“Electricity-generation drill one!” Mr. B shouts suddenly. He grabs one of the lighting orb props off his desk and lobs it at me. I catch it and trail off, startled. “Keep singing! Don’t worry about acting, just do the drill and sing.”

Tentatively, I pick up where I left off in the song and light up the orb. Five seconds pass, and then I cut out the electricity. Five seconds on, five seconds off. Three on, three off. Two, two. One, one, one, one.

It turns out that it’s hard to sing nicely while doing the drill. Soon, all I can focus on is breathing deeply and keeping my voice steady. My self-consciousness lessens—thank god—as my focus shifts.

“Stop there,” Mr. B says as I take a huge breath, preparing to belt my face off in the next phrase. The orb goes dark. “What’s this song about?”

“Um, I guess it’s about how much Valeria loves the place she’s from and how she’s sad to see it changing,” I say.

“That’s part of it,” he says. “But what about the second half of the song? When she starts talking about her dad?”

I think of the lyrics in the middle of the song. He told me to take my dreams and leave this place behind / But what can I do when my family needs me?

“She’s talking about how she feels like she can’t leave home even though her dad told her to, because she needs to help with her family’s store,” I say tentatively.

“Right. She thinks that the neighborhood is her safe place, and she’s afraid to leave it in case it’s not there when she comes back. It’s a song about giving up your dreams,” he says, his blue eyes boring into me from across the room. “What would you say is your dream?”

My gaze flicks down to the tile floor. Where is he going with this? The answer comes to me easily, but it takes me a moment to decide that I might as well tell the truth. “I want to be rich enough to help out my parents when I’m older.”

“Right. So imagine that you have to give that up. It’s never going to happen. What does that look like?” He stares at me with an expectant expression. “Describe it to me,” he prompts me. “What could happen so that you could never make that dream a reality?”

I tense. The thought of not achieving my goal makes something inside my chest clench up. The air in the room suddenly feels heavy, claustrophobic. I don’t want to talk about this with Mr. B. It’s too real, makes me look too desperate.