Being Hartley Read Online Free

severed.
    The rest of the day was spent packing and redoing Mom's schedule. Mostly, I kept out of her way, because she was not in the best of moods. It wasn't until dinner that she broke the big news to me. "It appears as if we'll be going on the road," she said, through gritted teeth.
    At first I didn't understand —I thought she was talking about traveling from Tasmania to LA. But she wasn't, and it took a bit of coaxing to get her to explain. Apparently, we were only going to be in LA initially, and then we'd be heading off with the SMD team on the road to Las Vegas, where they were shooting a couple of live shows.
    Seriously, I almost hyperventilated when she told me that. On the road! With the whole SMD team! Going to Las Vegas! If I hadn't choked on my burrito and needed a whack on my back from my dad, I would have thought I was really dreaming. I couldn't believe my mom had agreed to that, because every cell in her body would have been fighting even the suggestion.
    Why? Well, the thing with my mom is that she expends a whole lot of energy keeping her work and family lives separate. It's like church and state to her. The two should never, ever mix. And she's good at keeping them separate, too. Really good. Pretty much everything gets dealt with either by her agent in LA, her office in London, or Deb, her PA. In fact, Mom is so good at keeping her work and family lives separate that there have only ever been three photos of us taken together in public. Three. That's it. And I'm fifteen years old and my mother is an Oscar-winning actress.
    That's saying something.
    Usually when I get to see my cousins, we're either vacationing together somewhere private (like on this tiny private Hawaiian island we went to last year), or they come here for a break (seclusion plus), or we stay at their house and rarely go out. I've only met Rory's dance partner, Noah, once. He dropped by their house and even that was by accident (a very, very happy accident, as Noah is beyond cute). I've never met any of the other cast members from the show, though I know all about them from Rory.
    "Great," I finally managed to answer, after half a glass of water and a few hiccups.
    Mom didn't say anything and simmered away in silence instead.
    In bed, my heart, which had been starting to calm down, starts beating faster again, as I think about where we're going and what I'm about to be a part of.
    SMD . Finally, amazingly, unbelievably, I'm going to get to be a tiny part of it. Ever since the show started five years ago with Rory as an original cast member, I've watched it religiously. Taping it, replaying it, learning the routines until I can perform them perfectly—as perfectly as Rory, Lucia, and Valentina, the three lead female dancers on the show. Oh, and Mara, of course. Mara is the female understudy, who performs when the other female dancers are sick, or injured. Rory can't stand Mara. In fact, it sounds like no one involved with SMD can stand Mara, but there's no denying she's good. Technically, she's even a better dancer than the others, but there's something missing when it comes to Mara—her dancing's just not as likeable. Like her, it seems.
    Until last year, when it came to hip hop, I was pretty much self-taught. Like I said, I've been dancing practically since I was born. In fact, when I was born, my dad swears I came out kicking my legs and singing in time, rather than crying, and the doctor swore he'd never seen anything like it. As for Mom, her first question wasn't whether I was a boy or a girl, but about my hair. And when the doctor had told her I was a girl and that I had a head full of curls, Mom had hemorrhaged, needed a blood transfusion, and almost died. That's how much she didn't want me to be an entertaining Hartley. (So you'd think she'd be happy that, these days, I couldn't carry a tune to save my life, but no.)
    When I was about five and had already been begging steadily for years for dancing lessons like my cousins had,