Every dawn, Darci Marie watched the children waddle past her studio window in a single line, bundled against the cold, and every dawn she promised herself she would open a ballet school for them. She pressed her palm to the frosted glass. Fifteen small girls in pink, blonde hair tucked under wool caps, gripped a rope their parents held. They filed over the walk that ran below her door. Not one of them slowed. Not one dared. The walk was a sheet of ice. Overnight sleet had glazed the stone, and the morning made it worse. Darci had begged the parents for weeks. Let them stop, she said. Let them dance ten minutes before school. Every parent gave the same answer. The route was too dangerous. A child could fall and crack her head. So the line marched on, past her lit window, past the barre she had waxed for students who never came. Her white Persian cat wound between her ankles, ridiculous in a pink tutu Darci had sewn herself. Darci looked from the cat to the ice, then to the salt bag propped by the door. She had bought it to melt her own step. It weighed forty pounds. The dangerous stretch ran maybe thirty feet. "If they won't stop for the ice," she told the cat, "I'll take the ice away." She pulled on boots and hauled the bag outside. The cold bit her bare hands. She flung salt across the glazed stone, working from her door toward the far end where the children entered. Her fingers went numb. The bag emptied halfway. She dropped to her knees and chipped the thickest ridges with a garden trowel, breaking them loose, kicking the shards to the gutter. Sweat froze in her hair. By the time the eastern sky turned gray-pink, thirty feet of walk lay dark and dry and safe. The line came at its usual hour. The lead parent tested the stone with one careful boot. It held. He looked up at Darci, who stood in the doorway in her leotard, breath steaming. She lifted the potted pair of pink ceramic penguins she kept inside, posed forever on their toes, and set them on the step like a sign. "Ten minutes," she said. "Just to see." The parent nodded. He let go of the rope. Fifteen girls spilled onto the safe stone and Darci showed them first position, and for ten minutes they rose on their toes and laughed and did not fall. Then the parent checked his watch and clapped his hands, and the girls groaned and reached for the rope again. Darci watched them go. She had cleared the ice. She had won her ten minutes. But ten minutes on a public walk was not a school, and the salt bag was empty, and tomorrow the sleet would come again. She needed a room of her own, and she needed it before the parents changed their minds.