Sitting on the floor of my room with my coat still on, my bottom dresser drawer pulled out, listening to the sounds of the dorm—someone laughing, someone yelling that they can’t find their boots, someone flipping fast through their music playlist, doors closing—I can’t find anything I want to wear, nothing clean, anyway. I haven’t had time to do laundry in a month, have I? We’ve been racing from thing to thing to thing, trying to keep up with class and rehearsal and still pull off this whole production behind the scenes and sometimes crawl into bed for a few hours. We did it together, the four of us.

“We should all move to New York and open a burlesque club together,” Katherine said one evening, leaning back on her elbows on the floor of the rehearsal room with her feet out straight in front of her and her Hula-Hoop around her hips.

“Are burlesque clubs particularly lucrative?” Taylor said. “Will we be rich and famous?”

“We would be paid in friendship,” Nevaeh said, deftly applying a coat of red to her lips in front of the mirror and stepping back to assess it critically. “And we would all live in a one-room apartment and steal bread crusts from the birds, but it would be okay because of the magic of dance.”

“I can move to New York after Milan,” I said. “We can do it as a hobby. We can teach burlesque. We can make the world a better place!”

“We already make the world a better place,” Taylor said. “Because we are so ridiculously good-looking.”

I get up now and kick my door closed, dig into the back of my closet for the garment bag with my costume, and hang it on the back of the door and unzip it, and it’s like turning on the light when the white tulle spills out, the pastel sequins, the rhinestones.

I stare at it, remembering how amazing I felt in it. How beautiful and powerful I felt throwing it off. Inviting the audience to admire my naked skin—my thick thighs, the curve of my belly, the width of my hips and the jiggle of my butt. None of it perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. Learning, as we planned and schemed and rehearsed and then danced, that my body, and whatever you want to call a flaw, is nothing I am ashamed of or want to hide.

And there we were, sitting there in front of the dean, listening to him tell us, out of nowhere, that we have been caught. That our behavior was lewd. That our naked skin is immoral. Not knowing how to tell him how wrong he is.