“Tiff, I have no idea what I’m doing. Everyone else has plans. College, jobs, moving out. And then there’s me. Stuck. Just…existing. I keep thinking about my future, and every time, I come up blank. What am I supposed to do? Get a degree in something I don’t care about? Work at the theater forever? Flip burgers?”

Tiffany pursed her lips, tapping the polish brush against the rim of the bottle. “Okay, first of all, flipping burgers is beneath you. You’d burn down the kitchen in two seconds.”

I rolled my eyes. “Not the point.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“That’s the thing,” I admitted. “I don’t know.”

“Dancing still makes you happy, right?”

I frowned. “Yeah, but⁠—”

“So do something with that.” She gestured at me with the polish brush. “You’re always dancing, always practicing, always in the studio. If you’re not at work, you’re at dance. If you’re not at dance, you’re choreographing something in your head while you’re supposed to be paying attention to literally anything else.”

“You can’t make money as a dancer,” I replied, my voice edged with frustration. “Not unless you’re, like, a star. And even then, it’s⁠—”

“Who said anything about being a dancer, Bev?” she cut in. “Be a teacher. Run your own studio one day.”

I let out a short, humorless laugh.

“I’m serious!” She waved her hands like she was unveiling a grand idea. “Little Beverly’s School of Dance.”

I gave her a deadpan stare. “Little?”

“Fine,” she said with a grin. “Big Beverly’s School of Dance.”

I groaned. “I hate you.”

“You love me. But, for real, I think you’d be a good teacher.”

“Tiff,” I sighed, “it doesn’t make money.”

“Everything makes money if you’re smart about it.”

“Tiffany, it’s not realistic.”

“You know what’s not realistic? You working some office job for the next thirty years, slowly losing your mind because you hate every second of it. Just saying.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek.

She wasn’t wrong.

I loved dance. It was the only thing that had ever made sense to me, the only thing that had ever made me feel like me. It was the one thing I could count on, the one thing I could escape into when everything else felt too much. And maybe I had thought about teaching before. Maybe I had let myself imagine what it would be like to run my own studio, to watch kids fall in love with dance the way I had. But imagining something, and then actually doing it?

That was different.

“Not every job has to make you rich, Bev⁠—”

“Easy for you to say. You actually have a plan.”