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worse that Cadence had beaten me.

Chapter Eleven
    It took me a few days to get over that I’d lost out to Cadence, but by the time our first rehearsal for Mary Poppins rolled around I was feeling a little more excited.
    Rehearsals for the show were held on Tuesday nights and Sunday during the day. That was as well as having jazz on Wednesdays, technique class on Thursdays, and lyrical on Saturday mornings.
    â€˜I’m not made of petrol,’ Mum grumbled, as she drove me to Silver Shoes.
    â€˜When I’m rich and famous, Mum,’ I told her, ‘and the biggest star on Broadway, I’ll have a personal assistant to drive me everywhere – and probably you, too.’
    â€˜Right,’ said Mum. ‘Because it’s so hard right now to walk the five minutes to work.’
    But I saw that she was smothering a smile and really quite liked the idea of having a world-famous daughter.
    On Tuesdays we worked on songs while Sundays were dedicated to dance and acting. I quickly got used to seeing people carrying around pineapple juice, but when I got Mum to buy me some, it made my throat feel all warm and thick. I kept drinking it, though. I wanted to fit in.
    Speaking of fitting in, I was finding it a bit hard.
    At Silver Shoes I was used to walking in and having everyone not only being the same age as me, but knowing who I was. Sometimes they even looked up to me, like if they didn’t know a step and wanted me to show them.
    But with Mary Poppins I felt like no one cared about me at all, and I had nothing in common with them. Plus, they all liked to quote songs from musicals and had weird musical theatre in-jokes that I didn’t understand. So I felt a bit left out.
    It was very, very different from Silver Shoes.
    But when Mum dropped me off, once again I told myself to just go for it. And so I walked into the studio with my performance face firmly in place.
    The first song we had to learn was called ‘Step in Time’.
    â€˜Okay!’ said Stella, the musical director, clapping her hands to get our attention (that’sbecause everyone was talking, except for me, sitting in the corner like Nelly No-Friends).
    â€˜This is our big showstopper for Act Two! We’ll have some tap with our main dance troupe, some jazz from everyone else, and we’ll have the leads on as well. So we need big voices and even bigger energy. Cadence, would you like to hand these out, and can I have all the children on this side of the room and the adults on the other.’
    Cadence skipped around giving everyone the sheet music.
    â€˜Here you go, Ellie.’ She smiled as I took the stapled sheets from her dainty little hands.
    As soon as I looked at the notes in front of me my head exploded. I’d only just begun my singing lessons, so I was used to simple sheet music with minimal notes.
    But this sheet had four different lines of music just for one lyric, with everyone’sdifferent parts, and so many squiggles that I could barely tell what was a minim and what was a semibreve.
    Cadence must have seen my face because she stopped in front of me and laid her hand on my arm. ‘Don’t worry, Ellie,’ she said. ‘It will all make sense soon enough.’
    I quickly plastered on my best Silver Shoes showgirl face. ‘Oh, it makes sense right now,’ I said, channelling Paige and her sweet tones. ‘I’m just worried about some of these high notes. They’ll be hard for other people to hit. Not me, because I’m a mezzo-soprano.’
    I was hoping with all my might that I’d used the term ‘mezzo-soprano’ right. I wasn’t really one of those – in fact, I didn’t really know what I was. I just remembered the term from a sheet on vocal ranges that Billie had given me when I first started my singing lessons.
    But I must have used it right becauseCadence’s whole face shone. ‘Me too!’ she said. ‘Singing sisters!’ She