was fantastic; turnout was amazing.

Ah, yes.

Evangeline was the golden child. She made the rest of the National Honors Society look like underachievers. She made jocks look lazy.

Her brother, however, was as far from his sister as it got.

Bryan Donahue was not the kind of person Evangeline would normally associate with.

He wore tight clothes. He had long hair. School wasn't for him, instead he had abandoned academics and turned all his attention on his band. He partied, he drank. Once in a while one night stands would occur.

And all of this applied to his other band members.

Evangeline despised the scene. She despised drinking, drugs, promiscuous sex, torn clothes. She was innocent, in a sense, and it's not like it was a secret.

If Bryan wasn't her brother, he'd probably be another boy that she sneered at. Someone else that she would pass on the streets and pity.

But Bryan and Evangeline tolerated each other because they were blood and that was the way they were raised. They didn't hate each other and they didn't particularly like each other.

Evangeline put up with her brother.

But his band mates were a whole other story.