I come to class late on Thursday on purpose, but I let him stop me after. His socks have flowers on them. And he looks worried, sad, anxious. My heart squeezes. I like him. I am a monster for putting it off. But I can’t let myself be vulnerable, or get hurt, or get my confidence shaken. Not right now. Too much going on and too much riding on it. But it’s hard to stay angry at him when he looks like he wants to reach for me.

“After the last show,” I tell him, stepping back. “Let’s talk when everything is over.”

He nods at that, looking sad. I feel like a coward.

It’s the third and final show, though, and I tell myself I want to be able to focus on it. The excitement of performing again, the sadness that it’s our last. A tiny part of me has maybe been looking forward to the show being over, because being onstage, performing in such a brand-new way, having to develop a brand-new kind of faith in myself has been so overwhelming, so hard to process. But it has also felt so shockingly good and been such a surprising rush. I don’t want all those feelings to disappear when we take our final bow.

On Saturday morning, the last show just hours away, I wake up to a chill, snow building up on my windowsill. Thick flakes, falling fast, muffling everything. The other three are already at breakfast, so I wiggle into my heaviest turtleneck and wrap myself in scarves and remember to put on my mittens halfway to the cafeteria, snow dimming the sun and biting my nose and spilling into the ankles of my boots as I clomp along a path that hasn’t been shoveled yet.

I’m wet and freezing when I blow into the caf, which is quiet and almost empty. I am not surprised. Tree branches are whipping in the wind out there, tiny bits of ice and snow blowing in my face, my eyes, as I pushed my way across the quad. Taylor, Nevaeh, and Katherine are gathered at the big picture window, watching the grounds crew try to dig the sidewalks out faster than the snow falls.

Taylor pulls up the weather app.

“Well, we’re about to be buried alive,” he says. “Sounds like a party.”

“Forty-mile-an-hour winds tonight,” Katherine reads from her phone. “Whiteouts. That is not a real number of inches of snow that can fall in three hours!” She shows the phone to Nevaeh.

“That’s a blizzard,” Nevaeh says.

We all turn to look out through the window again. Bundled-up people trudge down the salted paths that keep getting snowed over, and there’s a snowball fight over on the quad, other students plowing furrows through the knee-high snow as they chase one another down.

Oh no.