Instructions for Dancing

Instructions for Dancing Plot Summary

Introduction

Seventeen-year-old Evie Thomas stands in her bedroom, surrounded by towers of romance novels she once devoured like oxygen. Now they feel like artifacts from someone else's life—a girl who believed in happily-ever-after before her father's affair shattered her family. As she packs the last of these books to donate, Evie doesn't know that a mysterious volume about ballroom dancing will soon curse her with an impossible gift: the ability to see the entire romantic history of any couple with a single kiss. What begins as a quest to understand her newfound supernatural ability becomes something far more dangerous when she meets Xavier Woods—a devastatingly talented musician with eyes that see straight through her cynical armor. As Evie reluctantly enters the world of competitive ballroom dancing, she finds herself caught between two futures: one where she embraces love despite knowing its inevitable end, and another where she remains safely alone, watching life from the sidelines while her heart slowly turns to stone.

Chapter 1: The End of Romance: Evie's Disillusionment

The morning light filtering through Evie's bedroom window illuminates a graveyard of dreams. Romance novels lie scattered across her floor like fallen soldiers, their pastel covers mocking her with promises of eternal love. She picks up "Cupcakes and Kisses," once her favorite, and flips to the scene where the head chef and line cook have their passionate food fight. Six months ago, this would have made her heart flutter. Now the words feel hollow, meaningless as autumn leaves. Her mother Grace appears in the doorway, surveying the carnage with worried eyes. The divorce has aged her in ways that makeup can't hide, though she tries to maintain the facade that everything is fine. "You used to love those books," she says, her Jamaican accent bleeding through despite years in Los Angeles—a telltale sign of stress. Evie's younger sister Danica bounces in, radiant in vintage tennis whites, another new boyfriend in tow. While Evie has retreated into cynicism, Danica has doubled down on love, cycling through relationships with the desperate optimism of someone trying to prove their parents' failure was an anomaly. She chatters about her latest romance while their mother bakes compulsively, filling their small apartment with the scent of sugar and denial. The family operates like a broken clock—all the parts are there, but nothing synchronizes anymore. Phone calls from their father go unanswered by Evie, who can't forgive what she witnessed that day in his office. The image burns in her memory: him kissing another woman with the passion that once belonged to their mother. Trust, once broken, doesn't simply heal with time. It calcifies into something harder and more permanent—a shell around the heart that no amount of wishful thinking can crack. That evening, as Evie loads her bike with the last boxes of books, she makes a silent vow. Love is a game where the house always wins, and she's done playing.

Chapter 2: The Mysterious Gift: Acquiring Supernatural Sight

The Little Free Library stands like a tiny blue shrine beneath the jacaranda trees of Hancock Park, its doors weathered by countless hands seeking stories. Evie approaches with her final donation, ready to purge the last remnants of her romantic delusions. The elderly woman appears as if conjured from the morning mist—pale brown skin like weathered parchment, eyes holding secrets deeper than ocean trenches. "You have a lot of books for us, dear," the woman says, materializing close enough to touch. Her presence carries an otherworldly quality that makes Evie's skin prickle with recognition, though they've never met. As Evie loads her romance novels into the little wooden house, the woman insists she take something in return. "The rules are 'give a book, take a book,'" she explains with a knowing smile. Hidden in the back corner sits a slim, water-damaged volume: "Instructions for Dancing." Its pages contain simple diagrams of footsteps and arrows, a roadmap to movement that seems almost mystical in its precision. When Evie protests that she doesn't dance, the woman's eyes twinkle with ancient mischief. "That someone could be you, dear. I insist." The book feels warm in Evie's hands, as if it contains more than mere instructions. She bikes home through streets suddenly unfamiliar, taking wrong turns that lead her deeper into a maze of possibility. It's only later, when she reaches the end of the block and turns to wave goodbye, that she discovers the woman has vanished entirely—leaving behind only the scent of jasmine and the weight of destiny pressing against Evie's chest like a held breath. That night, she dreams of dancing couples spinning through starlight, their faces blurred by motion and time.

Chapter 3: Learning to Dance: Reluctant Partnership with X

La Brea Dance Studio perches atop a narrow staircase like a temple dedicated to impossible dreams. Evie drags her bicycle up each step, past walls covered in memorabilia from a more romantic age—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers frozen in eternal embrace, their eyes promising that love and movement are the same thing. The climb feels like ascending toward her own execution. Fifi, the studio's resident firecracker, explodes into view wearing asymmetrical crimson and stilettos that could puncture steel. Her Eastern European accent transforms simple words into declarations of war against mediocrity. "You are eeenterested in zee waltz, I zee," she announces, though Evie has only come to return the mysterious book. Before protest is possible, she's swept into a beginner's class where couples practice the ancient art of moving as one. The problem reveals itself immediately: Evie has no partner. The solution arrives in the form of Xavier Woods—six feet of impossible beauty with dreads dipped in blue and a smile that could launch a thousand bad decisions. He's using her bicycle as a prop while breaking up with some poor girl named Jess over the phone, his voice carrying genuine pain beneath the necessary cruelty. Their first dance lesson is a disaster of epic proportions. X's feet seem magnetically attracted to hers, his lead more like a kidnapping than a guide. Fifi's corrections rain down like artillery fire: "Left foot! Sexy is small word! You are not little teapot!" But somewhere between the bruised toes and wounded pride, something begins to shift. The music finds them, or perhaps they find it—two broken people learning to trust again, one painful step at a time. When Fifi finally grants them the privilege of dancing to actual music, Evie feels something she thought was dead forever: the possibility of flight.

Chapter 4: Falling Despite Fear: The Growing Connection

The Santa Monica Promenade buzzes with the energy of dreamers and street performers, but Evie only has eyes for the boy whose hands are learning to hold her without breaking. Fifi has dragged them here for "real world" practice, claiming that dancing in public will cure their stage fright. What she doesn't mention is that it will also cure something deeper—the fear of being truly seen. X proves to be more than just another pretty face with a guitar. His stories unfold like origami flowers: the death of his best friend Clay in a senseless accident, the band called X Machine that carries a dead boy's dreams, the father who doesn't understand why music matters more than safety. His vulnerability cuts through Evie's defenses like warm light through winter frost. Their first real date—though neither calls it that—takes them on a cheesy celebrity bus tour through Hollywood. X photographs the legendary music venues with the reverence of a pilgrim visiting holy sites. At Surf City Waffle, they write song lyrics on napkins, their heads bent together over words that capture heartbreak and hope in equal measure. "Black Box" becomes their first collaboration—a song about preserving love even after it crashes and burns. When he walks her home, moonlight turns the ordinary street into something magical. The kiss happens like gravity—inevitable, necessary, terrifying in its perfect rightness. His lips taste like possibility and danger, like every romance novel she ever loved distilled into a single moment of contact. For the first time since her father's betrayal, Evie remembers what it feels like to want something more than safety. But even as her heart opens like a flower toward sunlight, a small voice whispers warnings she's not yet ready to hear.

Chapter 5: The Devastating Vision: Seeing Their Final Dance

The grand ballroom of the Seasons hotel glitters like a jewelry box come to life, gold streamers and balloons creating a shrine to impossible dreams. Evie and X have made it to the finals of LA Danceball, their bodies moving together with the precision of clockwork and the passion of lightning. Months of practice have transformed them from strangers into something rarer—partners who trust each other with their dreams. The Argentine tango begins with a whisper of violins, building to a crescendo that demands complete surrender. This is the dance that has eluded them, the one requiring total vulnerability. But tonight something has shifted. X's lead is strong and certain, Evie's follow fluid as water. They move across the floor like lovers, like warriors, like two souls finally admitting they are one. The crowd disappears. The judges become irrelevant. There is only the music and the way it flows through their joined bodies, only the heat of his hand against her back and the certainty in his dark eyes. When he spins her into the final dip, when their faces are inches apart and the ballroom holds its breath, Evie knows with crystalline clarity that she loves him. The words spill from her lips like confession: "I love you." His smile could power the entire city. "I love you too," he whispers, and leans in for the kiss that will seal their fate. But the moment their lips meet, the world explodes into vision. Evie sees their entire future unfold in devastating detail—the album they'll write together, the love they'll make, the guitar he'll buy her, the way he'll tell her he loves her every single day. And then the funeral program in her hands, his beautiful face printed above words that stop her heart: "In loving memory: Xavier Darius Woods." Ten months. They have ten months before a faulty heart valve steals him away forever. The vision ends, and Evie tears herself from his arms like she's been burned. His confusion and hurt slice through her as she runs, leaving behind the trophy, the applause, and the boy whose love will destroy her.

Chapter 6: Running from Pain: The Choice to Leave

The darkness of Evie's bedroom becomes a cocoon, a place to hide from a world that has revealed itself to be even crueler than she imagined. The supernatural gift that showed her everyone else's heartbreak has finally turned its spotlight on her own future, illuminating the exact shape of the devastation to come. Ten months. Such a small number to contain a lifetime of love and loss. X's texts arrive like arrows, each one piercing deeper than the last. His confusion bleeds through the phone screen—one moment they were winning everything, the next she was running like he'd struck her. The lies come easily now, cruel necessities dressed up as mercy. She breaks up with him over text because hearing his voice would shatter what little resolve she has left. Martin becomes her confessor, the only one who knows about the visions and therefore the only one who might understand. His friendship is a lifeline in the drowning darkness, proof that some connections can survive even the most impossible truths. Sophie and Cassidy hover with concern they can't name, seeing only the shell of their friend while the real Evie disintegrates inside. Her father appears at the door with takeout from their old favorite taco truck, armed with bad jokes and the kind of love that doesn't know how to fix everything but tries anyway. His presence is both comfort and torment—another reminder that even the people we trust most can disappear without warning. When he reveals that his own marriage to Mom ended not because he left, but because she refused to fight for something already lost, Evie understands that every love story is more complicated than it appears. But understanding doesn't ease the pain. If anything, it makes the weight heavier—the knowledge that love is both the most precious and most fragile thing in the universe, always balanced on the edge of forever and never.

Chapter 7: The Worth of Now: Choosing Love Despite Its End

The wedding reception sparkles with the kind of hope that only comes from people brave enough to promise forever despite knowing how rarely forever lasts. Evie's father and his new bride Shirley dance badly but beautifully, their imperfect waltz somehow more moving than any professional performance. They are proof that some people choose love not because it's safe, but because the alternative—a life without love—is no life at all. In the receiving line, Shirley's words echo in Evie's mind: "I already love you because you're a part of him." The woman who destroyed her family is not a monster but a person—flawed, hopeful, deserving of the happiness she found in the wreckage of someone else's marriage. The complexity of it makes Evie's head spin and her heart crack open just enough to let in a sliver of understanding. The revelation comes not as lightning but as dawn—slow, inevitable, transforming. Standing in that ballroom surrounded by people celebrating love despite its impermanence, Evie finally grasps what the mysterious old woman tried to tell her. The visions weren't a curse showing her heartbreak—they were a gift showing her love. Every couple she'd watched had chosen connection over safety, intimacy over isolation, the terrible beautiful risk of caring for another person. She finds X at his grandparents' house, guitar in hand, eyes wary with the particular hurt that comes from being abandoned without explanation. The apology tumbles out of her like confession, like prayer: she was afraid of losing him so she lost him first, taking the coward's path that led only to emptiness. When she tells him he's the love of her life, his smile could resurrect the dead. They return to the reception together, and this time when they dance the Argentine tango, Evie doesn't see the future. She sees only now—his hands warm on her back, the disco ball scattering light like stars, the way he looks at her as if she hung the moon. When their lips meet, there are no visions, no supernatural warnings. There is only love, pure and present and achingly temporary. The old woman's words echo one final time: it was never about the endings. It was about choosing to love anyway, choosing the brief bright flame over the cold safety of darkness, choosing to hold on even when you know you'll have to let go.

Summary

In the end, Evie Thomas learns that prescience is not power but burden, that knowing the future can blind you to the present's infinite worth. Her supernatural gift, born from heartbreak and nurtured by cynicism, transforms from curse to blessing only when she understands its true purpose: not to prevent love, but to reveal its preciousness. X will die, yes, but first he will live—and in choosing to love him despite the approaching darkness, Evie chooses life itself. The romance novels she once discarded contained a truth deeper than their pastel covers suggested: that love stories are not about happy endings but about the courage to begin, again and again, despite knowing that all stories end. In a world where hearts can stop without warning and forever is a myth we tell ourselves, the only rational response is to love fiercely, completely, while we can. Evie's visions showed her a hundred different ways love could break, but they also showed her something more important—a hundred different ways it could begin, each one a small act of rebellion against the dying of the light.

About Author

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Nicola Yoon

Yoon reflects on the intersections of love and identity through her evocative narratives, often embedding cultural diversity and complex emotional landscapes in her work. As a Jamaican-born author who immigrated to Brooklyn at age 11, she channels her own experiences into young adult fiction, exploring themes of different types of love and cultural dynamics. Her early book, "Everything, Everything," narrates the story of a girl living in isolation due to severe allergies, a concept inspired by her protective instincts as a mother. The author’s narrative style, characterized by emotional depth and realistic characters, further resonates in "The Sun Is Also a Star," which focuses on the brief encounter of a Jamaican girl and a Korean American boy, highlighting the challenges of deportation and identity.\n\nHer transition from engineering and Wall Street to writing full-time around 2015 underscores her dedication to crafting stories that engage with social issues through romance and commentary. Nicola Yoon's bio reveals her continuous commitment to portraying diverse characters, as seen in her Joy Revolution imprint, which emphasizes love stories featuring people of color. Her recent venture into adult fiction with "One of Our Kind" marks a thematic expansion, blending dystopian elements with satire. Readers benefit from her works' ability to foster empathy and understanding across cultural lines, enriching the young adult genre with narratives that are both heartfelt and socially relevant.\n\nYoon’s contributions to literature have been widely recognized, as evidenced by her National Book Award finalist status and her achievement as the first Black woman to reach #1 on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list. Both "Everything, Everything" and "The Sun Is Also a Star" have been adapted into films, extending her influence beyond the literary world and highlighting the universal appeal of her storytelling.

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