Dancing for the Lord The Academy - By Emily Goodman Page 0,17

old had they said these kids were, anyway? She’d worked with the kids before—it had been one of the ways she helped to pay for all the extra dance classes—but some ages were a lot better to work with than others.

You could spend that hour getting some of your schoolwork done. That still, small voice spoke directly to her heart; and Danni already knew better than to ignore it. She had been listening to that voice for too long to set it aside now. She just wished—suddenly rather desperately—that she could put it aside, ignore what it was telling her.

But she wouldn’t. No matter how much she might like to ignore what that voice was telling her, she knew that it was right. She was really going to have to work hard if she was going to get ahead in these classes, especially since she did want to have the chance to devote her senior year entirely to dance.

Work hard now, do what you want to do later. With a sigh, Danni spread her materials out on a table in the commons area after her math class, staring down at her English book as though she had never seen one before. All right, Lord. Help me to do this well, because the last thing I want is to end up having to do it again.

She worked straight through the hour, pausing only once, to get up and drink down a few ounces of water. By the time she was done, she had a respectable pile of completed work in front of her—enough that she thought she could be proud to turn it in on Wednesday, at any rate. She’d read several of these stories before, in her English class back home.

Math. I’ll have to do some math tonight. Math wasn’t exactly Danni’s favorite subject. She preferred science, if it came to that, and maybe history—but those wouldn’t be until the next day, and she knew that if she wasn’t careful, she would end up putting off the less-favored subject until she had to take it her senior year.

She desperately didn’t want to end up in that position.

With a sigh, Danni slid her work into a folder and repacked her backpack, then hurried away again. Kids’ class. Well, she’d always enjoyed them before, right?

As it turned out, this was one of the best kids’ classes Danni had ever been in. The students were old enough that she could be sure that the majority of them actually wanted to be there, rather than being thrust there by parents with high expectations, but young enough to still believe that dance was supposed to be fun.

A room full of ten-year-olds had never been Michael’s favorite way to spend an afternoon; but Danni had to admit, if she was going to teach, this was definitely the age group that she preferred.

She threw herself into the afternoon with gusto, showing the students new moves, teaching them everything they needed to know and even showing them some of the tricks she had learned over the years, things that made the steps look even more graceful than before. By the end of the hour, she felt as though she had done her absolute best for all of the girls involved.

“They’re absolutely enchanted with you,” Mlle Kirby told her quietly.

Danni jumped. She had been staring blankly after the last of the dancers, thinking about…actually, even she wasn’t sure what she had been thinking about. The intrusion of another voice into her private world had been startling.

Mlle Kirby laughed. “How has your first day gone?” she wanted to know. “Feel like packing up and heading for home on the next bus out yet?”

Danni laughed along with her. “Not quite yet,” she told her, surprised to realize that it was true. “It’s going to be challenging, but there’s a lot of good here, too.”

“I agree,” the teacher admitted, lowering herself to the floor and beginning a round of stretches designed to keep her muscles limber even as she cooled. “I wouldn’t teach here if I didn’t believe it—though I do think they push you girls too hard, sometimes.”

Danni joined her in the floor. “I get the feeling that all of the push this year is to see whether or not we’ll even make it to next year,” she admitted. “Tell me honestly: how many people wash out before Christmas—or just don’t ever come back after the holidays?”

“A lot of them,” Mlle Kirby confessed, her voice slightly muffled due to the fact