Maya had been practising her dance routine for forty-seven days. She knew this because she had made a small mark on her wall calendar every day, and there were forty-seven marks.
She had practised in the kitchen, between the fridge and the table. She had practised in the garden, on the grass. She had practised in the car park of the supermarket while her mother did the shopping, ignoring a man who gave her a strange look. She knew every step. She knew the music so well she could hear it in her sleep.
None of this mattered at all the moment she stepped onto the stage.
The stage was big. Much bigger than her kitchen. The lights were hot and white and pointed directly at her face, and she couldn't see the audience through them — just darkness, and the sound of a lot of people shifting in their seats.
Maya stood in the wings — the side of the stage, where the curtain was thick and dusty — and her legs stopped working.
Not literally. She could still move them. They just felt like they belonged to someone else.
"You're on in thirty seconds," the stage manager whispered.
Maya looked down at her feet, which were in silver shoes, which she had polished the night before. She had done that. She had polished those shoes. She had done forty-seven days of practice. No one could take that from her.
She thought about what her teacher, Miss Ling, had said last week: Feeling nervous is just your body getting ready. It's the same energy as excitement. You get to choose what to call it.
Maya tried it. She said, very quietly, to herself: I am excited.
It felt almost true.
"Ten seconds," said the stage manager.
Maya walked onto the stage. The lights hit her. The music started. And then something happened that she hadn't been able to predict: her body remembered. All forty-seven days of practice, stored somewhere in her legs and arms and the middle of her chest — it was all there. It didn't need her to think. It just moved.
She danced.
It wasn't perfect. She was a quarter beat late in the second verse, and she turned the wrong way for a moment in the bridge. But she kept going, and her feet kept finding the rhythm, and by the final chorus she was fully, completely in it — just her and the music and the stage and the audience she couldn't see.
When it ended, the applause came down like rain.
Maya stood in the centre of the stage and blinked. Then she smiled — a real one, the kind that takes over your whole face without asking permission.
In the wings, Miss Ling was clapping. In the front row, her family was clapping loudest of all.
Maya walked off the stage on legs that were working perfectly now, thank you very much. She had done it. Not because she hadn't been afraid. Because she had been afraid, and she had walked out there anyway.
That, she thought, was something worth knowing about herself.
