Man. What do I categorize this under? “Yoga”?

1995: I’d wanted ballet lessons for as long as I could remember. In 1995, at the age of twelve, I got them.

It was my stepmom who spearheaded the whole thing. She took me to our local Capezio. I picked out my own pair of soft pink shoes, a black leotard, pale tights and a white chiffon skirt. Every Sunday she dropped me off at lessons, and an hour later she picked me back up.

When I wasn’t in class, I gazed arduously at those soft pink shoes. I practiced the warm-up exercises in the hallways of the junior high, and in the back stage during drama club meetings, pointing my toe out to the side, raising an arm, circling back.

I felt at home in ballet. There was nothing about it that wasn’t pretty, controlled, quiet. My friend Johanna had been a ballerina for most of her life already, and when she showed me the tapes of her performing as a mouse in a production of “The Nutcracker” I nearly cried with jealousy. I wanted to be in “The Nutcracker” so badly. You could have made me a candy cane.

1996: “I don’t think you’re quite ready for level II,” the instructor told me. “I think it’d do you some good to take another level I class.”

We were standing outside the door to the classroom. I looked in at my level-II-ready classmates, running and giggling or sitting strangely in the middle of the room, sucking a thumb. When they weren’t taking ballet class, they were amusing themselves with other necessary schooling appropriate for their age group: preschool, kindergarten, first grade. Our age discrepancies had always been clearest to me in the long mirror that stretched across our classroom, where, during flights from one end to the next, I could observe my head bobbling at twice the height of my peers’, like a baby giraffe in a pen of piglets. Whenever we swung our legs back I had to make sure I wasn’t about to knock some distracted, Lifesaver-mouthed princess’ teeth out.

I thought about that. I thought about a whole new troupe of them, the same age next year, and me a year older: thirteen, fourteen years old in a sea of toddlers.

“So what do you think? Do you want to take the same lessons again next year?” my stepmom asked.