Saturday night, our second show—this time it’s all anticipation before the performance, no fear, scurrying around to set out the electric candles and Velcro up the swaths of fabric and the lanterns overhead, exchanging a quick kiss with Jack when we pass each other (to the eye-rolling hilarity of Katherine and Nevaeh, who are sneaking their own kisses behind curtains).

The show is pure happiness, the audience electric and buzzing, the three of us blowing up the stage. I revel in the gleeful shouting, the gasps, the applause as wild as my hair curling around my shoulders, my bare skin catching the spotlight, glittering and glowing winter white-person pale. My final pose, arms in the air, is so defiant I could stop an army. I get a roller-coaster-drop feeling in my belly listening to Jack banter with the crowd in his smooth, deep voice between our main acts. My cheeks ache from smiling when I flip the curtain aside to join him onstage for our plié lesson, and my hand tingles, so ridiculous, when I take his to steady him, a little skip-beat when he smiles at me.

The amount in our cash app gives me a thrill but also makes me feel almost guilty. So much money just for me. I’ll find a way to pay it forward somehow. Cautious happiness now, though. In bed, too wired to sleep, I let myself download the language app again.

I drift off listening to a comforting, soft voice whisper buon giorno, buon pomeriggio, buona sera in my ears. Conosci il sindaco? Do you know the mayor? Quell’anatra é in piedi sulla mia pizza. That duck is standing on my pizza. Buona notte.

“You are smiling at your phone again,” Katherine says on Sunday night, waving her stack of calculus flash cards at me. She’s sitting on my bunk bed with Rachel in her lap, running Nevaeh through equations as Nevaeh works on my “looks like no makeup” makeup.

I’m still leaving Gavin on read and smiling as I text Jack back, even though I’m going to see him in about an hour. He wants to show me his favorite nerd movie, Baraka, which he says I will love and guarantees will change my life. I made him promise he’d watch Center Stage with me, which is terrible and has so many problems, but I love it, and I’ve watched it ten thousand times since I was a kid.

When my mother’s Skype ID pops up, I groan.

“Don’t pick up,” Nevaeh says. “You’ll regret it.”

“It could ruin your date!” Katherine says.

I grimace at them. “I have to.”

Nevaeh sighs and leans back, tapping her makeup brush against the open lid of her palette and poking it behind her ear. “Your funeral.”

“And it’s not a date,” I insist as I answer.