looking back, kate couldn’t even really say why she thought she’d get the part. She’d never thought of herself as a drama person before. Or a singing person, either.
Last year, when she was still in primary school, she’d gone to see the secondary school musical, which was Into the Woods. She’d been so swept away that she went back again the next night. It just looked so much fun. Everybody looked so confident and grown-up and romantic and happy. They looked like they knew who they were and where they belonged, in a warm, glowing world full of hilariously complicated problems that somehow all worked out all right in the end.

So this year when she saw the poster announcing auditions for Anything Goes, Kate signed up immediately. It wasn’t even a decision. She knew exactly which part she wanted, namely Hope Harcourt, beguiling young heiress.

Part of it was that she was at a new school, and she was still trying to figure out where she fitted in. In primary school she’d always been looking for her thing, her talent – something, anything, that she was good at, that would make her special.

And she’d finally found it – boy, had she found it – but then the irony was that she couldn’t tell anybody about it!

So a fat lot of good that did. To everybody else she just looked as plain and ordinary as she always had.

Plus she felt like she’d outgrown her old primary school friends, and she somehow hadn’t managed to find any new friends to replace them with. She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t just a tiny bit the Silver Arrow’s fault – if spending so much time talking to a steam train and saving animals made it harder to relate to her classmates who led normal lives.

But that’s where the musical came in. Being Hope Harcourt would be like being the conductor on the Silver Arrow only everybody would know about it, and they’d be in it with her. And at the end of the show when Hope Harcourt had her happy ending, it would stay that way. She felt guilty about wanting a life apart from the Silver Arrow, but wasn’t everybody entitled to their own life? And to friends who weren’t a magical steam train? She was eleven going on twelve. Sometimes you just need somebody to talk about cat stickers with…

Continue reading the extract here…

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