It was September, which meant it was light out at 5:30 when we left to go see Blair’s opening-night performance of Coppélia. There were no stars to be seen, and it still felt like summer as we all hustled into the car and made the long drive to Milwaukee. Blair was Swanilda, the girl whose boyfriend falls in love with a doll. I mean, seriously? Spoiler alert, but they end up getting married anyway. I say if a guy starts liking a doll more than you, you better hightail it to the hills. Call the cops, cause that guy’s messed up. But I was only nine then. I wasn’t thinking of things like that. I was thinking of Blair, in one of the lead roles, and of the many extra lessons she’d had with Aleksander to perfect it. I was thinking of the fact that Mom said we couldn’t spend the whole weekend in Milwaukee at a hotel like we sometimes did because of all the money it had cost for Blair’s private lessons and tutu and shoes. But it was all for Blair, who had recently slid the latest chapter of Planet Pirates under my bedroom door and who French-braided my and Sophie’s hair for fun last weekend at our sleepover. I would drive a million miles there and back just to see her.

The theater was crowded. It was one of those ritzy places with plush seats and little boxes in the corner that you imagine kings and queens sitting in. When we sat down, I pulled out the program Mom had bought. There was Blair, smiling in a picture, with too much makeup on.

Last seen as an Arabian dancer in The Nutcracker, Blair McCourt trains at Aleksander Alekseev’s Milwaukee School for Classical Ballet. She is a freshman at Waukegan County High School. Much love to Mom, Dad, Jade, and Abby.

There our names were, right there in print! I knew instantly that I would keep it, forever. We’d look back at it in fifty years when Blair was a professional dancer.

We waited patiently for the show to start, and when it did—

Well.

She stole the show.

That’s what everyone told us after. Blair stole the show, the other parents in the lobby said, giving Mom tight hugs. The write-up in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said the same thing, that although Kevin Krier danced beautifully as Franz and Dr. Coppélius was played by the exquisite Brandon Johansson, Blair McCourt as Swanilda was the one who stole the show.

I asked Mom what that meant, and she said it meant that the audience’s attention went to Blair because she was the best. Mom said this so proudly, even though I thought it might be a little mean. After all, everyone had worked so hard. Was Blair blocking the light from all those other people, even the dancers who were mainly just in the background?

But it was true. She did steal the show. What she did, the way she could move, was more than ballet. It was magic. I’d seen Blair dance a thousand times before, but this was different. She had switched from pretty good to amazing. To watch something like that happen—someone tell a story through turns and leaps and pirouettes—was like watching something transform. Blair wasn’t just talented, I realized, sitting in that theater. She wasn’t just good, the way I was good at spelling and Dad was good at fixing things. Blair was magnificent. Blair really did have a destiny.