by Katy Cannon
Monday morning I was fizzing with excitement. I chose my outfit with care – skinny jeans, and one of Alice’s hilarious T-shirts over a crop top I’d bought on my shopping trip. (Obviously the T-shirt was getting shoved in my bag the moment Mabel was out of sight.) I’d also made good use of the make-up I’d bought when we were shopping. I’d stuck with a fairly neutral, believable Alice look for now, but I had a full stash of stuff with me for taking it up a notch before I got to the theatre.
At the theatre, I’d be Willa again, not Alice. Full-on, real me, Willa.
I couldn’t wait.
Mabel looked amused as she walked me to the Tube to meet Hal. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quite so excited about science camp,” she said. “And I was the quintessential science nerd in school.”
I shrugged, and tried to look a little more nonchalant. “It’s just nice to be doing something productive with my summer,” I said virtuously, in my best Alice voice.
Hal was already waiting for us by the entrance so, after going over the plan one last time for luck, Mabel waved us goodbye and we headed down into the Underground.
I snagged a seat on the first train that came along, and Hal sat down opposite me, looking nervous.
“It’s going to be fine,” I assured him, fishing in my bag for my brow kit. “I’ve got this whole thing worked out.” For some reason, that just made him look more nervous.
I was totally right, though. We arrived at our stop in plenty of time, and I waved him into the Queen Anne campus before pulling off Alice’s ‘science camp’ T-shirt, getting out my phone and double-checking the route to the Old Row Theatre.
Despite being early, I wasn’t the first one there – in fact, I was one of the last. Seemed like everyone else was just as eager as me. As we all waited to check in with a girl with blue hair sitting at a table in the foyer, I eyed up the competition.
There was a group of four girls who looked a year or so older than me, all in almost-matching outfits, so I figured they were friends. There were two guys, but that was all. One lounged with confidence against the stair banister, checking his teeth in the selfie camera on his phone. The other was shorter and skinnier than me, with a shock of bright red hair – not ginger, actually dyed red – who was rifling through his satchel. Then there were another five individual girls, ranging in age from around thirteen to sixteen, all looking a little nervous – you know, eyes wide as they took in all the theatre posters, or picking at their nail varnish as they stared at their feet.
Nobody who’d be a problem, I decided.
Finally it was my turn to register. “Hi, I’m Willa Martyn,” I said, handing over my registration paperwork. The name felt even stranger to say than it normally would. I’d almost got used to being Alice over the last few days. But I’d never been Willa Martyn. (If Mum and Dad got divorced and he disowned me totally, would I have to take Mum’s maiden name? How did these things even work?) Mum was married by the time she got her big break, and everyone knew her as Sarra Andrews, not Sarra Martyn.
“Willa… Willa… Huh. It says here that your registration was cancelled?” The girl with the blue hair looked up at me, while still pointing at the big X next to my name on the list.
No. No, this could not be happening. Not after everything I’d gone through to get here.
Mum must have emailed or called them without telling me.
Well, I’d just have to talk my way out of this, the same way I’d talked my way in.
“Billie,” I said, reading the name off her badge. “Trust me, there is no way I’d cancel on the opportunity to be here this summer! Look at my form. I registered for this course the day it opened for bookings. It’s my dream to be here. In fact, I just flew in all the way from LA for it.”
Billie frowned down at the list. “I guess it could be a mistake.”
I nodded. Vigorously. “I think it must be.”
“OK, well, we actually had a last-minute dropout this morning and I haven’t called the first person on the waiting list yet, so there’s still a space for you.” My heart started to lift again. And then it dropped, like a rock, with her next words. “We’ll just need to speak to your parent or guardian to confirm.”
I’d never thought as quickly as I did in that moment, watching Billie reach for the phone.
“Billie,” I said softly. “Do you know who my parents are? Trust me, they’re a little too busy right now to deal with something this minor.”
She looked sceptical, so I pulled out my phone and opened up Mum’s Twitter feed, scrolling down to the last photo of the two of us. Then I showed it to Billie.
Her eyes widened as she recognized me – and more importantly, Mum. “But it says here your name is Martyn, not Andrews.”
“Mum’s maiden name,” I explained with a little shrug. “I wanted to get here on my own merits, not my parents’ names. But now I’m here… I mean, I could call Mum but she’s filming in LA and the schedule is crazy, and Dad’s on stage in Edinburgh this afternoon, so…”
“Right, sure.” Billie quickly printed me an extra name tag and handed it over. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
I gave her my widest smile. “I really appreciate it, thanks. Any time I can do anything for you.” By which I meant, if my parents could do anything, and she knew it.
No way she was dobbing me in now.
“Enjoy the camp,” Billie said, looking a lot happier about the world.
“Oh, I will.” I took my badge, pinned it to my jeans pocket rather than ruin my top, and stepped away from the desk.
Suddenly, a large and imposing figure appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing a bright orange velvet jacket over a flouncy white shirt. Vincent Paloma – our director for the week.
“Ah, my budding thespians. Are we all here, Billie? No, I can spot a couple of notable exceptions already.”
I looked around, towards the door. We were missing people? People he already knew?
“I’m sure they’ll be with us shortly,” Mr Paloma went on. “Now, if you will all follow me, we shall begin your introduction to the stage.”
Vincent Paloma (“Call me Vincent,” he told us) was a national star of stage and screen – according to his autobiography, which I’d read excerpts of online. He’d starred in BBC dramas, Shakespeare on the stage, radio plays, arty films (mostly twenty years or more ago) and, recently, a lot of pantomime. Mum said he used to have talent, but now he mostly stuck to teaching. I hadn’t been entirely sure what she meant by that at the time, but I was getting a better idea now I’d met him.
The important thing was, he knew the business. He had contacts, he had history, and he had the casting director from Heatherside coming in two weeks to watch us perform. So really, it didn’t much matter if he seemed more impressed with himself than I was.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
We all took a seat in the audience of the small Old Row Theatre auditorium, while Vincent paced across the stage giving us his welcome speech (mostly a recap of the most exciting bits from the autobiography, as far as I could tell).
Then he stopped pacing, stood dead centre of the stage, and stared out at us. Suddenly the lights went out, and a single spotlight illuminated his face. Looking up at the back of the theatre, I could see Billie’s blue hair shining through the window of the lighting box as she worked the spot.
“Most of all, you are here to learn from me. I will make it my mission to convey to you all you need to know to forge a career in this fickle, faithless but fabulous business we call simply, the Show.”
We sat in silence, still staring at him, until clapping sounded from the side of the stage (the wings, I reminded myself). Belatedly, we all joined in, as a beautiful redheaded girl, not much older than me, walked on to the stage, followed by two other girls, both equally gorgeous.
“Well said, Uncle Vinnie,” the redhead said, throwing her arms round Vincent. “I’m sure we all know just how privileged we are to be here. These are the friend
s I was telling you about,” she said, motioning to the other girls. “They can join us, right?”
“Of course! Anything for my favourite goddaughter.”
“While the rest of us had to audition twice, fill in endless paperwork and pay for the privilege,” the girl next to me – Daisy, according to her name tag – muttered. I nodded in agreement, even as Vincent motioned his goddaughter and her friends to join us in the audience.
“Now,” he said, clapping his hands together as the lights came back up. “We’re going to start with some warm-ups. Everyone up on the stage, please!”
By the time my first afternoon at the theatre was over, I’d learned three things.
1. I hate doing trust falls.
2. Vincent’s goddaughter, Tuppence, already went to the best stage school in London, as did her friends, so I had no idea why they had to intrude on my summer camp.
3. If it wasn’t for the Heatherside casting director watching us at the end of our second week, I’d be wondering if this course was worth all the bother.
That last was only increased by the discovery of Hal, sitting hunched up against the wall outside the stage door when I left at six o’clock.
“What are you doing here? I thought I was going to meet you at the station?” I ignored the sniggers behind me as Tuppence and her friends exited the theatre.
“Is she talking to a homeless person?” I heard one of them say, with exaggerated amazement.
Hal stood up before any of them could offer him fifty pence for a cup of tea.
“We were meeting at the station,” he said. “But that was before I realized that my course finishes a whole hour before yours.”
“You couldn’t just hang out at the university?”
“I did!” Hal was getting agitated now. Probably not a good sign. “But then it turned out that Mabel was visiting the other campus today!”
“What! What was she doing there? What happened?” If Mabel realized I’d lied about attending science camp, all bets were off – and I wasn’t sure how good a liar Hal was without me there to back him up. What if he’d given the game away already?
“I don’t know what she was doing there, because I hid, of course!”
My heartbeat gradually returned to the medically recommended tempo. “So she didn’t even see you? Way to give a girl a heart attack.” Swinging my bag up on to my shoulder, I started walking towards the Tube.
“She didn’t see me this time,” Hal corrected, as he chased behind me. “What if she swings by the campus another day? Or every day? I can’t keep jumping into the girls’ loos to avoid her.”
“You ran into the girls’ loos? What if that’s where she was going?”
“I didn’t think about that at the time,” Hal admitted. “But what if she stops by the science camp and you’re not there?”
“You brazen it out,” I said, with a shrug.
“I do what?”
“You lie, Hal. Tell her I’m running an errand for the teacher, or I’ve nipped to the loo, or whatever.”
Hal didn’t look entirely comfortable with the idea. “What if she decides to hang around to see you?”
“I don’t think she will,” I said, thinking it through. “She was all ‘this is your big adventure in the city’ when I told her about it. She won’t want to hover.”
“But if she does?” Hal pressed.
“Then you’ll just have to cover for me somehow.” He didn’t look too pleased about that prospect either. “For Alice, of course,” I added, to remind him why he was doing this.
Hal sighed. “So what do I do for the hour after I finish? If Mabel is meeting you at the Tube every afternoon, I need to be there with you, right? She knows my dad only lives around the corner. And I can’t risk her seeing me hanging around at the university without you, once the camp is over. I’m not a good enough liar for that.”
“Come to the theatre,” I said on impulse. “You can hang out there and wait for me, then we’ll head home together.”
“They won’t mind?”
To be honest, I had no idea. But I was sure we could figure something out. “It’ll be fine. Now, more interestingly, what am I going to do while you’re at the university tomorrow afternoon?” Tuesdays and Thursdays the theatre was used for a drama course for seven- to twelve-year-olds, while us older kids got it the other three days a week. “Because I’m definitely not hanging out at science camp.”
WILLA: So? How did the date go?
ALICE: It wasn’t a date.
ALICE: And we’re adding it to the list of things we’re never talking about again.
WILLA: That good, huh?
ALICE: Worse. How was the theatre course? Worth all the drama it took to get you there?
WILLA: Jury’s still out.
WILLA: And Hal almost blew the whole thing with Mabel.
WILLA: Luckily I’ve fixed things now.
ALICE: I can’t believe you roped Hal into acting as your alibi.
ALICE: How did you even manage that?
WILLA: I told you! His gigantic crush on you…
ALICE: I hope you’re wrong about that.
ALICE: Crushes are the worst.
It took a few days of planning, and staring at maps and bus routes on my laptop screen, to figure out exactly how we were going to get there. But with Luca’s translation skills, we had all the information we needed. I saved one of the photos from the best website to my phone, and set it as my new background instead of the photo of Willa and her mum.
I might still be Willa to everyone in Italy, but I needed to go to the Cascata della Fuga as Alice, or else what was the point?
At night, I lay in bed remembering everything Mum had told me about the magical waterfall – which to be honest wasn’t much, as she had never been there either. She’d only heard stories from friends who had been. But those stories were enough to keep the magic alive for me.
“Are we going to tell Sofia where we’re going?” I asked Luca, as he wrote down bus times from the screen for us. “I mean, this trip is going to take us all day for definite.”
Luca chewed on the end of his pencil as he considered. “We can tell her we’re taking the bus to the next town from the village – Lunice,” he said, after a moment. “It’s a not a total lie, because we will be going there. We’ll just be catching another bus afterwards. Anyway, I’ve done that journey before plenty of times, so she won’t worry so much about that. Otherwise she might make Antonio go with us.”
I pulled a face. I definitely didn’t want that.
One good thing about my panic attack at the festival: seeing Antonio kissing Maria seemed to have crushed my crush for good. Since that night, it was as if I could see clearly again. See Antonio as just another boy – not someone so high above me and everyone else.
It was kind of a relief and kind of sad at the same time.
“OK, so we just take stuff as if we’re going into Lunice. That’s easy.”
“You’re going to want to wear trainers, though.” Luca glanced down at my/Willa’s flip-flops. “It’s a proper walk at the other end.”
“Don’t worry about me.” Willa might not be much of a hiker, but I’d explored more cliff paths and sea caves with my dad than Luca could imagine. “Just make sure we pack plenty of water.”
“And snacks,” Luca added. “Definitely snacks.”
The first part of our journey was pretty uneventful.
We’d decided to take the trip on a Thursday – mostly because that was one of only two days when the buses we needed both ran, and partly because we knew that Sofia already had plans to take Rosa to a friend’s house that day, so she couldn’t beg to come along. As much as I liked Rosa, taking an eight year old hiking to a waterfall wasn’t my idea of fun.
Luca and I walked up to the village and found the right bus stop without trouble. Luca had already managed to eat most of our snacks by the time the bus came, but I figured we could buy more when we stopped in Lunice to catch the next bus.
Lunice was a pretty town – at least, the parts I saw as we walked across the main piazza to the second bus stop. Then we were off out into the Italian countryside, watching for something to tell us when to get off.
“How will we know when it’s our stop?” I asked Luca, but he had his head resting on his hoodie and his legs stretched out in the aisle, his eyes closed.
I elbowed him in the ribs.
“You need to worry less,” he said, turning away from me and resettling his makeshift pillow. “This bus is basically only going one place. Someone will yell when it’s time to get off.”
“Are you sure?”
Luca looked back to roll his eyes at me, but he was smiling, which was a little more reassuring. “I said I’d get you to your waterfall and I will. So relax and enjoy the trip. OK?”
“OK.”
“Good.” Then he put ear buds in so he could ignore me completely.
I sat back and stared out of the window, fretting every time the bus slowed to a stop to let someone on or off.
In the end, though, Luca was right. The bus pulled up into a small village – much smaller than Tusello – and the driver called out something that clearly meant ‘everybody off’.
Luca, who I’d thought was fast asleep, rolled to his feet in no time, and waited for me to gather up my book and journal so we could disembark.
“Where now?” I asked, as the bus roared off again, leaving us on the side of the road.
“Now we walk.” He glanced down at my feet, spotting that I’d changed Willa’s usual flip-flops for the pair of trainers I’d worn on the flight. “Good choice.”
To start, the road out of the village was dry and dusty, the sun beating down on the back of my neck so hard that I insisted on stopping to reapply sun cream (Luca rolled his eyes).
We chatted as we walked – not about anything that mattered, but about little things. Luca told me stories about his life, but I noticed quickly that most of them happened after he came to stay with Sofia. And if they were from before, they were about school, or Rosa and Antonio. Nothing about his parents.
