Now that Namine is no longer required to wear her brace all the time — in fact, while her leg is healing, she’s forbidden to wear it — she’s happy that she gets to wear dance shoes on both feet.
Of course, Namine’s classmates don’t miss a detail like Namine’s brace being missing. The first thing I heard was “Hey, Namine got her cast off!” (Namine didn’t bother to correct them on that detail. It was neither here nor there, in her mind.)
Ballet class tonight was shorter than usual, because several groups performed their recital dances for all the younger ages’ classes. Namine’s ballet class isn’t doing a recital, and she’s not in tap dancing. Her jazz class didn’t do their performance in front of the other girls, though, because they hadn’t finished learning it.
After warm-ups in jazz class, though, the girls jumped straight into practicing their recital song. Rather, their teacher tried to. Most of the girls were pretty distracted, having gotten out of most of their ballet class (the majority of girls are in a three-class combo: tap, ballet, and jazz).
Not Namine, though. Like any seven year old, she can get pretty distracted, but that rarely happens at dance. Even though it had to be tiring, she just stood still in her walker, waiting for the class to settle down and for the teacher to start the music.
Namine can’t stand up without the use of her arms, so she alternates standing and sitting in her walker’s seat so she can do both the kicks and the arm movements. After practice was over, she was pretty tired. Tired, but very happy.
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