Adrian appeared out of the swarm of cameras, stepping up onto a low platform that hadn’t been there the night before and wouldn’t be there after he left. He was holding the air horn in one hand, and a megaphone in the other. “Good morning, all-stars!” he shouted, through the megaphone. We knew our cue: we roared approval and delight until our throats hurt. Adrian smirked, mugging for the cameras before raising the megaphone again. “Are you ready to get this party started?”

We were. We were so ready to get this party started.

“Well, then, come on!” Adrian beckoned, and we ran, barefoot and in our nightclothes—or what we were pretending were our nightclothes—for the stairs. I realized we’d all been put in second-floor apartments on purpose: with only twenty contestants, sleeping four to an apartment, we could have been in doubles, each of us with a private room. But then he wouldn’t have been able to address us en masse like this, or get dramatic shots of shoeless dancers running down concrete stairs. Sometimes I really hated Hollywood.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, we ran straight into a wall of cameras, followed by some producer shouting, “Cut! Did we get the shot?”

“They came out slower than I like, but we can edit that,” said Adrian, pushing his way through the mob. “I think we had good energy, good sincerity, and besides, Lindy will kill me if I don’t get back to the theater before it’s time to assign choreography groups. Morning, all. Thanks for your quick response, car for the theater leaves in twenty. Please be presentable.” Then he was gone, turning on his heel and pushing back through the swarm of cameras.

Some of which were almost certainly still running, knowing Adrian. I kept my smile in place, feeling my face relax into the easy routine of being Valerie, who was virtually unflappable. “Let’s go get dressed!” I chirped, looping my arm through Lyra’s. She matched my smile with her own, and side by side, we walked back upstairs, the boys trailing behind us.

Jessica, who’d clearly done the same math I had, was waiting on the balcony. “There are seven empty apartments in this complex,” she said, without greeting or preamble. “What would it take for me to convince the two of you to move into one of them?”

I blinked. Lyra blinked. I recovered first.

“If there are seven empty apartments, why don’t you move into one of them?” I asked. “You could have the whole place to yourself. Way better than just a single bedroom.”

“Because then I’d look like I wasn’t a team player,” said Jessica. Her tone was disgusted, like she couldn’t believe I’d be so stupid. “Everybody knows you two were BFFs during your season, so if you wanted to go off and have some girl time, they’d find a way to spin it that didn’t make you look like total bitches.”

“Do we get a vote here?” asked Anders. “Because Val’s my BFF, too, and where she goes, I go.”

“I’m not going to be the only dude rooming solo with a woman,” said Pax. “I know where the camera takes that, and it takes me to a lecture from my mama as soon as I get home.”

“So basically, we could all move into one of the empty apartments, and leave you with the problem you already have,” I concluded. “Sorry, Jessica, no sale. Now if you’ll excuse us, I want to be wearing something more substantial when I go to find out what sort of torture we’re being put through this week.” I stepped past her, my arm still looped through Lyra’s, and Anders and Pax followed close behind.

I didn’t look back to see whether Jessica was seething. I was a smart girl. I could make an educated guess.

“Showtime,” giggled Lyra, hugging my arm.

I smiled at her, and opened our apartment door. Showtime, indeed.

So here’s the thing about dance rehearsal: it’s fascinating while you’re doing it, because you’re learning new choreography and forcing your body through its paces, even as your muscles protest and your lungs complain and your skeleton feels like it’s about to turn into sludge and come dripping out the soles of your feet. And when you’re done, you’ve learned something new, and you can make art with your body. That’s the true power of dance. Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion when we do our jobs right, and we can stop your heart with the point of a toe or the angle of a limb. But describing rehearsal?

If there was an annotated dictionary with more elaborate definitions, “a detailed description of a dance rehearsal” would probably go under “boring.” There’s a lot of repetition, and a lot of “I tried, I failed, I fell, I tried again.” Not the sort of gripping material that holds the attention, unless it’s edited down to a series of sound bites and clever clips. There were cameras on us the whole time we were dancing, capturing every scrap of material that could possibly be worked into a montage.