Now they were both excited. Derek was up and pacing. Ideas for dance moves came into his mind, one after another.

“Okay, let me get a pen and paper so we can sketch out the routine,” Vijay said. “You can play it line by line, and we’ll pause it and figure out what we’re doing.”

An hour later, they had a basic outline of their dance: Two sixth-grade friends foolishly enter the local haunted house only to have the daylights scared out of them by a real-life monster, who emerges from the shadows and chases them away.

“Good work, partner!” Vijay said. “We have a killer song, a great story, and two fantastic, world-class dancers! We are going to win this talent show for sure!”

Derek laughed. He didn’t know about winning the talent show—although that would be great if it happened. But he had his doubts. There were some super-talented kids at Saint Augustine’s, and most of them had been practicing their skills for years. The competition was going to be fierce.

But he didn’t say that to Vijay. After all, what was the point of being in a contest if you weren’t going to try all out to win?

“I feel so much better now,” Vijay admitted. “I was afraid for a minute there that you were going to chicken out on me.”

“No way!” Derek protested. “When I said I wanted to do this, I meant it. We are good to go! And don’t worry—after all this other stuff is out of the way, we’re going to work this thing until we’ve got it totally down.”

“Good!” Vijay said. “There’s just one other small problem.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Who are we going to get to play the part of the monster?”

Yikes. Derek hadn’t thought of that.

“Never mind—we can figure that part out later,” he told Vijay. “Just leave that job to me.”

Chapter Seven TESTING TIME

The week flew by, yet it seemed to take forever.

Every moment of Derek’s life was taken up with school, sleep, study, homework, eating, or practicing basketball—sometimes more than one of them at a time!

Sam was trying his best, but there was no doubt that tutoring him—which was what Derek was pretty much doing—was slowing Derek’s own studying down. On the other hand, going over things so thoroughly for Sam’s sake did make Derek understand them better. So it wasn’t a total waste of time, really—it just felt like it.

Derek and Vijay had touched base a bunch of times during the week. Vijay had not lost his enthusiasm for their project. In fact, ever since Derek had come up with their song, Vijay had been imagining how the dance/story would play out.