Trying It Alone

Before there was a class, there was just Sam, alone in the living room, trying.

She watched the video so many times that week that her mum eventually took the phone away for a while, not because she was annoyed, but because Sam's eyes needed a break whether Sam agreed or not. So Sam did the next best thing. She hummed the drum part to herself — badly, mostly just "dum dum da-dum" over and over — and tried the moves from memory.

It went worse than she expected.

Her arms went one way when they were supposed to go the other. She stepped on her own foot twice. At one point she spun around too fast and knocked her lamp sideways, and it didn't break, but it did make a very dramatic clattering sound that brought her mum running in from the kitchen to check nothing was on fire.

"I'm fine," Sam said, a little out of breath, a little embarrassed, standing in the middle of a slightly crooked living room. "I'm just bad at this."

"You've been doing it for four days," her mum said, straightening the lamp. "Nobody's good at anything after four days."

"Then why does it look so easy when he does it?"

"Because he's been doing it for probably twenty years, and you've been doing it since Tuesday."

Sam sat down on the floor, legs sore in a way she wasn't used to, and thought about that. It didn't make her feel instantly better, but it made her feel a little less silly about the lamp incident. She got back up, hummed the drum part again — a little quieter this time, in case the lamp was listening — and tried the shoulder move one more time.

It still didn't look like the video. But for about half a second, right in the middle of the move, it felt like it might, someday. That half a second was enough to make her want to try again the next day.

She kept at it all week, in short bursts between homework and dinner, in the ten minutes before bed when she was supposed to be brushing her teeth, in the driveway once, badly, until a neighbour walking their dog gave her a curious look that made her duck back inside laughing at herself. By Friday, her shoulders still wobbled more than they popped, but they wobbled with a little more confidence than they had on Tuesday, and that felt like something worth noticing.