In the Spotlight, page 7
“Whew,” Kit said.
“I knew it would work,” Toby said (he wasn’t good at this pretending, either).
“So when you flip the switch, it breaks the circuit on purpose to turn off the lights. All lights work like this! It’s just like a light switch on the wall,” Ellie explained, grinning. “Now it’s easier to turn the lights on once you’re onstage, instead of having to wire it all up to the battery every time you want them to come on!”
“This is going to be so amazing,” Kit said, and hugged Ellie tightly. It felt like she was hugging Ellie not just for the lights and the switch but also for how hard Ellie tried to find Pancakes, so Ellie hugged her back just as hard.
A big round of applause from the pageant room came out of nowhere—
“Oh, it’s 9:17—that means that clapping is for Emily! I hope she didn’t drop any batons,” Kit said, pulling back and clapping her hands together even though Emily wouldn’t have been able to hear it from the pageant room.
“Wow,” Toby said as they wheeled the ramp back up against the wall, where it would wait till Kit was ready. “There must be a lot of people in there.” He looked back at Ellie and Kit and seemed worried. “Are you scared?”
“Of what?” Ellie asked.
“All the people. Looking at you,” Toby said. “With their eyes.”
Ellie considered this. “Only a little. Someone is always looking at someone, and it’s almost always with their eyes.”
“Still,” Toby said warily. “That’s a lot of eyes. I bet there’s at least two hundred eyeballs in there.”
“Sometimes I do get stage fright,” Kit admitted. “Not so much anymore, but when I was first doing pageants, one time I ran off the stage and over to my mom right in front of everyone. I bet I’d have run all the way home if I could have.”
“Oh, yes,” Toby said, nodding. “That’s called fight, flight, or freeze. When you get scared or startled, your body goes oh my gosh and you feel like you either need to fight something or run someplace safe or just go super still!”
Kit tilted her head to the side in thought. “Hmm. I wonder what would happen if my body decided to fight when I got scared. I probably wouldn’t still be doing pageants, that’s for sure. I bet fighting the judges isn’t—Ellie? Where are you going?”
Ellie was running away, shocked that she hadn’t thought of this before! Could it really be so simple?
Without stopping, she called over her shoulder, “I have an idea! We have to flight like Pancakes!”
Kit and Toby looked at each other, each hoping the other understood. Neither did, but they took off after Ellie anyhow, since that’s what friends do. Ellie ran through the lobby, down the short hall, to the prop storage room.
Where is it? It had to be in here somewhere; Melody had said it herself— “There! Right there!” Ellie said, pointing. Melody’s magician routine props! They were tucked away in the corner, unused—an abracadabra wand, the bunch of rainbow-colored handkerchiefs, the juggling balls, and the—Yes! The costume with the top hat.
“Why do we need Melody’s stuff?” Toby asked as Ellie wove around some Hula-Hoops, a whole bunch of wigs, and some very fancy-looking stilts.
“Not her stuff—her hat!” Ellie said, reaching the magician props. She held her breath. Please be right, please be right, please be right, she thought as hard as she could. Then Ellie stooped down and picked up the top hat.
It was heavy. Too heavy for a plain old hat.
Ellie grinned then hugged the hat to her chest. She tipped it just a little so that Toby and Kit could see what was inside.
“Oh my gosh,” Toby said, slapping his hand to his forehead.
“I can’t believe it!” Kit squealed, bouncing on her heels.
Nestled in the hat, looking very sleepy and very confused, was none other than Pancakes.
“How in the world did he end up here?” Toby asked. “And how did you know he’d be here?”
Ellie reached down and patted Pancakes’s rabbit head. He was very soft and made little rabbit sniffly noises at her. “It was half what Kit said—that she got so scared she’d have run home if she could have—and half what Melody said that first night, that it took months and months for Pancakes to feel at home in this hat.”
“He came home,” Kit said. “Wow. Way to go, Pancakes.”
Pancakes didn’t seem particularly impressed with himself, but rabbits never were.
A round of applause from the main pageant stage nabbed their attention, and then the announcer’s voice: “Thank you so much, Miss Piper Pellegrin! Those spins sure were fast, huh, folks? Up next: last year’s Miss Junior Peachy Keen champion, Miss Melody Harris!”
Ellie, Toby, and Kit all looked at one another with giant eyes. Melody was going on to do her gymnastics routine! But Pancakes was right here—
“Run!” Kit said, and Ellie didn’t have to be told twice. She cradled the hat and bolted back through the prop room, down the hall, into the ballroom, and behind the curtains that led up to the stage. Melody’s gymnastics routine was seconds from starting, but the music hadn’t begun—there was still time for her to be a magician, still time for her to pull Pancakes out of the hat, go, go, go faster, Ellie, faster! Kit’s mom was at the side of the stage with Kit’s skateboarding ramp, looking very unhappy about the fact that Ellie was sprinting toward her while Kit, who was to go on very soon, was nowhere in sight.
“Ellie! Where is Kit—”
“One moment, please!” Ellie said, then took the steps to the stage in two big jumps.
She skidded to a stop.
Ellie squinted. The lights were bright, and they were shining right on her. She looked out and realized that there were definitely two hundred eyeballs, if not more, in the audience. And that she was onstage in a ballet costume, when it was most definitely not her turn.
“Sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. The whisper caught Melody’s attention. She’d been posed in a very dramatic and very bendy opening position, but now that she saw Ellie walking toward her, she sat up and, with a smile and little curtsy at the baffled judges, darted over to her.
“What’s going on?” Melody said, and she sounded a bit like the old Melody—which is to say, she sounded very annoyed with Ellie.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ellie whispered, and turned her back to the audience. She held out the hat so that only Melody could see—
Melody made a little happy sound, then she leaped up and down, clapping her hands to her mouth. She snatched the hat away from Ellie and hugged it tightly just as Toby and Kit panted onto the stage with the rainbow handkerchiefs, the juggling balls, the abracadabra wand—all the things Melody needed to do her magician act.
One of the pageant ladies was walking up to the stage, her high heels click-clacking on the wood as she went. (Ellie happened to look down and notice that she’d been right earlier—they had used screws and not nails on the stage! She’d have to remember to tell her mom—)
“Ladies and . . . young man,” she said, glancing at Toby.
“Toby Michaels, your future Miss Congeniality,” Toby said, handing the handkerchiefs to Kit so he could offer the lady a handshake.
“Erm, yes,” she said, shaking his hand. “Is everything all right? We need to move along.”
Melody looked at Ellie then at Kit, and Ellie was very, very sure that Melody was going to apologize. She was going to tell Kit about everything—about how she’d been the one to leave the cage open and how she’d known all along that Kit hadn’t sabotaged her! She was going to fix it all, and everyone was going to be happy because Pancakes was back!
But then Melody looked to the lady and just said, “Yes—but I’m going to do my original magician’s routine.”
“Oh! How lovely,” the woman said. “Well, let’s get on with it, then, all right? This is counting toward your two and a half minutes.”
“Right, right,” Melody said. She grabbed her props and hustled to place them in the right spots. Ellie, Kit, and Toby hustled off the stage.
“What is going on?” Kit’s mom asked.
“Pancakes! Ellie found him!” Kit said excitedly.
Ellie wasn’t surprised that Kit was so excited—Kit was very nice that way. Still, Ellie couldn’t help but feel a little angry that Melody hadn’t apologized to Kit, not even when she had Pancakes back in her arms. She thought about what Melody had told her that morning—that she didn’t want people to know she’d lost Pancakes, since Miss Junior Peachy Keen shouldn’t lose her talent like that. Was that why Melody hadn’t said anything? Did she not want anyone to know because she thought winning was more important?
That didn’t seem very right.
“Ellie! Ellie, did you hear me?” a voice—Kit’s voice!—said.
“What is it?” Ellie asked, spinning around just as Melody’s magic act began.
Kit looked panicked. She pointed at the ramp. “The lights aren’t coming on anymore. It’s broken!”
“It was just working—I tested it in the hall before they moved it in here!” Kit’s mom said in a very stern voice. “If the lights don’t work, we ought to pull them off. If she goes up there, and there are lights that don’t turn on, it’ll be worse than no lights at all.”
“Ellie can fix it, Mom. Give her a minute!” Kit said, though she looked very, very worried that this wasn’t true. Melody’s routine was almost over—she hadn’t even had her whole two and a half minutes, after all. And as soon as Melody finished, it was Ellie’s turn then Kit’s. How could Ellie fix the lights if she had to be onstage at the same time?
Let’s think. You can do this, Ellie Bell, Ellie told herself. She reached for her tool belt—
She gasped.
She wasn’t wearing her tool belt—she was wearing a tutu. She hadn’t put on her tool belt with her ballet costume, since it would have smashed down all the fluffy tutu parts. The only tool she had was the wire clippers she’d used to add the switch—and she’d left those in the hallway.
“Ellie?” Kit asked nervously. Her mom already had a hand on one string of lights, ready to yank.
“Okay,” Ellie said, thinking out loud. Thinking out loud was something her dad did a lot, and she’d started doing it without really meaning to. “There must just be a break in the circuit. Circuits have to go in a whole circle to work—we just need to find the break!”
“That was last year’s Miss Junior Peachy Keen, Melody Harris!” the announcer said. “Up next, we have Miss Ellie Bell, performing a ballet dance.”
“Quick, help me pull them off!” Kit’s mom said frantically.
“No! No,” Ellie said, taking big deep breaths. “I have an idea. Help me push the ramp onto the stage.”
“But it isn’t my turn yet, Ellie. It’s yours. You need to go—hurry, before you lose your time,” Kit said, looking sad. All that work to help with Melody’s act, and it was Kit’s that wound up being ruined!
Ellie chewed her lip. She had an idea. It was the sort of idea that might be a great one or might be a terrible one, and she couldn’t really say for sure which it was. She knew this much, though—that she was the only one who could get the lights fixed before Kit’s performance.
“Push the ramp out onto the stage!” Ellie said hurriedly.
“But wait, it’s not my turn yet—” Kit said.
“Let’s go people, move, move, we’ve got a schedule to keep!” Toby said, and began shuffling Kit’s mom and the pageant people and even a few of the other girls waiting to go onstage. “Punctuality is very congenial!” he added, just in case anyone thought differently.
Kit’s mom looked like she was very unsure about what was happening, but everyone else started moving so quickly that she didn’t have time to argue. The pageant people wheeled Kit’s skateboarding ramp onto the stage, and Ellie followed before her body could decide to do that whole fight, flight, freeze thing that Toby had told her about. Ellie looked out into the audience and saw her mom, who seemed a little confused but clapped really, really loudly anyway.
“Miss Ellie Bell, who will be performing a dance routine to ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’—”
“Wait!” Ellie said, interrupting. The judges all looked up, and Ellie worried that might have been rude, so she smiled her best pageant smile (she and Kit had been practicing it at home, and a perfect pageant smile was harder than you’d think). Ellie padded over to the announcer in her ballet slippers. “For my talent, I will be repairing the lights on my best friend Kit’s skateboarding ramp.” She paused and then quickly added, “While ballet dancing.”
“Oh!” the audience said, some nodding, some tilting their heads the way Kit’s pet sheep did when she heard a new sound. Ellie felt her stomach go wobbly. Sure, the judges had told her that helping someone was never embarrassing, but she couldn’t get over how she’d never seen a single other pageant girl engineer onstage—it just didn’t seem like a flashy, showy pageant talent! Maybe the dancing-while-engineering part would help, though. Right?
Right.
Ellie’s whole body felt wobbly now, and she really, really hoped she was right. She stepped away from the announcer and put her arms over her head in the opening pose for her ballet routine. There wasn’t any music now, so she just played it in her head and spun around in a circle, then jumped/hopped/pranced toward the ramp.
“Electricity!” Ellie said as she bounced to the ramp. “It comes in two types—current and static!” She waved to one side for the word “current” and the other for the word “static.” “Current has to go around in a circle. The electricity goes out the plug or the battery and into the wires, then through the thing you’re giving electricity to, then back down into the plug. A circle!”
She spun in a circle, then another, just to make sure everyone understood. She wanted to do a few more, but this was starting to make her super dizzy. “These lights won’t turn on because the circle is broken. But they can be fixed! We just need to find the spot where the wire is cut, or bent, or broken apart!”
Someone in the audience cheered—wait, no! It wasn’t someone in the audience at all. It was the group of people standing backstage—the other pageant girls and Kit and Toby and even Kit’s mom! They cheered so loudly that the audience started clapping, too. Ellie felt her heart fill up like a balloon—maybe this wasn’t going too badly!
She jumped and twirled as prettily as she could over to one side of the ramp, sweeping her eyes along the string of lights. “No breaks here!” she announced.
The crowd cheered again.
She twirled and even stopped to do a dance step she really loved that looked like the way a cat jumps, then she peered over the middle of the ramp. “No breaks here, either!” she told the crowd.
“Find it!” someone yelled.
“Where is it?” someone else yelled.
“Ellie can fix anything!” someone else yelled, and Ellie was 90 percent sure this was her mom.
Finally, Ellie danced over to the other side of the ramp, stopped, and did a plié and a nice rond de jambe, just like she’d learned in ballet class. She peered at the lights that went across the top of the ramp, and—
“It’s here!” she said.
Everyone cheered, especially the people backstage. Kit’s mom looked a little sweaty. Ellie reached down and tugged on the wires to connect them back together—
Her heart sank.
There was just no way to do it, though—the wire was already pulled tight so that Kit’s skateboard didn’t get caught in it, like it had during their test run back home! If she had a bit of wire from her tool belt. Or maybe a piece of aluminum foil! Or even a fork—
But she didn’t have any of those things. Who brings a fork onstage for a ballet/engineering talent performance?
Ellie swallowed. Now she was only going to be a so-so dancer and a so-so engineer onstage, and Kit’s lights weren’t even going to work for the trouble. She turned to the audience and tried to do the cat jump again, but it was clumsy, and she almost hurt her ankle.
“The wires won’t reach,” she said, trying to explain and dance at once. It wasn’t working very well at all, and she knew her time had to be almost up. Ellie looked offstage at Kit, who was smiling. Kit wouldn’t be mad at her if the lights didn’t get fixed. Kit was nice like that. “We need something to complete the circuit, but I don’t have anything that will work,” Ellie said, and even though she was on the stage, she was talking mostly to Kit.
“But I do!” a new voice said, and it was loud. Really loud, and sort of singsongy, and coming from the opposite side of the stage. Ellie whirled around (remembering at the very last second to make it a dance-whirl instead of a surprise-whirl).
It was Melody! Smiling big, facing the audience, and looking very, very fancy as she stepped out onto the stage. Lots of people clapped for her, though there was also a lot of confused talking going on—people whispering and wondering and pointing.
“Will this work, Miss Bell?” Melody asked, twirling toward Ellie with a very fancy spin that Ellie didn’t know how to do.
“It—Oh!” Ellie said when she realized what Melody was holding. “This?” she asked, looking up at Melody.
Melody nodded and waved the object a little, urging Ellie to take it. She flashed another smile at the audience. “Let’s see her fix it!” Melody shouted to the people. “Let’s see Ellie engineer!”
The audience cheered. Ellie felt the way her stuffed monkey looked when he was going round and round in the dryer—because the thing that Melody was waving at Ellie, trying to get her to take? Was her crown.
Whoa.
Ellie took the crown from Melody’s hands as carefully as she could. “Thank you, Melody!” she said loudly, though she was still so surprised by all this that her voice was a little squeaky. “We can try using this to complete the circuit!”
