The Silver Bells Christmas Pantomime: The perfect feel-good Christmas romance!

As Christabel instructed the now thoroughly pissed-off actors to pretend they were feathers, I stifled a giggle. It was pretty safe to say that the Silver Bells Christmas pantomime was going to be every bit as awful as it always was.

*

In a way, I was glad when the rehearsal finished. Watching Christabel pretty much waste everybody’s time for an hour and a half had been quite painful. They hadn’t done much rehearsing at all, what with all the pretending to be trees and feathers. After all that malarkey, she’d instructed each of them to write a one thousand word essay on their character and have it ready by the next rehearsal.

I was just putting away my paintbrush and preparing to leave when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lauren.

‘Hi, erm, I hope you don’t mind me coming over to say hello! So you’re Alice Woods.’

‘Um…yeah that’s me!’ I raised my paintbrush in a funny sort of salute. Why did I have to be so damn awkward?

‘I’m Lauren Baker.’ She reached forward and grabbed my arm, making my paintbrush clatter to the floor. ‘I saw you on stage in New York when you were in Hairspray; you were amazing as Penny Pingleton! I just thought I’d come over and say hello properly, since there wasn’t time earlier.’

I gently prised my arm out of her vice-like grip and smiled, flipping some of my dark brown hair away from my face.

‘Thanks, that was a while ago now!’ I’d never been good at taking a compliment and nowadays, I was worse than ever.

‘You inspired me to follow my dreams.’ Lauren’s chocolate-brown eyes were now the size of dinner plates. ‘I mean, look at you; you’re from Luna Bay and you’ve achieved amazing things. You’ve performed all over the world! I want to do the same one day, just have to get out of the village first. Ooh, and you’ve got lovely hair!’

She reached out to touch it, but I managed to deftly duck out of the way. ‘Um…thank you again! Anyway, I need to get going; lots to do and all that…’

Lauren sighed and twirled a strand of bright auburn hair round her finger. ‘I’m sorry, I can be a bit…overenthusiastic sometimes! It’s just when I saw you on stage, it made me realise that I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. You were just so…alive, I guess. Like you could really tell you belonged up there – know what I mean? You’ve probably been asked this, like, hundreds of times already, but why are you here painting our sets and not off on some glitzy world tour or something? Didn’t something awful happen to you? I remember hearing rumours when you came back to Luna Bay that something terrible had happened in New York.’

My stomach twisted itself into knots as I tried to think of an answer that didn’t include “my boyfriend died so I stopped performing”. In a way, I was glad she didn’t know the full story: I’d had enough concerned head tilts and pats on the arm to last me several lifetimes.

‘I…’ The words I wanted to say stuck in my throat. ‘I guess I just didn’t have the heart for it any more. But you were great up there when Christabel let you do your stuff!’

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