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“That’s great for you. But then you won’t be there when everyone else is giving Lia a hard time for getting involved with her teacher. How do you imagine that working out?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lia replies simply. “Let them say what they want.”

“They’ll talk about you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, please! If there’s one thing you do care about, it’s what other people think of you.”

Lia flinches. A pained expression flashes across her face, piercing my heart. “I know. But I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to constantly be afraid of what others think of me. I’m tired of it.” Her voice trembles, and I slide my hand down her arm until our fingers intertwine. “I’m so tired of all this, Jase. And I can’t control it anyway. They already have an opinion of me.”

“I know. But this is . . .” Jase wrings his hands, visibly overwhelmed. “Lia, seriously, this is a really stupid idea.”

“It’s only six months until graduation, I’ll survive.”

“Can’t you just . . . Can’t you just keep your hands off each other until you graduate?”

“No.” We answer at the same time.

“We don’t want to either,” says Lia.

Jase and his girlfriend exchange glances; he looks a little desperate, while she seems almost amused.

“Don’t look at me like that, Pixie.”

“What? As if you could have, when it came to us.”

His shoulders slump. He seems resigned, but he’s not giving up yet. “That’s different.”

“Why? Because we’re in love? I think they are too.” She nods in our direction. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t want to go to Pearson.”

“Is that true?” He turns back to us. “Are you in love?”

“Yes,” I reply.

Lia nods.

“Phew. Okay. That . . .” Jase rubs his forehead and sighs. “How did this even start?”

I glance down at Lia and smile at the memory of that rainy July night. “At a party.”

“The evening before I flew to London,” Lia adds. “Neither of us had any idea he was going to be my teacher.”

Jase’s girlfriend sighs too and then presses her lips together but can’t suppress the grin that spreads across her face. “That sounds like a great story.”

Jase sighs wearily. “Yeah. Great. Really fantastic.” Then he becomes serious again. “You really want to talk to Pearson?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Lia looks up at me when Jase asks the question. It’s your decision, her eyes say, but that’s not true. It’s her decision too. And then something suddenly occurs to me.

“What about the performance?” I ask her. “Pearson hasn’t decided who he’s going to cast yet. If we tell him about us, what if it makes him decide not to give you the part?”

Her hand goes to her neck again, grasping at thin air. “Then I’ll deal with it. The role isn’t as important as we are.”

“It’s not?” I ask. The role meant everything to her. But she must mean it, otherwise she wouldn’t have said it, and something about that makes me very happy. Because I know that, deep down, she never really cared about dancing the Swan Queen. It was about something else. Something she now understands. Something she’s ready to let go.