I’m back in the auditorium in the afternoon because the schedule for this show was designed specifically to torture me. I have rehearsal every day after school except for Fridays. I don’t even get Friday nights off to relax, because I have potions club, and I refuse to give up my shift at Pilar’s that night. I’m already losing enough money because of this show.

It turns out that we’re going to be front-loading learning the choreography, so Brittany will be teaching us all the big dance numbers for the first two weeks. After Brittany leads us in some stretches, Mr. B takes Mateo to learn his music in his classroom, leaving Brittany in charge. I didn’t think this was possible, but the rehearsal is worse than the dance call. Because I’m a lead, I’m in the front of all the formations, which means I can’t watch anybody. Which means I forget the moves the second Brittany stops doing them with us.

“No no no, stop,” Brittany yells after I spin the wrong way and body slam Mikey. Telling us to stop is unnecessary. Mikey is on the floor, his stocky body sprawled out uncomfortably, and everyone has stopped dancing to gawk. “You turn to the right, Shay. The right. Got it?”

“Yeah,” I mumble, offering Mikey a hand to get up. He takes it and hops back to his feet. “You okay?”

“I’m cool!” he says, giving me a thumbs-up. “It’ll take more than that to take me out!”

I make eye contact with Ana, who smirks and hums “Puttin’ on the Ritz” under her breath.

“Shut up,” I mutter at her. She’s vastly exaggerating how bad I was at that choir choreography anyway.

Things don’t get better from there. After we stumble through the first thirty seconds of the dance a few more times, Brittany cuts our final attempt off with a dissatisfied wave of her hand. “Okay, enough. We’ll have to come back to that. Let’s practice stage slides. Give me space so I can show you how to do one.” She flaps her hand again, waving people out of the way. She runs a few paces, then puts her feet down flat and slides across the whole width of the stage at high speed.

“So you need to adjust the texture of the floor ahead of you at the right moment, or else it doesn’t work,” Brittany calls back to us. “It takes some coordination to get, so make sure you think of the magic you’re doing at least a few seconds before you try the slide.”

You have to be kidding me. She wants us to adjust, like, twenty feet of the floor to be smooth enough to slide on while maintaining our balance and basically ice-skating across it?

“Do you guys need to see it again?” Brittany says impatiently.