I didn't want to go to school. I never did. My mother would drag me out of bed in the mornings and make me breakfast and I would ask her again and again why I couldn't stay home. I knew, even as a child, that I would never do anything with those lessons. I knew they were useless to me. I knew I was meant to dance.

My mother used to say that I could dance before I could walk. She would tell me about how I would stand up on my little toddler feet and wiggle, all the while keeping my eyes closed and my ears open to the music she played while she cooked.

My mother had been a dancer before me, and her mother before her. We were dancers. It was in our blood. Ballet, hip-hop, jazz, tap, ballroom - anything. Everything. Everyone in my family had trained at an academy in France. I was the first one not to go.

My mother didn't have the money to send me. Her own career had been cut short by an accident: me. She wasn't able to dance long enough to save money for me to go to school. So I didn't go to her fancy academy. She trained me in our garage, in our kitchen, in the supermarkets. We would dance down the streets if we ever went anywhere, and then we would come home and make dinner and dance around the kitchen, and when we'd eaten we'd go into the garage and I'd stand at our make-shift barre and she'd teach me everything she knew. And in the morning, she'd wake me up to send me to school and I would beg her 'Please mama, let me stay home and dance with you,' and she would chuckle and shoo me out the door.

In school, I would sit at my desk and tap my feet on the floor, rehearsing a tap routine I dreamed up in my head. I would spin down the hall in the arms of an imaginary partner. I would teach my friends how to do the simpler moves during recess, and they would fall about laughing and declaring that I was a much better dancer than they. I loved that. I would take a bow and they would mime throwing flowers at me. I dreamed of the day when I would be a real dancer. A ballerina, perhaps, or maybe one of those dancing girls in the videos my mother and I would watch.

So when I got the letter that I had been accepted into some school I'd never heard of, I tried to refuse.

'Mama!' I pleaded. 'What's the point in sending me away when you know I'll learn so much more with you? You know they don't teach dance there. Why should I have to go?'

My mother did not even look up from her knife as it sliced through another carrot. 'You need an education Adéle. I can't be your teacher forever.'

'Why not?' I asked, outraged. 'I don't need what they're teaching me. I only need what you can teach me!'

'Your body will betray you someday Adéle. You will need an education to fall back on,' she told me as she swept the carrots into a pot.

'My body won't betray me! Look, it does anything I ask it to! Anything!'

At this, I lept into a grande jeté, perfectly executed. I landed and lifted my left leg behind me into an arabesque, then back down into a croisé with my left leg behind and finished with a pirouette. I stood in fourth position, waiting for her approval.

My mother didn't even look up. 'You are a good dancer. Better than I was at your age. But everyone ages. And I don't want you to end up like me, working in a shop because you have no skills in your head to match those in your body.'

I turned and ran to my room. But in a few weeks, I was at the King's Cross Station for the first time, staring at the sign indicating I was standing on Platform 9.

'Where is the platform mama?' My voice was quiet, scared.

She looked around worriedly and shook her head. 'I don't know sweetheart.'

We stood for a minute. I clutched the handle of my trolley and stared at the trunk we'd tied onto it. I pushed it back and forth experimentally. After a while a kind looking woman came over and helped us get onto the platform. We stood there for a second, uneasy, watching the odd people around us and the scarlet steam engine that gleamed on the tracks. A boy with a badge on his chest helped me load my trunk onto the train, and as we pulled out of the station I waved to my mother, standing alone on the platform, her hand lifted in a wave and her eyes full of sadness.

I had trouble sleeping at school. After about a week, I couldn't take it anymore and slipped out of my room in the middle of the night. I wandered around for a bit until I found myself lost and standing in front of a door I was sure hadn't been there before. When I opened it, I found a classroom. A proper classroom, with mirrored walls and a real barre that was made of smooth wood and not a bit of plastic pipe. It had gleaming hardwood floors, and there, in the middle of the room, was a pair of brand new pointe shoes, already broken in. They were just my size.

Every day I would slip away to this room. Every night I came back and danced until my muscles ached and my eyes slid shut out of a tiredness that seeped into my bones. I slept better.

When I went home for the holidays, I told my mother about the room.

'It's beautiful mama. It looks like the pictures you showed me from your days at school.'

She smiled at me and pushed a bit of hair off my face. 'I'm glad you like your new school sweetheart.'

Except I didn't. I liked that room and that was all. I couldn't ever skive off a class because it was a boarding school - they would know. I learned things I didn't care about and didn't learn the things I needed. I spent ages in the library reading books about dancing, both Muggle and magical, and left homework until the last minute and didn't study for my tests. I scraped by. In class, I would sit and gaze out the window, watching the birds and dreaming up a new routine. I skipped meals to stretch and run and workout, building up my strength until I could balance on one hand and leap higher than I ever had before.

I did not have friends at school. I kept to myself. I tried at first, but none of the other girls had even heard of jazz dancing, and only a few knew what ballet was. They thought my restlessly tapping feet were strange, and they cast disparaging glances at my waifish body. The boys did not like me either. They called me 'Stick' and asked when I was going to disappear again. And so I avoided them. I ran off to my room and rehearsed every dance I knew until I couldn't stand and I threw up from exhaustion.

I was happier than I had been before I discovered the room, but not as happy as I would have liked. I would have liked to have a friend. As I grew older, I would have liked a boyfriend too. But there was no one who even looked in my direction. I sat alone at a table during lunch and watched the people around me. They didn't notice. I listened to their conversations and imagined they were talking to me. I danced ballroom without a partner, but imagined that this boy or that one was dancing beside me. I retreated into my head so far that I didn't notice the scathing remarks the other girls threw my way. Dance became my escape, my drug, my way of life. I knew I could never survive without it.