Love and Other Drama-Ramas! by Sarah Webb

bewildered.
    She shakes her head. “So impatient, Grasshopper. All will be revealed.”
    “On the tambourine for one song only,” Brains hollers. “We have our Lionettes, the coolest rock chicks ever — Mills, Susie, and Frizzy.”
    The opening bars of “Forest Fire” ring out, and the three girls tap tambourines on their hips. The crowd cheers wildly.
    I shriek again. “No way!”
    Clover hoots with laughter. “I thought Mills might as well join in the fun.”
    I peer across the auditorium at Bailey and Annabelle. Annabelle is frozen statue-still, her mouth a huge O while Bailey’s eyes are glued to Mills. That’ll show him — Mills is worth millions of any D4.
    I clutch Clover’s arm in excitement. “I heart you so much for arranging this, Clover.”
    “You’re so welcome, Beanie.” She grins. “No one messes with my girls, ever. Now, let’s cheer them all on.”
    We punch our fists in the air and chant, “Lionettes! Lionettes! Lionettes!”

“Do you notice anything different about me?” I ask Dad, flicking the front of my hair a little to give him a clue. It’s Saturday afternoon, and we’ve brought my baby sister Gracie to the Dublin Zoo. A father-daughter trip, Dad called it, but I think it was just a ruse to get away from Pauline, Shelly’s ultra-painful mum. If I had to pick the one person I’d least like to be stuck on a desert island with, Pauline would be right up there, along with Annabelle Hamilton and Dad’s annoying new wife, Shelly.
    Pauline and Shelly are very similar: they are both whippet thin, with huge white teeth, china-blue baby-doll eyes, and an entire wardrobe of tacky white and gold clothes.
    Dad tears his eyes away from the tigers to look me up and down. “New jeans?” he tries with a shrug.
    “Dad! I got my hair cut this morning. I’ve got a fringe.” I do jazz hands on either side of my forehead. “Ta-da!”
    He smiles. “So you do. Makes you look older.”
    I grin back. “Correct answer, Pops. Mum thinks so too.” I’m still a bit unsure whether I’ll keep it, though — unless I straighten the fringe every morning, I suspect it’ll look a mess. And unlike the D4s, I’m not interested in daily primping just for school.
    We leave the tiger enclosure, and Dad pushes Gracie’s top-of-the-range Bugaboo toward the monkey island. I walk along beside him.
    “Want to push your little sis?” he asks.
    “Later maybe.” I’m getting a kick out of watching Dad try to negotiate the crowds. In his camel-colored cashmere coat and pointy-toe Prada boots, he looks a little out of place, like a male model playing “dad” in a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. Most of the other dads are wearing practical rain jackets, zipped over their potbellies.
    We watch the monkeys gibbering and swinging from the ropes for a few minutes, and then I notice that two spider monkeys are holding hands and spinning around. “They look like they’re dancing,” I say, pointing at them.
    Dad smiles. “So they do. That reminds me, my bank’s sponsoring a ballet this Christmas featuring Mills’s sister. Cool, huh?”
    I look at him in surprise. “In Budapest?”
    Claire Starr moved to Budapest when she was fifteen to train in their state ballet school, and now she’s a full-blown ballerina. Mills doesn’t talk about her very often — Claire isn’t very good at keeping in touch with her family, and I think it’s a bit of a sore point. She hasn’t been home for two years.
    “No, Dublin. They’re doing
Romeo and Juliet
in the Grand Canal Theatre, and Claire’s headlining. They’re calling her the Irish Ballerina. Great marketing ploy, eh? It was all a bit hush-hush until the sponsorship deal was finalized last week.”
    It’s strange Mills hasn’t mentioned it yet, but maybe Claire wasn’t allowed to tell anyone until the funding was sorted. Ballets cost an absolute fortune to stage apparently, and without a big sponsor they just don’t happen.
    “As part of the deal, all the