Page 6 of The Devil Wears Tartan

She hangs up first, and I lower my phone in time to see the photo for her contact profile still displayed on the screen: Christmas morning four years ago, the two of us laughing with big red bows from our presents perched on our heads.

Chris took that picture. He says he’ll come for Christmas dinner every year, but he hasn’t managed to show up for the past three.

I shut the screen off and shove the phone in my pocket. I bend over the fountain and take a few long sips of cool, metallic-tasting water before splashing my face. Then I use my damp hands to smooth my hair down before tightening my ponytail.

By the time I make it back to the warm-up gym, I’m under control.

Right on cue, Catherine struts over from the group of teenage girls in kilts she’s talking to and jerks her hand in a sharp motion that tells me to follow her over to an unclaimed stretch of the gymnasium wall.

When we’re out of earshot from any students, she leans in and hisses, “What was that?”

“Sorry,” I mutter. I don’t drop my eyes from her glare. “I had to take a phone call.”

Her lip twitches. “A phone call, Kenzie? Really? You know it’s your job to make sure your girls are ready for the chaperone. One of them almost missed her event.”

“I know. It won’t happen again. It’s just...” Now I do glance down at the floor. “It was my mom. She had a...a thing she needed help with.”

“Oh.”

When I look back up, Catherine has her lips pressed together. The echoes of squeaking shoes and chatting students getting ready for lunch fill the silence between us. After a moment, she steps closer and reaches up to fix a lock of hair that’s slipping out of my ponytail.

She might not be one for soothing words, but her little adjustments have always comforted me. Whatever else she is, Catherine is there for me. She always has been.

“You know what I’m going to say, right?” she asks, her voice as close as it gets to soft.

I nod and parrot her catchphrase. “Rise above.”

“Correct.” She straightens her already ramrod straight shoulders and lifts her chin. “Rise above. Always. No matter what surrounds you. No matter what tries to tug you back. I know how high you can go, Kenzie. I know you can get past all this.”

I ignore the sting in my chest when I hear her call my mother ‘all this.’ Catherine might not have a trace of subtlety in her body, but she knows how to get what she wants.

She knows how to get where she wants. She’s risen above way worse than me, and she’s the whole reason I’m here today. She’s the whole reason I’m anything more than what I started off as: the girl who showed up to her first highland class late with no shoes and a note from her mom saying there was a ‘problem with the credit card company’ that was keeping the final payment from going through.

“Be there next time,” Catherine adds with a final grimace. “We can’t afford to be anything less than perfect, not with Moira Murray back in town.”

She heads back to the group of girls she was talking to, and I walk over to where my water bottle is resting against the wall a few metres away. I unscrew the lid and down a few sips, resisting the urge to splash my face again like I did at the fountain.

Catherine’s always told me that when you achieve something, you need to hold onto it as tight as you can because there will always be someone ready to come and take it from you.

When it comes to everything I’ve ever achieved with highland dance, that person has been Moira Murray.

Perfect Moira Murray, with the dimpled smile and the easy laugh that makes everyone around her turn and laugh too. Even when I was the one taking home the trophies, the whole crowd had their eyes on her. She’s one of them. She was born into this, and it didn’t matter how hard I pushed myself. It didn’t matter how high I jumped or how fast my feet moved. You can’t dance yourself into belonging the way she has since she first tied on a pair of ghillies at five years old.

But I tried.

I tried for years, and by the time we finished high school, the dance world knew my name as well as hers. I just wanted them to say mine louder. I don’t know exactly when Moira and I started making every competition a personal feud between the two of us, but that summer in Scotland was supposed to end things. It was supposed to prove I tried more, worked more, wanted more—no matter where I started from.

Except she didn’t even get to come on stage, and now she’s back out of nowhere, working as a dance teacher just like me, and once again, it doesn’t matter how far I’ve come. They’re all looking at her again. She’s enough to have the kids whispering her name and the parents whispering about switching schools.

“Kenzie!”

I snap to attention where I’ve been staring blankly at a high school basketball banner on the wall and nod at Catherine. She’s giving me a pointed look from across the room as she motions at the doors.

Right. Lunchtime.

Now that the final event of the morning is wrapping up, most of the dancers have already changed into sweatpants and headed out to meet their parents and friends. I leave my fellow Rebecca Stewart Academy teachers to supervise the stragglers and march out to the lobby, braced for whatever cohort of concerned parents will be waiting for me.

There are always some angry ones, ready to complain that the piper played too fast or to tell me they know their kid danced better than the winner; the judge was just ‘looking somewhere else during all the good parts.’

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