Adrienne rubbed her forehead. “Would I do that? Well, I do go through my things regularly and maybe I got rid of a tiny bit more than usual, but I’m entering a fresh phase of my life. I need new clothing. And Dominic and I have retired from competing, so I don’t need most of the rehearsal stuff anymore. A lot of it is Lycra, which will stretch or contract as needed. You can always hem something that’s too long.”

I walked over to Adrienne without saying a word and hugged her.

She hugged me back. “We are going to make you unveil your beauty, Charlie, even if it kills all of us. Now I have to make sure my mother-in-law doesn’t take over the studio while I’m in here, so I’ll see you later.” Adrienne left.

Nina was grinning at me. “Come over here. This is your locker,” she said, showing me one of the gray cabinets.

I touched it, trailing my hand across the metal surface. I really belonged here now, in the teachers’ room.

“You can put your things in there. Although you should take those off and burn them.” She pointed at my shoes. “You can’t dance in those. You’ll twist your ankle and get injured. You have to buy a pair of real dance shoes.”

I worried about the extra expense. “How much will that cost?”

“You need to get good ones because you’ll be in them the whole day long. Shoes are the only tool a ballroom dancer has, so they’re very important. There are cheaper ones on the market, but you need to get the ones the professionals wear. So you’re looking at about a hundred and seventy dollars for the shoes, with shipping probably close to two hundred.”

I gasped. “For one pair of shoes?”

“Yes.” Nina opened her locker and took out her Latin shoes, which I now saw were the same as the ones Katerina had. “The strap around the bottom of the foot will give you support. The heel will keep you balanced. You actually need two pairs, Latin and smooth.” She took another pair out of her locker. I had seen Katerina wearing this sort when she rehearsed. I had thought they were flesh-colored pumps but now I noticed that the top had elastic around the edges, so that the shoe crumpled up upon itself when no one was wearing it.

“I can’t afford that,” I said.

“Well, since you’re just beginning, you could do everything in your Latin shoes. You’ll need to decide at some point what kind of dancer you’ll be.”

“What?”

“If you’ll concentrate on smooth or Latin dances.”

“I thought we had to do all of the dances.”

Nina sighed. “Of course we do. I don’t mean with students. I mean as a pro. When you’re a part of a professional couple, you’ll specialize either in the smooth dances or in the Latin ones. Sometimes that’s determined by your body type. If you’re smaller, you have to do Latin. It’s always those tall couples with the long legs who win in smooth. They glide across the floor like they’re flying.”

“Simone is tall and she does Latin with Pierre.”

Nina said thoughtfully, “Simone is really talented. I hate to say it because she can be such a you-know-what, but she’s good. She trained at Juilliard, could have been a ballerina at the School of American Ballet. And she doesn’t let you forget it either. But she’s a very versatile dancer.” Nina looked me over. “You’re right in the middle. You could probably go either way.”

“Well, since I have to get a pair of Latin shoes anyway, I’ll be a Latin dancer.”

Nina burst out laughing. “That’s very practical of you.”

“I’m a sensible person.”

“Your heart’s going to pull you one way or another. Take off your stockings.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to tape your feet.”

I stopped asking questions. It was all too much. I just did as she said.

She took my left foot and started sticking Band-Aids on it, around my heel, the wide part of my foot. By the time she was done, my foot was almost completely covered, and looked like it had been in a car accident.

“Preventative taping,” she said. “You are going to get the worst blisters anyway. This will just slow down the process enough that you have time to toughen up your skin before your feet start bleeding too much. Most pros won’t tell you to do this. They’ve been dancing so long that their feet are totally deformed, like mine.” She stuck out her foot. It looked fine to me, slender and graceful, until I realized that there were thick calluses across the heel and front of the foot, in exactly the same places she had taped on mine. “But I remembered when I came back after the baby, I’d been out long enough to lose my calluses, and boy, did my feet bleed. I almost couldn’t get the blood stains out of my shoes. That was when I decided to be careful and tape my feet again. Actually, it was Simone who gave me the tip. I guess it’s a ballerina thing.”

“Was it hard to come back?”

Nina raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah. No studio in the city would hire me, even though I’d been really good before I left.” Her voice was bitter. “Only Adrienne took a chance on me, a single mom. You’re not supposed to have a baby before you’ve ever won a title. Come on, let me do the other foot, then we’ll go order your shoes.”

—

Adrienne let me borrow from my next paycheck to pay for the shoes, and she used her credit card since I didn’t have one. Katerina was nice enough to continue lending me her shoes until my own came.

I rooted through the bags Adrienne had brought for me. There was so much beautiful and luxurious clothing. Velvet skirts, cocktail dresses, silk scarves and, most important of all, Lycra dance dresses and tailored pants that I would be able to move in. I had already felt in that last dance session how hard it was to dance at a professional level in my regular clothing. I would hide these at the back of the closet at home, where Pa wouldn’t notice them.

I pulled on a black dance skirt with built-in panties; the skirt flared when I twirled. On top, I added a tight black camisole, and over that, a thin pink silk cardigan. I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. The pink brought out the flush in my cheeks. I raised a hand to my face. Then I went into the ballroom for my first dance session as a professional.

—

That dance session, Simone was indisposed. I found out later that she was so furious about my being hired instead of Pierre that she’d walked out. After our class, one of the other dancers would train me. The first day, I had Nina as my teacher. She put a large yellow booklet in my hands. On the front, it read “The Avery Way” and it showed “Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Supreme Gold levels.” Inside was a long list of dances and the steps for each one at each level.

My spine was rigid.

“Relax,” Nina said, cracking her gum. She wasn’t allowed to chew it while teaching but they let her do it when she didn’t have a student. “You have time to learn all of this before your exam.”

This was like school again. “What exam?”

“We’re all certified. You’ll be tested to confirm that you know all of these school figures perfectly—both parts, orientation, the count, everything. But don’t worry about that yet, just try to get the steps down. Let’s start with waltz today. Stand next to me, we’re both going to do man’s part first.”

I stood next to Nina and considered us both in the mirror. Nina was as lovely as ever, but for the first time, I didn’t look horrible either. I stood a bit straighter. Nina drew a large circle counterclockwise around the ballroom with her arm. “If you imagine that circle drawn onto the floor, then that is your line of dance, otherwise known as ‘LOD.’ The left-turning promenade step starts diagonally to the wall . . .”

The rest of the dance session passed in a blur for me. That first lesson, we covered about three steps each in all ten dances, doing both the man’s and the lady’s parts: foxtrot, waltz, tango, eastern and western swing, rumba, cha-cha, samba, mambo and merengue. I didn’t have any energy to wonder which ones I liked best.