We all paraded back into the dressing room. I brought up the rear - I wasn't too enthusiastic about another pointless search. Just as I entered the room, I heard Katie Beth squeal.

    "Hey, here they are," she said, holding up a pair of toe shoes. They were mine. I could tell from across the room. "They were in your bag the whole time, Jessi." I ran over to her and grabbed them without even saying thanks. My shoes! I'd never been so happy to see them. But I knew Katie Beth was wrong. Those shoes had definitely not been in my bag the whole time. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.

    "Very good, Katie Beth," said Madame. "Zee mystery is solved. Now let us get on wiz zee rehearsal!" She led us back into the studio and the rehearsal began for real. I put on my toe shoes as Madame told us about the first part of the dance we would be practicing.

    "And zen," she said, "zee Princess Aurora enters wiz a glissade ..." She made a movement that suggested what I was supposed to do. ". . . and zen a releve en arabesque." Again, she illustrated what she meant.

    I love to watch Mme Noelle move. She doesn't dress in leotards for class - she just wears a turtleneck and a long black skirt. And when she demonstrates steps, she doesn't do them full out. But every move she makes is just so - so full of grace is the only way I can describe it. You can see all those years of dance training in the slightest motion of her arm. I don't think she knows how to move like a regular person anymore. I wonder if I'll ever have that kind of poise.

    For me, for now, ballet is more like hard work. The stuff I do without having to think about is stuff I've been doing nearly every day for seven years. And everything new I learn is based on those foundations. It takes a long, long time to learn to dance.

    I tried to concentrate on learning my steps. I was doing the best I could to forget about the whole miserable scene before rehearsal. But I couldn't get it out of my head.