He glares at her and looks back at me. “If you don’t get it, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted because no one has any faith in me…” He pauses to glare at all of us in turn, and we each roll our eyes. “Then there’s something wrong in the world,” he finishes with a flourish. “It’s yours.”

I swoop down and kiss the top of his head, feeling grateful for him. All of them.

We four found one another the first week of our first year here, me and Taylor and Nevaeh and Katherine—our meeting the surest sign that magic exists. We kind of grew up together. Fourteen years old when we met and eighteen now. Three and a half years of classes and lunches and rehearsals and off-campus adventures, and we’ve got one another’s backs no matter what. We make one another better, and we shove one another toward extraordinary in the studio, onstage. We all know what it’s like to work so hard and want something so much.

Now the end of our senior year is just a few months away. The three of them are moving to New York City, Taylor and Nevaeh to Tisch and Katherine to Julliard. They’ll be in prestigious schools, maybe all getting an apartment together, and me…?

“Group hug!” Katherine cries, and Taylor groans “Noooooo,” but Nevaeh has climbed into Katherine’s arms on the couch. They press their cheeks together, and I heave Taylor up onto the couch, and he yanks me down across his lap and half of Nevaeh’s and Katherine’s, and I fit my arms around all of them as best I can and close my eyes and wish everything were this easy and that nothing bad would ever happen to any of us.

I spare a wish for myself too.

There are many, many things wrong in the world, of course—but please, please, please don’t let the Angles decision be one of them.

3

Monday, late morning, our pointe shoes boom as we thunder across the floor in technique. It’s a minor miracle I feel this alive and invigorated after a sleepless night spent waiting for a text from Angles that never came.

But it’s allegro, my favorite part of class, when we’re cut loose from the barre and spun into motion, sent crisscrossing across the studio in packs, leaping up like we’ll never come back down, soaring like eagles. And the sound when we do land becomes a heartbeat louder than my own, and every leap is another release that my hip muscles howl at like a war cry, and every return vibrates through my perfectly extended foot and calf and thigh. My arms catch fire, but I stay flawlessly precise in every turn of my wrist and tilt of my head and lift of my rib cage.