In the mirror her freckles looked louder. Her hair was still back. She wet her hands and smoothed the part. A girl at the next sink, number 9, said, "Is that your audition shoe or did you forget yours?"
"These," Willa said.
"Bold," the girl said, not entirely unkind. She had glitter on her eyelids and the careful posture of someone who had been told she photographed well. "I'm doing a lyrical. What are you doing?"
"Whatever they teach. And a minute."
"A minute of what."
"Something I made."
The girl blinked, as if made were an unusual ingredient. "Okay. Good luck."
"You too."
The studio they were led into had a ceiling higher than any church basement. The floor was pale and scuffed in the honest places, the center worn to a softer color by years of weight. Barres lined two walls. A piano sat in the corner under a gray cover, and a speaker on a stand waited with a small red light. Three adults occupied a table with papers. One was a man with gray at his temples and a sweater the color of dry leaves. One was a woman with a silver bun and glasses on a chain, her pen already moving as if the paper had started without the children. The third was younger, maybe thirty, with a clipboard and a face that gave nothing away and did not pretend to.
Willa stood in the second row. Her number crackled when she breathed. She put her weight even on both feet. The brown shoes looked like themselves against the pale wood, and for a moment she loved them so hard it almost tipped into fear.
The faculty woman who led the warm-up did not smile and did not scowl. She counted. Plies. Tendus. A swing of the arms that traveled into the ribs. Across the floor in simple runs, then with a change of direction. Willa listened with her whole body. The blister stayed a rumor. When the combination asked for a turn she did not have a pretty name for, she found the timing in the last two counts and let the first one be ugly rather than late. The silver-bun judge wrote something. Willa did not try to read the hand.
They were split into groups of four. Number 14 went with 9, 11, and 22. The phrase was taught once slowly, once at tempo, and then they were expected to keep it. Eight counts of a traveling step with a suspend at the end, a turn that finished to the corner, a drop into the floor that was not a collapse, a recovery that had to look like an idea. The teacher clapped the accent on the four.