Future Traded Yestoday

4

I don't think I've ever been taught how to dance. Not professionally, at least. My mom probably taught me how to dance when I was little, but that for sure doesn't count as experience.

Not when one of the top dance instructors is brought to the school for the day.

We were told we only had one day with the instructor, which apparently equates to spending the entire day dancing. I didn't think it could be this exhausting.

I had expected the dance instruction to take over our physical education period of the day. That would have made sense and would have allowed for all of the students to have time with the instructor. So when I learned we were to be there all day, I thought we were finally going to be joined by other students.

I think the others were expecting that too, judging by how we kept looking towards the doors every time a new period started. Instead the room was kept with just us eight and the instructor.

Starting at six in the morning, the instructor walked us through stretching and basic techniques. Some of us picked it up a lot quicker than the others, and by some of us I mean three of us. The Thai kid, the kid younger than me, and the older of the two that started with me for the week there was three.

The kid younger than me got so excited when we were told we were going to dance today. It's the most I've seen him smile and get involved since he's come here, and we've tried many times to open him up.

The stretching and basic techniques took us until lunch. That's when we learned from the stares we were getting from the other students that we were going to be the only ones getting dance instruction for the day. After that, I noticed we all stopped watching the door to see if anyone else would come in.

What didn't help was that our lunch break was cut in half. We had fifteen minutes to get our food and get back to the practice room. We didn't even know there was a practice room before today.

Shoving food down our throats did not mix well with immediately going to dance. What also didn't help was the guilt from knowing we were getting special treatment. The glares from the other students make me inwardly cower whenever I remember them.

As soon as we were back from break, the instructor was waiting for us to get started again. We immediately went into learning an intense routine and were taught how to apply the techniques.

That afternoon we learned how to work through the pain.

It wasn't a lesson I wanted to learn at thirteen years of age. Even the kid younger than me wasn't enjoying this as much when we started getting later into the afternoon and our limbs felt like lead.

Around dinner is when we learned a lesson our instructor wasn't prepared to teach us today. We learned how to stand up for ourselves against adults.

The Canadian kid had collapsed and we had to help him out of the practice room ourselves to the nurse. After that the Japanese kid noticed the kid younger than me was trying to skip dinner just so he wouldn't feel sick when we went back to dance.

Once we took our time eating, we returned as a group to the practice room to tell the instructor we were done. By "we" I mean the older of the two I was originally with, the one who was good at dancing, spoke up for the rest of us. He told the instructor we were too young and we didn't have the stamina for this and we needed to either have a break or be done for the day.

So we got our break.

We thought we were done for the day as we all took turns in the showers and collapsed onto our beds. The Canadian returned from the nurse looking better than when we dropped him off, and I think that made us all feel better. It made me feel better, I know that.

Our assumption of being done was wrong, though. At some point in the night the instructor came in and flipped the lights on in both rooms, shouting for us to get up and get dressed.

We didn't stop dancing until early morning when we were allowed to get some sleep before our classes started.

That was the first time I heard someone cry themself to sleep. I just didn't know it wouldn't be the last.