For a moment nobody moved, and the cold kept its foot in the house. The shoe rack held what the morning had already decided: Audrey's white trainers, a pair of rain boots with last year's mud still kissed into the tread, Patricia's low heels for things that were not this, and the empty space where Willa's brown shoes lived when she was brave enough to take them off. Coats crowded the hooks. Audrey's black puffer was on her body. Patricia's camel was buttoned. Willa's old navy windbreaker hung at the end, a sleeve turned inside out from the last time she had yanked it down in a hurry before anyone asked where she was going.
Patricia looked at the coach as if a stranger had brought weather into a room she had just straightened. "Requested her for what, exactly. A demonstration. A seat in the back. I am not interested in charity with a letterhead."
"It's an audition," Coach Moretti said. "Same floor as the other children who were asked. The request came from the school after the September open floor. I didn't write her name in for her. I sent the video they asked me to send. They wrote back."
Willa's stomach went tight and bright. She had not known there was a video. She remembered the open floor, a Saturday when Audrey had a costume fitting and Patricia had said, Fine, go, don't be weird about it, and then forgotten. Willa had stood at the side until the coach nodded her in. She had danced a phrase she had built in a church basement on Tuesday nights, when the youth group was done and the janitor let her have twenty minutes if she stacked the chairs after. She had not known anyone was holding a phone.
"Video," Patricia said.
"Thirty seconds," the coach said. "She knows. Or she knows now. I should have copied you on the reply. That part is on me. The audition is not."
Audrey shifted her weight. The hoop earring tapped her jaw when she turned her head. "Mom. The car. If we leave in ten we're only a little late, and late is already a story."
"I can drive Willa," Coach Moretti said. "You don't have to split yourself in half. I'll have her back after, or you can pick her up at Calder. The address is on the form." She unclipped the paper and held it out, not like a dare. Like a form.
Patricia did not take it. "She isn't prepared. Look at her. She looks like she's going to rake a yard."
Willa looked at her sweater. It was clean. It was beige. It was the one without a stain, which in this house was a kind of preparation. She had washed it in the sink on Thursday and dried it on the radiator. The jeans were the best pair. She had folded audition clothes into her backpack three nights ago and taken them out again because the backpack looked like she was running away, and running away was the sort of thing her mother noticed.
"I brought a warm-up," the coach said, touching the garment bag. "Black. Plain. The Academy loans them when a dancer doesn't have studio clothes. She can change there. Nobody is grading the coat she arrived in."
"And the shoes," Audrey said, softly enough that it could be concern if a person wanted it to be. "They'll see those and think we don't— think she doesn't take it seriously. That's not fair to her either."