Road Trip

Stretch

The music started - mostly overplayed songs I didn't really like, but that was fine - and Jane made us run round and round the hall a few times before she took up her position at the front to show us what to do.

"How the -" Mary got halfway into the splits and toppled into Nell, taking them both out quite loudly. Great start. I fell about laughing as they picked themselves up and went back to lunging. I sank lower into it and tried to figure out whereabouts this was supposed to stretch me.

During that first session, we quickly established that we weren't flexible, and that stretching is weirdly funny. It became routine for Mary to fall into either me, Nell or Sophie, with whom we quickly developed a friendship, and for the four of us to carefully choose where we could see certain people. We all knew Nell liked Teddy, Mary was in denial about Ryan, Sophie and Ryan dated, and I was trying to figure out whether I had got over my childhood crush on Xander.

Ellen was not always there, but when she was, she was almost as bad as Mary. We loved them both, though. Mary and I had met Ellen through Back to the Eighties, and she knew Sophie, so we were all happy.

Until Christmas, we stretched every Wednesday and hoped the scripts would come soon. There was, it seemed, some difficulty with getting our hands on them - Mr Small told us that they had apparently been dispatched but had never arrived. It was all very complicated and I tried not to involve myself.

Xander, it turned out, was just as flexible as I remembered him being in primary school. Teddy was muscular but solidly inflexible, and I knew Joseph was just not stretchy. The rest of us were mostly average. I could bend some strange ways but not others, which was confusing. One of the little first years was scarily bendy, and I wasn't sure if she actually had bones half the time. She was also very tiny and cute.

It was difficult, while you were the person doing it, to realise that you were getting better, because the process is gradual, but I noticed it when touching my toes got easier. I didn't think I'd ever be able to do the splits, but I didn't mind. Most of the time, anyway. There were points where I wished I was better, but never enough to actually be motivated to work.

Teddy was determined that by the time the show rolled around, all the guys would be able to do the splits, so they could do it in sync. He was the only one who thought this was even vaguely possible, though.