Prince Luke's POV
Lights that were soon to be dimmed shown upon the faces of the massive audience in the theater, illuminating individuals and their clothes with bright beams of glowing warmth. Noise trickled up to the ceiling in small waves, hushed chatter coming from those who impatiently waited for the performance to start. The curtains of the stage were still closed. The deep red velvet wouldn't stay that way for much longer, though, for it was almost time for the show to start.
The occupants of the Royal Box were quiet. An uncomfortable silence hovered like a cloud over Luke and the other four members of his family, the guards outside and inside the special viewing area standing out of the cloud even though they were mere feet away from his family.
Luke squirmed. He hated sitting in between his brothers, with his parents on the other side of Fitz, feeling like anyone who looked up at from from the main audience would just skim their piercing glances past Luke and onto either one of his brothers. If his parents both ignored his existence, so would everyone else. Luke also hated the feeling of being invisible, no matter how used to it he was, and this whole event was doing a great job of making him feel like a ghost.
To him, even the attention Sam had been getting from their mom would have been good. Being yelled at was much better than basically being ignored. Did they even notice that he was there? Just the action of yelling at Sam showed that their mom cared about him.
But Luke? No. It didn't seem like anyone cared about him. Fitz and Sam interacted with him sometimes, though not very often, and the most conversation he'd had with people that weren't palace servants or guards in the past few months had been with the selected who had only been there for a few weeks. Having them at the palace had helped remove some of the ever-present feeling of being invisible, but there was only so much that girls who might have liked his brothers best could do.
With all of the girls backstage in preparation for the oncoming performance, Luke was completely alone in the royal box, no one near him caring enough about him to give him any minutes of their day. Jadie, who sometimes seemed to notice him, had disappeared seconds after they'd arrived.
"Boys, I think the performance is going to start in the next few minutes," said Queen kriss, surveying the three of them with her usually frustrated brown eyes. Many people had said that their mother was a horrible person, but Luke had watched her when she didn't think anyone was looking. He knew that the stern Queen who dotted on her oldest son, ignored her middle son, and pretended to hate her youngest son was going through some things that made her life rather hard.
She had broken the uncomfortable cloud of silence into small pieces of a fragment of a second. They began to collect once she had finished speaking, turning into a tension that was heavier than ever before. Luke really did hope that it would start soon.
Sure enough, the lights began to dim and the theater slowly fell silent. Jadie must have been getting ready to make an announcement over the theater sound system to introduce the show. They'd done this in the full run-through dress rehearsal yesterday, but Luke had been preoccupied with doing other things, such as helping the girls backstage and turning Scarlet green. He wondered if the makeup application would go well tonight.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the first performance of the America Singer Center for the Arts! Tonight will be a collection of marvelous performances done by the girls of our current selection. They've worked long on hard on this, so please silence your cell phones and refrain from recording the show unlawfully,"
Jadie's voice came from the giant speakers on either side of the stage. The announcement was typical of any performance in any type of theater, whether one like this or a simple movie theater in the city. It was obvious that Jadie had the right voice for talking to large crowds of people through things that made her sound even louder than she did in person, which was pretty impressive. Luke winced at thinking of her deafening shouting in his direction.
"Please consult your programs for the names of the performers and the order the show will go in. We hope you enjoy the show!" said Jadie's voice, coming from the speakers once again. Luke quickly glanced down at his program to make sure he was correct about what order everything was going to be in.
The house lights were fully dimmed. The curtains slowly began to open, revealing a stage with four girls posed in the middle. It was still in complete darkness, a blackout, and would stay that way until the music began and the girls in the pose started to dance. He recognized Kira, Isa, Adelacia,and Mazie. Each was wearing their hair up in sleek high ponytails. Their outfits were jumpsuits of shorts with a long-sleeved top that and metallic embellishments along with attached jazz shorts.
Music played from the speakers, the opening chords of Seven Nation Army filling the air. Mazie suddenly began to move. She quickly flung an arm out from the direction all girls were in a diamond inside facing position in towards the opposite way, contracting her body like she was a puppet that had been dropped.
Isa did the same during the next eight count, expect she moved into a jazz pirouette and then landed in the same position as Mazie. It kind of looked like both girls were bending down to touch their toes and had been deactivated by a power switch. Kira and Adalacia did the same, each starting out in a different way and ending in the same way as the two other girls in the dance had.
As soon as the first four counts of eight had ended, they launched into a complicated routine that was definitely fitting of the advanced level. Arms and legs flew out and in like bolts of lightning. The girls moved like they were separate parts of one whole being, their bodies fluidly moving as one.
Powerful music accompanied the dancers and they were able to match their movements to it with precision and ease. To any audience member unfamiliar with dancing, it looked almost easy for the girls, but Luke knew that they were really working themselves to new levels during the song. These four were practically professionals at this. Well, some of them were, but they looked like actual profession jazz dancers, which they weren't.
Looking to his right and left, he saw that his family seemed impressed with the skill level of the girls. EVen Sam was intently watching them. Tiny details that Luke would have missed if he wasn't trained to see them were done perfectly by the girls and everyone at least knew something was going correctly.
It went by in a blur. The dance was over quickly in Luke's perspective. Seeing the whirlwind of complex motions that the girls had spent so much time on was really amazing, though he was sure only half the people in the audience understood what was actually happening on stage. Non-dancers tended to focus on the face instead of the feet or other movements, which was why dancers were able to get away with things during shows. Luke had learned that really well.
Luke and everyone else in the audience burst into applause at the end of the dance, Luke starting to worry about how much his hands were going to hurt at the end of the performance. That many hours of clapping were bound to be painful.
One dance down, another few million left. He wondered if any of the girls would mess up, or if something would go wrong backstage and a costume quick change wouldn't work out. It would be remarkably easy for the performance to end in catastrophe, but the dress rehearsals and hours of rehearsing during the two weeks previous to this were supposed to be enough time for them to learn how to do everything perfectly.
Next up was the Mediocre group, a name that Luke found to be a little insulting to the girls in it. Implying that they weren't the best, or the worst, was probably a mistake on the part of whoever came up with that.
When no one came on stage during the few seconds between the dances, the routine must have started with the girls running in or doing some kind of traveling step for their entrance, using up more time than just starting in a pose did but requiring the dancers to learn how to get to their assigned spots on the stage and match the music with their probably fast movements so they could get on stage.
He was right. Two girls nearly flew out of the wings as soon as the music started, running to their spots and spiralling down to the ground to hold a pose. That was probably so they audience would focus on the girls going onto the stage instead of the girls who were already there.
Elizabeth's face seemed to be having trouble keeping a smile on, and Luke began to think about all the terrible things that could go wrong. What if she was injured? Or hurt? Even from the royal box, his keen vision was able to tell that there were hints of panic and fear in her very blue eyes. The way they didn't seem to smile with her face, the way the edges were folded. Being barely able to see them didn't mean he couldn't read their emotions.
Nevertheless, the girls carried on and the dance soon was in full swing. It was really cool to see something that was performed well with large amounts of effort going to it from people who hadn't done this their entire lives. The fun, light tone of the dance also helped make it enjoyable to watch.
Luke glanced around at his family to see if any of them had seen Elizabeth's worry about whatever it was that was troubling her. No one, not even Fitz, looked like they'd noticed. They could have just been hiding their emotions, though, his family members seemed to be pretty good at that. He glanced in his mother's direction and suddenly realized that there was a bit of her face that appeared to be off in some way.
She'd been acting like that for awhile, even since before they had even announced the start of the selection, almost like she had been getting sick. But she had been perfectly healthy. That concern was unfounded, he shouldn't have had to worry about that at all. Especially during the performance.
Thinking about the performance, he remembered that he was supposed to be watching it and narrowed his focus back on the girls who were currently moving into a different formation on the stage. This dance had some good arm movements, using the shoulders for isolations and such, coordinating the heads in a less fierce way than the girls who had been in the advanced group earlier.
Red, gold, pink, and silver tutus turned into blurs of color when the girls did inward turns. Two colors were repeated, so there were only two girls that had their very own color and didn't share it with another person, given that the dance was made up of only six girls.
There was a surprising amount of turns and leaps in the dance. He thought that there would have been less, but maybe the instructor who had choreographed it and taught them the choreography just cared about getting the dance finished and didn't care about the quality or quantity of things in it, just having them do things like that to make more time in the general spang of the performance.
He could remember, back in the days of dancing that he still became embarrassed about whenever someone brought it up, that a few choreographers had employed strategies like that in ballet routines. Having a male dancer do tour jetes all around the stage was painful and kind of tiring for the dancer.
Alexis and Albany were the last pair to run back in after a section where all of the girls ran on and off in different ways. They jumped into a line with the other four, clapping their hands together and throwing their back legs up as they did so, all the others joining them and signalling the coming end of the dance. The music was fading, too, and the girls scrambled to get into their final poses before they song ended.
Applause came from Luke and the audience when it did end. He was already getting that weird feeling he did when he was in theaters of any kind, but Luke really hoped it would eventually just go away because of how much time they still had left while they watched the entirety of the performance.
Waiting four seconds for the lights to fully dim, the girls stayed still until they were sure that it was time for them to get themselves off the stage so the next routine could start. Two or three of them would probably go straight to the quick change rooms because they only had the span of one dance to change into their costumes for the Intermediate dance, a mix of selected from the advanced and mediocre jazz groups.
It was only a couple of short seconds before the beginning jazz group's song started. The song, entitled "The Walker" was by a band called Fitz and the Tantrums. He suspected that the song had been chosen just because it would get on Fitz's nerves, it seemed like something the choreographers might do.
Mae came out first, leading the girls on her side in a line that walked straight forwards. Another line, lead by Dakota, came from the other backstage wing right after she had appeared on stage. Whenever the music would hit a certain point, the girls would clap their hands and do a quick spin before moving forwards. They ended up in two evenly spaced lines, the girls in the back visible through spaces in the front, Mae in the front left and Dakota in the back right.
They twirled to the left, then to the right, pointing their feet in a tondue in the direction of whichever way they had just come from. Hands were put on hips in unison before they did a spring step on both sides.
It was pretty easy for Luke to tell it was a beginning jazz dance, but the girls were able to do it well enough that the audience would just focus on their smiling faces and not see any slight mistakes they happened to make.
Author's Note: I've been having some trouble with writing recently, and I'm generally terrible for procrastinating, but here's part of a chapter so I don't get attacked by all of you waving pitchforks and torches!
The next chapter will still have over 7000 words anyways. Please review so I know that everyone's still reading, I am actually planning on doing an elimination before the Hawaii trip at this point.
My goal is to have the entire story finished by July 24th, the birthday of the triplets.
