Free Jade and the Surprise Party by Darcey Bussell

Jade could hear the music in her head. She did a skip kick, a lunge and two quick turns, then she sprung up high, landing in second position. “Yes!” she said, punching the air. “Did you follow what I did? Let’s try it together!”
    Her partner, Chloe frowned. “Er… can you show me again, Jade?”
    Jade looked puzzled. She glanced across at her ballet teacher to see if she was looking in their direction. Madame Za-Za’s eyes were on the rest of the class, watching as they made up their own short dances in pairs.
    “OK, I’ll go back to the beginning. It goes flick, kick, flick, kick, arms up, turn to the right, arms down…” Jade gabbled.
    Chloe tried to copy the moves, but she forgot what came after the first arm movements. “Sorry,” she said, biting her lip.

    Jade tried to hide her disappointment. “Is it that there’s too much street dancing in the routine?” she asked. But she didn’t wait for Chloe to answer. “I can easily change it. Look, how about
pas de
bourrée
instead of the flick, kicks, like this.”
    Jade felt excited as she went on making up new steps. Eventually she stopped and turned to Chloe. “Try that.”

    Chloe took a deep breath, but she’d only just managed the very first bit when Madame Za-Za said it was time for the end of the lesson. “You can finish off your dances next time, girls, and then perform them to the rest of the class.”
    Jade didn’t even try to hide her disappointment this time. She knew it wasn’t Chloe’s fault, but dancing in pairs was frustrating. As soon as class was finished, she left the studio, quickly changed out of her red ballet shoes and grabbed her things. Everyone else was chatting away, but Jade didn’t feel like talking. “Bye,” she said quietly, then slipped out of the building and set off for home, feeling a little guilty that she hadn’t said goodbye properly to Chloe.

    In her bedroom later that day, Jade put on her red ballet shoes. She hugged her knees and stared at the shoes remembering how they’d come to be hers. She’d found a parcel posted through her letterbox withthe shoes inside. At first Jade hadn’t been sure about ballet dancing and she was still surprised to find that she, Jade Winters, now loved ballet!
    And as for the shoes – well they had turned out to be the most special thing of all – not just because they’d brought her to ballet, but because they were magic too. They could whisk her away to the land of Enchantia where all the characters from the ballets lived. There she’d met the White Cat and had such an incredible adventure.
    Jade stood up and began to go over the dance she’d made up in the class, butsomehow it wasn’t working. She tried to hear the music in her head, but it was impossible with her twin brothers and two little sisters making so much noise around the house. There wasn’t much room to move in her tiny bedroom either. But in her heart Jade knew that those things weren’t the problem. The real problem was with the dance itself. It was just too frantic. Perhaps that was what had made it so hard for Chloe. The steps didn’t… flow.
    Immediately, Jade set to work, trying to improve the dance. But she’d no sooner got started than her mum called out to askher if she’d mind reading her sisters a bedtime story. “While I bathe the twins, love.”

    Jade rolled her eyes, but then felt a leap of excitement as she grabbed a book of fairy tales. She would read them
Sleeping Beauty and
that would remind her of Enchantia.

    Her sisters, Lottie and Hannah snuggled up in their beds and listened as Jadebegan the story. Their eyes grew big and round when she came to the bit about the Wicked Fairy storming into the Princess’s christening party in a boiling rage.
    “Show us the picture, Jade!” said Lottie.
    “Sorry?” Jade blinked a few times, realising that she hadn’t been concentrating on the story at all. She’d just been reading the words mechanically while the rest of her brain