THELMA

Thelma Macias stood before her swim coach at Los Amigos High School, her broad shoulders hunched, her face troubled. She had to leave right now, she told him in the middle of a swim meet; she had an orchestra rehearsal that could not be missed.

“You have to choose,” Eddie Guerrero responded in obvious frustration. “You want to do everything, Thelma, but you can’t. You’ve got to make some decisions here.”

For Thelma, a multitalented 14-year-old who opted to leave to play her cello that day, missing two swimming events, life these days is a series of difficult choices.

Only three months ago, Thelma was one of Beth Burns’ most gifted students, a passionate, athletic dancer whose fervor for the Saint Joseph Ballet seemed to mirror Burns’ own.

Thelma had studied at Saint Joseph for five years, practicing six days a week, at least two hours a day, rehearsing the more difficult steps again and again, intensity etched on her face. When she performed, her dancing was filled with emotion and drive that belied her age.

Thelma’s future in ballet, Burns said without hesitation, was limitless.

But in February, after weeks of conflict with Burns and other staff members over her angry, rebellious attitude, Thelma suddenly quit. She wanted to explore other interests, she said, including swimming. And she needed to stop feeling the pressure she associated with ballet.

Time spent in the studio was time away from being a teenager. She couldn’t accompany her friends to school volleyball and football games. She couldn’t join sports teams or run for student government. And increasingly, Burns and the ballet wanted more, not less, of her time.

“I’ve been thinking about quitting for two years,” Thelma said on the February day she finally left the program. “Everybody’s always on me to be there all the time, to do nothing except ballet, and I have to miss everything else. I just want to try something new.”

But now, with Saint Joseph’s annual spring performance fast approaching, Thelma feels an uncertainty and wistfulness she cannot hide.

She misses the nervous excitement of getting ready for a performance, the rehearsals and costume fittings. She misses the accolades from Burns and others. She misses her friends.

But mostly, she hungers for the dance itself, the joy she felt at creating something beautiful, the thrill of mastering each intricate step.

“I want to dance,” she said recently. “I really miss it, but I don’t know if I want to dance [at Saint Joseph]. I don’t miss the pressure I felt.”

Dancing anywhere else, though, is not an option. Thelma did not pay for her classes, costumes or field trips at Saint Joseph; like 96% of the students there, her costs were covered by scholarship.

And like many of the low-income, often high-risk students at Saint Joseph, Thelma has a troubled, complicated history.

As a young child, she and two older siblings were caught in a protracted custody battle. Twice, her father fled with her to Mexico, only to return her to her mother, who had legal custody.

“I felt kind of like a doll, tugged and fought for,” said Thelma, her brows arching high over thoughtful, wide-set eyes. “I try not to think about it now.”

Adding to her confusion, she said, was her mother’s belief that Thelma, still a young child, should choose for herself where she wanted to live.

“I didn’t go get her right away when her father took her,” said her mother, Thelma Oda. “I wanted her to see what it was like over there so she could say if she liked it or she didn’t like it.”

Thelma remains resentful toward both parents. She has seen her father very little during the last eight years, though he lives just a few miles from Thelma’s Santa Ana home. Recently, she has begun to spend occasional weekends with him.

“I just don’t feel close to them,” she said. “My mom, she wants us to have, like, this real mother-daughter relationship now. But it feels kind of weird.”

Thelma, whose parents earn $40,000 a year, is better off than many at the ballet.

Her stepfather, Joe Oda, an evening-shift custodian for Orange County, works part time at two other jobs, cleaning private homes and supervising workers at a clothing factory. Her mother was also a county custodian but has been receiving disability payments for more than a year. She is taking a three-month training course that she hopes will yield a better job.

With her mother and stepfather working nights for much of Thelma’s childhood, her brother, Oscar, now 21, and other relatives often cared for her. “I pretty much raised myself,” she said.

Even as a young child, Thelma generally awoke and got ready for school on her own, then did her homework and practiced her music without being told. “She’s always been pretty independent,” her mother said.

And driven.

Little more than a year ago, in eighth grade, Thelma decided to learn the cello. She already played the tenor saxophone but had always wanted to learn the cello, and one of the instruments had just become available at her school. She began taking cello classes and eventually made the school district’s honors orchestra. She also sought out a private music instructor, Ardelle Womack.

Knowing her family could not afford the cost of the lessons, she persuaded her mother to offer Womack a deal: Each Saturday, in exchange for a 45-minute lesson, Thelma and her mother would clean Womack’s home, scrubbing floors, cabinets and toilets.

Womack accepted. “Dedication like that is unusual in such a young person,” she said. “Her desire is pretty evident in her willingness to clean my house.”

But intense and ambitious as she is, Thelma also can seem very vulnerable.

One recent afternoon, she sat sideways at the desk in her bedroom, a breeze lifting the curtain at the open window behind her and softly moving her long, curly hair.

The conversation turned to Burns: a trip the two of them once made to west Los Angeles to watch a dance performance, the “weird-looking” pasta they ate, the Italian appetizer called bruschetta Burns encouraged Thelma to try.

“We had so much fun,” she said quietly. “Nobody ever did something like that with me before.”

As she talked, she picked up a card from her desktop, an invitation to attend the ballet’s performances at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. She played with it, turning it over and over. It felt strange to be on the mailing list, she said, to be a spectator at a performance that had defined her spring for many years.

She has thought more and more lately of calling Burns and asking to come back, but she hesitates, unsure what the response would be.

“What if I’m supposed to go crawling back?” she asked. “What if she thinks I’m not strong? What if she wants to . . . rub [past conflicts] in my face? I don’t know if I could take that.”

She sighed.

“But I really want to dance.”