Escaping My Fort

By Stephanie Ciotta

After each class I would find my mom pacing the dance academy’s hallway waiting to pick me up. We had this rule that we wouldn’t talk until we got to the car. Once we were seated and buckled, she would break the silence and ask how class went. I would respond with a simple and awfully vague, “It was okay.” She would then proceed, each time, to say, “Make any new friends today?” I would fake a smile and say, “Sure!” She would smile and nod with a concerned look on her face as though she knew something was wrong. Up until I was seven years old, this was our weekly ritual. One day, though, that silence before the car ride was broken.

As my freshly rosined ballet slippers gently brushed against the wooden floor that afternoon, I could feel the stares from my fellow classmates. Their eyes were piercing and my heart couldn’t help but race. After our warm-up, our teacher dismissed us for a ten-minute water break where we gathered in the dressing room to change our shoes. I often found myself in the corner near the cubbies where I would sip out of my water bottle with a straw, alone. Today wasn’t any different. Pretending as if I didn’t mind that the other girls were huddled in the other corner sharing funny stories, I sat fiddling with my shoes—tying and untying them until my teacher would call us back into class.

“Oh, by the way, your birthday party was so much fun, McKenzie!” shouted Jamie from across the room.

All at once, the girls gathered and began talking about the birthday party I wasn’t invited to, the birthday party I didn’t even know about. Pretending not to be bothered, I would turn and quietly giggle along with them as they told stories from the party, hiding my true feelings. On the outside I made like I didn’t care. “No big deal,” I was repeating inside my mind. On the inside I was crying.

My mom arrived right on schedule. We kept with tradition and waited until we got into the car to talk.

“So, honey, class went well?” she asked as usual.

“Yeah, it was fine,” I remarked.

My eyes began to water. There was a part of me that just wanted to tell her that I didn’t belong in these dance classes because of the girls, but since I began dancing when I was three, it had just become a way of life to go to a class each week. As an effort to avoid being seen and heard, I blasted the radio and turned my head toward the window trying to shield my eyes from showing that I was slowly breaking down. My eyes began to well and tears began streaming down my face. I tried my hardest to fight back them back, but they seemed to be a force not even I could control this time. Every time a tear would make its way past my cheekbone, it had become a reflex for my hand to quickly wipe it away, making it seem like I had an itch. She had no idea what the real reason was for my suddenly “itchy face.”

Later that night, while I sat under the fort I made of pillows and blankets I made in my room, I began reading an “Amelia Badelia” book as I clutched onto my beloved Pocahontas doll. All at once, the voices of my mom and dad began coming from their bedroom. I sat in my fort thinking about how the girls in my dance class didn’t like me. I began to cry. At this moment, I hit my breaking point. I slammed shut my book, and hysterically ran into my parents’ room where I dove straight into their pile of pillows. I remember looking up at their faces overwhelmed with concern. My mom grabbed hold of me, telling me to calm down.

“Stephanie, what is the matter?” she asked as she cleared the hair from my face. All at once, I explained to them that in dance class I always drift to the corner of the classroom, the end of the line, and the farthest away from the girls because they didn’t like me since I was too shy. In between the gasps for air as I was crying, I told them about the birthday party I wasn’t invited to; the party I pretended I didn’t care about. Being as supportive as possible, they told me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. They just asked that I give dance classes one last chance next week to mare sure I really was unhappy. Then, if I truly hated it, they would pull me out of classes for good. I hugged them and accepted their proposal.

The day had finally come after a week waiting with much hesitation. My mom pulled into the parking lot of the dance studio, shut the engine of the car off, and there we sat.

“See how it goes, all right?”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and kissed her goodbye. I kept telling myself that in two hours I would probably never have to see any of the girls again. With that in my mind, I stayed positive and entered the classroom.

Ballet went as usual. For partner work across the floor, I ended up tagging along with another pair making it an awkward trio formation. For more spread-out exercises, I found myself in the corner trying to fake smile my way through the class.

The time had come for tap class, one of my favorite styles of dance at the time. There was something about the possibility the shoes possessed that could create such rhythm by simply scraping it a certain way on the wooden floor. It was like music for me, music I could generate myself. For fun, Miss Janine, my teacher for the class, told us to spread out around the room so we each would have enough space to try a new step called “wings,” a fairly advanced feat for 7-year-olds to conquer. As she showed us the footwork, I visualized in my head what my feet had to do in order to create an exact duplicate of her sound. After she finished her demonstration, she challenged us to give it a try.

We began our attempts to create the distinct three noises necessary to get the step right. Scraping noises overwhelmed the studio and Miss Janine just giggled at us, walking around guiding us individually as to what we were doing wrong and how to correct it. While she was with one of the girls on the other side of the room, I bent my knees, brushed my ankles outward and proceeded to shuffle them in producing an exact replication of what she had done moments before.

Her head jutted up, “Who did that?” Miss Janine exclaimed.

Everyone in the room fell silent. I kept quiet and stood there as the other girls looked at one another. After a few moments, they all picked up from where they left off and continued with their attempts in hopes to recreate the noise that caused such excitement in our teacher.

Mustering up the confidence to try once more, I took a deep breath, bent my knees, and out came the sound. This time, she saw that I was the one responsible. I stood, feeling my face turn bright red since all the girls came to a halt and glared at me shocked. Their once hurtful stares were now stares of jealousy. I could hear them begin to whisper to one another. Miss Janine’s face lit up and she grabbed my arm and pulled me into one of the other rooms where the owner of the studio was teaching the national competition team.

She halted the class and exclaimed, “Stephanie, do exactly what you just did in the other room!”

I looked around, smiled hesitantly and did three in a row. The academy owner’s mouth dropped. She ran out into the lobby where she grabbed three other teachers and my mom who was waiting for class to be over. They made me do it once more. They seemed to have all been impressed by what had come pretty naturally for me. The owner took my mom and me outside and began to talk to us about how she has had her eye on me for a while.

“We’ve been watching Stephanie,” she told my mother, “and we really think she has great potential. It’s the quiet ones who we often watch out for in classes.”

I stood there, shocked. “People noticed me?” I thought to myself as the owner asked my mom if I was interested in joining the competition team.

“I’ll have her think about it,” she told to her as she glanced at me with a slight grin.

As I walked out of the dance room and into the dressing room to grab my dance bag full of shoes, I ran to my mom and hugged her. I hastily put on my jacket and I told my mom that I wanted to continue dancing right then and there in the studio. I broke the rule; I broke our “code of silence.” The confidence I gained from this slight recognition made me break through the shyness that had once consumed me.

I began the competition class the following week. The girls were more than welcoming. We instantly bonded and my love for dance had been ignited once again.

Being a discouraged child living in the moment, the idea of giving up something I loved because of what other people thought of me didn’t seem as awful as it sounded. Now, I would never compromise myself, or something I loved for the sake of what another may think of me. It turns out that the dance studio and the stage have become like a second home for me. Over the years, I have attended countless competitions, won many platinum and first place awards over the past twelve years. Who knows what the future may have in store for my career in dancing. I do know, however, that the moment I stepped into the competition classroom, it was as if I finally belonged somewhere, somewhere that I could escape to that wasn’t the fort I made out of pillows and blankets back home.