Cayla Miller has been dancing for about two years, which in fifth-grade terms is long enough to have performed in The Nutcracker, to know that tap is her favorite, and to understand that the people running lights have not been entirely honest with her.

"They tell you that you won't be able to see them," she says. "But you can see them."

The crowd, that is. Standing right there, looking right at you.

She dances ballet, jazz, and tap at a studio in Metropolis. She's been on stage in productions, worked her way through nerves and itchy costumes — "some of them hurt" — and landed somewhere she didn't quite expect: still a little nervous, but going out there anyway.

"A little bit," she admits when asked if she gets nervous. "Because there are a lot of people."

She wouldn't even let her older sisters come to her very first dance performance. Both of them are older; neither of them is a dancer — she is the one in the family who started this. The first time out, she wanted to protect it. Keep it just hers, at least until she knew what she was doing.

She's past that now. Mostly.

What she loves about tap is something she can't quite put into words. "You get to run around in them, and the sound of them is — it's weird, but it's... it." The sentence doesn't finish so much as land. But you know exactly what she means.

At school, she gravitates toward the STEAM lab. "You just get to make all kinds of things." Science, too. She wants to be a doctor someday, she says — or a dance teacher. One to help people live healthier. The other is to help people live happier.

She's ten years old. Both are still completely possible.

A few hallways away, Ashley Miller has spent the past few years watching students find what Cayla is still in the middle of finding — the moment when the nerves stop running the show.

Ashley is a school board member, a cheerleading coach, and a pom-pom coach at Joppa-Maple Grove. She didn't plan any of it. Her daughter wanted to join the cheerleading squad. There was no coach.

"For one of my kids, absolutely, I'm gonna say yes," she says.

So she stepped up. Learned as she went. Called it a learning curve, and meant it. And somewhere in the middle of figuring out how to coach, she started to understand what she could actually do.

"That I'm more capable than I imagined," she says — not just on the sideline, but in the boardroom, too, where her job is to speak for students who don't always have the words.

Her cheerleaders are young. Some are returning with a season under their belts; others are brand new, still growing into themselves. One girl in particular came in barely speaking — quiet at practice, quiet at games, ducking any question that put her in the spotlight. Ashley noticed.

As the season has gone on, that same girl now cartwheels onto the floor solo, in front of the whole crowd. Her cheers are louder. She's smiling at every game.

"You could see the nervous jitters just melting away," Ashley says.

The older, more confident girls have helped make that possible. Ashley watches them teach the newcomers — on the court, off it, in the small moments of practice when someone figures something out and passes it forward.

"Watching them teach each other and lead each other," she says, "has been rewarding."

Her own first group — the original squad, seasons ago — had their version of that same crossing. First time on the floor in front of a crowd. Two quarters of visible nerves. Then the music, the movement, the moment of no turning back.

"Seeing them get on that floor for the first time and nail it," Ashley says. "Come off the floor so proud of themselves."

Jumping. Smiling. Knowing they did it.

That moment didn't change how she coached. It confirmed it. "I realized I needed to continue what I was doing with these kids — that I was making a difference in how they could see themselves."

That's the through line — in Cayla's tap shoes, in Ashley's gym, in everything that happens between uncertain and ready. Joppa-Maple Grove gives students space to grow into themselves. Sometimes loudly, in front of a crowd. Sometimes quietly, practice by practice, game by game.

Either way, the floor is there when they're ready.