by Holly Webb
Sara shrugged. “I don’t know. What would I say? I’d look so stupid. And actually, I have to say, she did me a favour—”
“How come?” Bethany sounded disbelieving.
“I was so nervous this morning. I mean, really, really nervous.”
“Well, you seemed a bit out of it,” Chloe agreed, “but you weren’t that bad, were you? You looked OK.”
“Chloe, I’d practically forgotten how to walk, let alone sing and dance. But I was so relieved to get to the audition in one piece that I almost forgot all of that. I was still a bit nervous but nothing like before. I’m sure I did better than I would have if I’d been on time and waiting outside for ages. Toby – he’s one of the boys auditioning – he was there for ages and he looked so scared. I hope he’s OK.” Sara checked her watch. “He’s probably about to go in now.”
“Look,” Chloe hissed. “Lizabeth. What are we going to do? We have to do something!”
Lizabeth was walking through the crowded cafeteria, looking curiously at Sara. “So, how was your audition?” she asked in a sarcastic tone as she reached their table, obviously expecting Sara to burst into tears.
“Fine, thank you,” Sara purred. “I really enjoyed it. We’ll just have to see what happens now, won’t we? Best of luck, Lizabeth.” She smiled back sweetly, mimicking Lizabeth, and watched the older girl’s face change, the smile faltering to a confused frown as she tried to work out what was going on.
Lizabeth looked round quickly at Chloe, Bethany and Lily, all glaring at her, and for once her confidence seemed to break. She backed away and disappeared out of the cafeteria.
“She’s probably thinking that even if she gets the part, you’ll tell and it’ll be taken away from her,” Bethany said happily. “That was the best revenge, Sara. She hasn’t a clue what to do now.”
“Let’s hope it lasts a while!” said Lily. “Now tell us what it was like!”
Sara tried to remember every little detail, and they discussed the possibilities eagerly till the end of lunch. No one could work out whether not having to dance was good or bad, and they were still arguing about it as they changed for tap.
Ms Driver was just as keen to hear about the audition, and she called Sara over when they came in. She said that sometimes it was impossible to tell how auditions had really gone. “But you did dance very well last week, Sara,” she said, smiling. “You really pulled out all the stops. That’s a very important quality – being able to perform when you need to.”
Sara blushed delightedly. Now that the audition was over, she was trying very hard to let go and not stress about it. If she didn’t get the part, it wouldn’t be a disaster. The disaster would be if Lizabeth got it. If that happened, Sara just didn’t know what she would do.
She had to debrief for Mr Harvey in singing, too, but he wasn’t as horrified to hear about her singing ‘Feed the Birds’ as she’d expected. In fact, he made her sing it again for him! Then he totally picked it to pieces. If it hadn’t been for Bethany murmuring, “Ignore him! Ignore him! You know what he’s like!” in her ear, Sara might have decided she’d never be asked to audition for anything else ever again.
Mr Harvey was just explaining exactly what Sara had done so terribly wrong in the last verse, when the door opened and a rather nervous-looking girl edged round it. She looked as if she really didn’t want to be there and everyone felt for her. Mr Harvey hated being interrupted.
“What?” he barked.
“Please-could-Sara-Sinclair-go-to-the-small-studio?” she rattled off hurriedly, obviously desperate to get away before he had a go at her.
Sara was completely shocked. They wanted her back? Now? Had they decided they wanted to see her dance after all? She wasn’t in her dance clothes! With a worried look she turned to Mr Harvey, and discovered that, amazingly, he was beaming at her.
“Perhaps you didn’t sing it quite that badly after all!” he said. “Or, of course, they could just be imbeciles who are completely lacking in taste. Off you go!”
Bethany hugged her and pushed her towards the door. “Hurry up!”
Sara found herself at the door of the studio before she knew quite how she’d got there. She knocked very, very quietly. Nothing happened. It was just going through her mind that this was some other awful trick of Lizabeth’s when Nathan came round the corner, looking as confused as she felt.
“Sara! Did you get called out of class, too?”
“Yes. Do you think we’re supposed to go in? I’ve knocked, but…” Sara stared at the door helplessly and then jumped out of her skin as it opened.
“Aha!” It was Jasper. “Excellent. Sara and Nathan. Thought I could hear voices. Come on in.”
They followed him, exchanging excited glances. Tamara and Simon were still there, too, looking rather tired. Tamara was eating a sandwich and she waved it at them cheerfully.
“Now, sorry to drag you back again, but we just wanted to see you both together. Have you acted together before at all?” Jasper handed them scripts.
“N-no,” Sara stammered. “Not really. We aren’t in the same year.”
“We did some improvisation as a pair when we had a class to prepare for the audition,” Nathan put in.
“It doesn’t matter. Can you read that same scene for me again? Try and remember the direction I gave you this morning and see if you can hit it off. Brother and sister, remember.” He grinned at them and sat down in an ‘I’m the audience, impress me’ sort of way.
Nathan had the first line, thank goodness. Sara wasn’t sure where her voice had actually gone – it certainly didn’t seem to be where it should be. She looked at him hopefully. Could they pull this off?
Nathan took a deep breath, then a wicked glint came into his eye. He brandished his script under Sara’s nose angrily and started their argument. Somehow, it wasn’t difficult to spit her line back at him. He was such a brat!
On cue, Sara’s voice miraculously came back and she gave as good as she got, trying hard to put in all the gestures and movements Jasper had suggested earlier on. Nathan was really fun to act with and very good at picking up on her tone of voice. The scene was supposed to finish with Jane throwing a doll at Michael and it seemed quite natural to hurl her script at him. He actually managed to catch it and stick his tongue out at her. They stood there feeling a bit lost after that and it was a relief when Jasper started to clap.
“Excellent. Very nice indeed.” He looked over at Simon and Tamara questioningly and they both nodded. “Good. We just wanted to see you together. Obviously the relationship between Jane and Michael is very important.”
Nathan and Sara nodded breathlessly. Did that mean…?
“So, dependent on contracts and all that sort of thing, we’d like to offer you two the parts. We’re going to have two casts for the children because we can’t have you working every night, but you two will work together. OK?”
They nodded, speechless.
“All the arrangements will be made through the school,” Jasper continued, “so your parents will get a letter in a couple of days. Congratulations! It’s going to be fun working together. That last scene was great.” And he came over and shook hands with them both. “You’d better get back to your classes. I was at school here, you know, a long, long time ago, and I remember how hard they make you work!”
“Thank you!” Sara stammered, and she and Nathan dashed out of the studio.
“We did it!” he yelped as soon as the door had shut. Then he hugged her.
Sara was jumping up and down and hugging him back at the same time. “We’re going to be in Mary Poppins!”
Sara had done it. She had her first part. Gran would be so proud of her – and Jacky had brought her luck! Surely her parents would have to understand that Sara really should be at Shine after this. How many girls got a chance to be in a West End musical when they’d only had three weeks at stage school? They had to be impressed!
Sara and Nathan danced up and down the corridor, and as he hugg
ed her again, Sara realized that spending lots more time with her co-star was going to make the whole thing even better…
Lily Ferrars raced into school, looking forward to meeting up with her mates. She hadn’t seen them for a whole sixteen hours after all – chatting to Chloe on WhatsApp last night definitely didn’t count. She galloped up the stairs to the Year Seven form room, grinning to herself. It seemed so weird that she’d fought against going to this school for ages and now she was desperate to get here!
Lily had planned to hate being at Shine and to spend this year of exile not talking to anyone, but it hadn’t quite worked out that way. She hadn’t bargained on making three fantastic new friends in the first few weeks, and the atmosphere of the school was difficult to resist.
“Lily!” Sara bounded up behind her, with her face glowing, and Lily felt a teensy stab of jealousy. Sara had found out the day before that she’d got a part in a special Christmas run of Mary Poppins at a West End theatre. There was no doubt that Sara deserved to be at a stage school. Just looking at her now, star quality simply oozed out of her. Sara gave Lily a hug and the jealousy disappeared – Lily couldn’t be anything but happy for such a good friend.
“Don’t need to ask how you’re feeling today!” she giggled. “Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Not much.” Sara grinned. “It’s so exciting. I can’t wait for the letter to come from the theatre. Then it’ll all be official. Contracts and everything.”
They strolled into their classroom and loads of people called out their congratulations to Sara, who blushed, but grinned even wider. Chloe and Bethany were sitting on the windowsill the four of them had claimed as their own.
“Yay, Sara!” Chloe called. “Sing ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’. I want to hear how the professionals do it!”
Sara dumped her bag and scrambled up next to them, making a face. “That’s the one bad thing about this part – I’ve sung that song so many times. It used to be one of my favourites, but now I have to make it look as though I’ve never heard it before. On stage! Every day for weeks!”
“My mum said –” Lily started and then stopped, feeling embarrassed. Who wanted to hear what her mum said? But it seemed like the others did – they were all looking at her eagerly. Lily’s mum was an actress, not a really famous one, but the kind that everyone recognizes from somewhere. Marina Ferrars was always on TV and she was hardly ever not working. Lily’s dad was a lawyer who worked mostly with people in show business, so the Ferrars’ house was always full of actor-types – what Lily’s grandad always called ‘luvvies’. Lily hated it. Or she always had done, anyway. Her mum was certain that Lily was going to be an actress as well and so she’d started her in dance classes at two and a half, drama at three and singing at four. At first Lily had loved it, especially the acting, but for the last few years it hadn’t been that much fun.
“You’re so lucky having a mum who knows about all this stuff. What were you going to say?” Sara asked hopefully.
“Well, just that she was doing this play years ago, before I was born, and it was a really long run, so she knew the play backwards. One night she was tired – I think she’d been to a party or something the night before – and she suddenly realized she was on stage in the middle of the second act, and she had absolutely no idea how she’d got there. She couldn’t remember saying any of the lines, what she’d done in the interval, anything.”
“What happened? Was she OK?” Chloe asked. The others were all leaning in, half-excited, half-terrified.
“She was so scared she froze up, but she was in the middle of a scene with the guy who was playing her husband, and he sort of twisted some of the lines around so she could get back in without it being really obvious. She bought him a massive bar of chocolate the next day, she was so grateful.”
“Wow.” Sara shuddered. “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”
“It won’t,” Lily said comfortingly. “She’d been doing that part for months. Mary Poppins isn’t that long a run, is it? And you’re alternating casts for the children. That’s really good – you won’t have a chance to get stale.”
Bethany shook her head. “You know more about this stuff than anybody, Lily. You should set up an advice line for our year.”
Lily flushed, wishing she’d never mentioned it. “Don’t be silly,” she said lightly. “I’ve never even had an audition.” It wasn’t exactly true, but then that was one of Lily’s deepest, darkest secrets. “What about Chloe? You’ve had loads of work.”
Chloe shook her head. “A whole lot of modelling and adverts and one tiny part in a TV series. I don’t know anything about theatre stuff.”
Lily shrugged. “Well, I only know gossip from my mum and I’m sure she makes half of it up. In a few weeks’ time Sara will be our theatre expert anyway!”
Lily felt a bit of a fraud when the others treated her like some sort of guru because of her mum. She hadn’t even wanted to come to stage school! In Lily’s last year at her smart primary school, her mum had brought home the prospectus for The Shine School for the Performing Arts. Everyone at her dance class was really jealous but Lily was furious. She wanted to go on to the same school as all her friends, not spend the next five years training for a job she was never going to do.
Coming Soon!
COPYRIGHT
STRIPES PUBLISHING LTD
An imprint of the Little Tiger Group
1 Coda Studios, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
Originally published in Great Britain under the title Sara’s Big Chance
by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 2007
Text copyright © Holly Webb, 2007, 2019
Illustrations copyright © Monique Dong, 2019
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2019
eISBN: 978–1–78895–097–8
The right of Holly Webb and Monique Dong to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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