Katherine whirls down the hallway, towing me through the crowd of warm, half-naked bodies. I’m leaving wet footprints and I want to protest, but I am swept up and swept along, the energy in the house enough to blast out the walls. Lakeshore Academy is one of the toughest prep schools in the US. Our arts program is a feeder for Juilliard, RISD, Tisch—all the top arts colleges—and the academic-track kids end up at Ivies and similar. After an endless school week of classwork and homework and rehearsal and then more rehearsal and, hey, maybe more rehearsal, even those of us who can handle the pressure need places to explode.

We’re slipping around the flailing limbs of theater kids and gliding past the sudden smiles and shouts of glee when I’m spotted. Pausing to hug Halim, my partner in last semester’s pas de deux, I accept quick kisses on my icy-cold cheeks from the girls in ensemble and that cute girl Grace I bonded with in repertory (the only other full-scholarship arts kid at Lakeshore, as far as I know). My freshmen girls, the clever, quick, intense dancers I mentor, squeal my name as I pass, and I’m waving at them and blowing kisses as Katherine tugs me on, and we dance through the great room and the kitchen and into the den, where the hard-core dancing happens with the chairs pushed against the walls, and the music floods the room, crashes into your chest, and sinks under your skin until you can’t tell the difference between the beat and your body. The feeling is good in rehearsal, and the best onstage. But when it’s all yours and you can do anything you want with it, that’s when the adrenaline fizzes like champagne.

My hips are already moving, and the urge is building to strip off all my winter gear and just dance, no choreography, no counting time, just my body pounding with the boom of the bass and everything falling into place.

I go up on my toes, searching the den for Nevaeh and Taylor. The chandelier overhead is dimmed all the way down, the dark wood paneling on the walls gleaming and the crowd a great pulsing mass of joy. Everyone’s in dancewear or less, which always feels defiant—students aren’t allowed to show up at academic classes with bare shoulders or collarbones or scandalous leggings—too distracting, we’re told. Spaghetti straps once got me sent back to my room to change, feeling vaguely ashamed and angry, the way everyone turned to stare at me. Saturday detention because of my shoulders, as if girls’ bodies are against the rules and our skin is a sex crime, and cracking down on that is more important than our actual education. (And no one ever mentions that our performance costumes show way more than shoulders.)