A.N - Thanks for your great response. You should be happy to know that Jesse makes an appearance in this chapter. I liked writing it. It was fun. Lol. Enjoy it. :)

( For Emily :) )

And, another thing, I don't really like OC's much. So if I introduce any (which I do in this chapter) they wont have major parts. Lol. That's all.

Suze Simon's To-Do List :

1. Mediate Brooke

2. Pack and leave for L.A

3. Meet with the choreographer.

Chapter Two

As it turned out, mediating Brooke was pretty easy. She told me she was scared of her younger sister stealing her favourite necklace. All I had to do was convince her mom to bury her in it. It was such a Brooke reason to hang around. Especially since it made it so much harder on me, to try and get Brooke's mom to take my opinion when she'd never seen me before.

I was a new girl to the dance studio that Brooke went to and Brooke had recently filled me in on how much the necklace meant to her.

Yeah, right.

But, as I said, it was easily fixed - even if I did have to pretend I was Brooke's best friend to her mom - and three days after Brooke's death, after the funeral, Brooke had disappeared.

Which left me to finally be able to celebrate the fact that Paul had chosen me - me - to perform in his video. It would be just the qualification I would need to definitely hold my place in College.

Paul had quickly been in touch with us. A week after the audition a letter had arrived - not by post, delivered by Paul's personal driver - giving me the details of the video shoot. I was wanted in Los Angeles the next week to start learning the routine. And I was allowed to bring another three people with me - hotel rooms paid for and everything.

And no, I didn't bring my step-brothers.

Instead, I took my best friends, CeeCee and Adam who had stuck with me since I first moved to Carmel two years ago.

I let my mom have the other space, but she didn't want to be separated from Andy for weeks so the space has been left unfilled. Unless mom ended up giving it to Jake. Brad wouldn't be allowed to go - in order to get into college he had to take post-grad classes to make up his credits.

And now I was dressed in my dance clothes waiting for someone to introduce me to the choreographer. I only had a week and a half before we were scheduled to shoot. I needed to get learning.

"Ah, Susannah Simon?" A woman - who's hair was pulled back way too tight - spoke with a nasally voice. At my nod, she continued. "Follow me and I'll introduce you to the other dancers."

I followed obediently as she led me through the busy studio into a room where three other people were waiting. And got the shock of my life.

"Gina?!" I exclaimed.

"Suze!!" She screamed right back and we threw ourselves into each others arms happily.

Gina was my best friend when I lived in Brooklyn. We'd been going to dance classes together since we were four.

"Are you a dancer -" I began only to have Gina finish.

"In Paul Slater's video?" She nodded and pointed at me in a silent question.

I nodded frantically too.

"Girl, these are the male dancers." She winked an orange-coloured eyelid at me. "Our partners for the shoot."

I turned and smile at the two men who'd been standing there watching us with bemused expressions on their faces. I blushed a little bit. I'm not really one to kind of behave like that.

"That's Cole from the guy's group back at the dance studio in Brooklyn," She introduced pointing to a tall guy with that darkish blonde kind of colour hair and blue eyes. I nodded and waved before turning my attention to the second boy who looked somewhat familiar. "And that's Bryce, he says he'd from down your way. Carmel, is it?"

"Hey, Bryce!" Wow. Bryce Martinson. "I haven't seen you since you transferred from the Mission, just after I moved to Carmel. You dance?"

He looked embarrassed and ran his hand through his hair.

"Strictly ghetto," he joked. "Break dancing stuff. It was perfect for what Paul has planned for this video so, I thought, why not?"

I laughed.

"Well," Gina whistled. "Looks like Paul didn't look very far for dancers. Brooklyn and Carmel - that's all."

I nodded.

"Yeah," I agreed with a shrug.. "Guess he got bored of looking."

"Girl, we're on opposite sides of the map."

She had a point.

We were interrupted from our reunion by the door opening and closing. I turned around to face the front of the room - which was lined with mirrors - laughing. My laughter was cut short when I saw the guy standing there with an easy smile on my face.

He was breath-taking. Totally hot. Good-looking. Take your pick. What I said before? About Paul being the hottest guy I'd seen in a while? Yeah, that was so not true anymore. It was this guy.

"I take it you've all met by now?" He raised a scarred eyebrow as he spoke with an underlying Spanish tone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gina - who totally had a thing for latino guys - blatantly checking him out and having no shame doing it whatsoever.

I smiled at her. She hadn't changed a bit. She was just slightly more confident - which tended to come when you survived High School.

"Uh huh. Cole, Bryce, Suze and I'm Gina." she told him, pointing at each of us as she called our name. "We all know each other now. However, we don't know you."

The guy smiled.

"I'm Jesse," he told us easily. "The choreographer."

"So, wait," Gina carried on. "We get to work with you? Every day, for the next two weeks."

He looked at each of us in turn and smiled.

"Yeah, that's right." his gaze stopped on me. "Suze?"

"Yeah?" I asked coolly. There's no point in letting him know how interested I was. It's not like we could do anything about it.

"Your name," he began. "Short for, Susan, perhaps?"

I rolled my eyes.

"Susannah, as in 'Don't you -"

"'Cry for Me,'" he finished, smiling. "Yeah, I know the song."

Gina nudged me and gave me an impressed look. I shrugged uneasily.

"Right then," Jesse clapped his hands and took his teaching position at the front of the class. "We'll start easy today. Ease you all into this."

There was scoffs from the boys causing Jesse to raise his eyebrow again.

Swoon.

"Cole, Bryce?" He asked them. "Is there a problem?"

It was Cole who answered. Having not heard him speak before, I was shocked at how deep his voice was.

"No," he insisted. "No problem. Only, you don't have to go easy on us." He puffed out his chest. "We can take it."

The rest of us laughed.

"Warm up," Jesse ordered calmly, dismissing us.

Gina and I went through the warm up stretches we'd done together since kindergarten, when we started this dancing thing, before we launched into our talent-show routine. The one we'd performed for our middle school talent show and won first place for.

It was funny how easily the steps all came back to me. I twirled to the floor as Gina twirled in the air and we landed, standing, together in time to finish with our Beyonce-style move - which we came up with way before she did - and ended, out of breath, with our hands linked between us and the other one in the air in a ta-da motion.

Laughter managed to escape from us as the sound of clapping and whoops from our dance partners brought us back to now.

"Wow," Cole stuck his hand out for me to shake. "I look forward to working with you."

"Same here." I took it and shook it heartily.

Jesse clapped slowly with a smile on his face as he looked at me - which was a shock. Gina normally got all the guys - any guy - she had her eye on. And she definitely had her eye on Jesse.

"You really can take it," he gathered, a smile itching at the corner of his mouth. "You guys warmed up?"

Gina and I nodded, looking at each other and trying to contain our laughter.

"Well then, let's get started."