On my first morning at my new academic school—earlier in September than my music school would start—I stood before a bulletin board and tried to get my bearings. All around me kids who hadn't seen one another since June were trying to cram a summer's talk into the few minutes before classes began. The school was only for professional kids and kids working toward careers in the performing arts, and it went from the upper middle grades through senior high, so the voices around me ranged in pitch from little-kid thin to almost grown-up.

I'd hoped the bulletin board would have a map of the school's layout, but instead I found tacked-up notices of concert programs and playbills from shows where students had parts. Wow, I thought, spotting one from a new hit musical. A cast member's name was highlighted in yellow. Someone from this school is in that?

A teacher called, "Time to get to your rooms, everybody," and I turned just as a boy came up to me.

"I've been watching for you," he said as I recognized the cello player who'd wished me good luck with my music school audition. "I wondered if you'd be one of the new wunderkind here."

I started to draw back and then realized he wasn't hassling me. He was teasing, sure, but he was also welcoming me to a place where special talent was what everyone had. At that instant, I understood I was at last in a school where I belonged. It was an idea so overwhelming that it made tears fill my eyes and spill over.

"Hey, don't cry!" he said. "I didn't mean anything bad." He fumbled in a sweatshirt pocket and pulled out a cloth that had been used for cleaning rosin dust. "Here. Blow your nose on this."

I found out that his name was Ben and that he was an eighth grader like me.

BEN TOOK CHARGE of me those first weeks, kind of the way a nice big brother might take care of a little sister.

He made sure that I met everybody—dancers and actors and singers, as well as other kids who wanted to be classical musicians. I got to know a girl who played world-class chess and a boy who played pro golf.

My school seemed to me to be the most extraordinary place, filled with kids leading double lives. Individually we each had our commitment: an instrument to practice or ballet routines to learn; a music or dance school to attend or a coach to work with. But here, although we carried our commitment with us—identified ourselves by our art—here we went to math classes and wrote book reports and gossiped in the school cafeteria just like kids did in schools everywhere.

At first it surprised me how teachers worked around whatever came up. When I heard my science teacher reviewing material for a kid who'd have to miss class during rehearsals for a new show, I remembered Ms. Watkins, my sixth grade teacher who hadn't wanted me returning from lunch late because of my violin lessons.

And I could just imagine what she'd have to say about theater kids regularly taking off Wednesday afternoons to perform in matinees.

Sometimes kids would even disappear for weeks at a time, like when the golfer went on tour Or the models. This girl who was really, really stunning was forever taking off to do fashion shoots in places like Frankfurt and Tahiti. Mostly the kids didn't make a big deal about it, and our teachers didn't, either In fact, they went out of their way to help everybody keep up.

I heard one of them explaining it to the parents of another new student. "When you consider how stressful adolescence is anyway, and then you layer on all the responsibilities these kids carry, it makes you wonder how they handle things as well as they do," he said. "Sometimes I think our most important job is giving them some space."

I got to know a couple of dancers best, Kiah and Eleni, who went to ballet school on Saturdays the way I went to music school. And sometimes I hung around with two other dancers, both named Amy.

And there was Ben, of course. After a while he stopped treating me like a little sister We didn't exactly become boyfriend and girlfriend that year but we didn't exactly not, either.