Are we here to stay?*Rewriting*

Prologue

A/N: Soooo, it's been pretty long but I finally found some time and started rewritting the story all over again. Hopefully you'll like it even more :)

Time was out to get her, and sleep to evade her. That, Chloe Lukasiak was sure of. Yawning widely, she glared at her wrist watch. Every echoing tick of its second hand was crudely loud. 2:36 a.m. She sunk back in her chair. Any normal fifteen-year-old would have been excited to stay up late, but Chloe wasn't as eager, since she knew she'd have to be up in a few hours. She had never been a morning person and had always despised getting up early, especially for dance class. A cold shiver of trepidation ran through her at the thought of the frosty air stinging her warm skin.

It was hours past her bedtime, and she couldn't bring herself to fall asleep: her mind was racing.

Chloe had always been a straight-A student, but over the past year her grades had dropped. Homework became a second priority to dance.  This was a fact she hated to admit, remembering her plan to become a doctor if did not succeed at dance. The dance world was tough, she had no false pretenses about that, and the chances of performing on Broadway or to be accepted into New York City Ballet were low. This had always been something she'd wanted but her biggest ambition in life had always been to become a Rockette and perform at Radio City Music Hall.

Her whole universe revolved around dance. Chloe had to keep a very tight schedule, and had almost no spare time, not even to study or get changed; she was still wearing the same booty shorts she had put on that morning before leaving the house. She felt restless after almost ten hours of rehearsal. Her calves were sore from relentless stretching, her toes blistered, and her hamstrings were tight.

Her thoughts drifted back to a time where feeling completely worn out was the least of her worries. When Chloe first began dancing at the age of two, she would get excited, looking forward to dressing up in unimaginably elegant costumes and learning new dance moves. Thirteen years later, using increasingly repetitive themes, and performing to the same lyrical numbers as her seven-year-old self had, it wasn't nearly as exciting. When the appointed hour drew close, her heart sank  to a point where dancing had begun to feel more like a chore than a hobby. To top it all off, her dance teacher, Abby, only cared about getting the highest scores by packing in the same old tricks to impress the judges. She seemed to have little interest in the girls' improvement, which irked Chloe, who who would rather spend her practices broadening her creativity and gaining confidence in expressing herself through performance.

Abby, frustrated with the lack of further growth of the team, had demanded more intensive coaching in an attempt to keep the girls improving. And so, instead of enjoying the last days of summer vacation,  they got to spend it slaving away in the studio, practicing dance moves they'd all done hundreds of times before. Her mom had joked several times that Chloe should be getting paid, since dance had become more of a full-time job rather than the extracurricular activity she had originally signed up for.

But with Abby's insatiable ambition to place first, Chloe's instructor was becoming increasingly power-hungry. At last week's competition Abby had threatened to replace her and, considering the results of it the odds weren't in her favor. Chloe was afraid of being pushed away from the friends she had danced with since she could barely walk. It didn't seem fair at all that she could have everything taken away from her in the blink of an eye after so much hard work.

Chloe sighed, laying the book, which had been resting snugly between her palms onto her desk, and rubbing a hand over her face. Reading had become a habit; it helped take her mind off things that were bothering her.

Staring at the cover of Kiera Cass' 'The Selection', she wondered why she had chosen this novel in particular. Maybe she had subconsciously picked it out, desiring to escape her current life and start over, with all the knowledge she had acquired over the years.