Pete Milano's Guide to Being a Movie Star

by Tommy Greenwald

  (He shows her a bruise on his arm) Plus, I got smacked, just for fun.

  GIRL

  Oh my, that must hurt! No, I am not in trouble. Of course I am not in trouble.

  SAMMY

  Jeez … sorr-Y.

  GIRL

  I apologize. It’s just that … I am very far from home. It is my first day here at school, and I am a bit lonely and overwhelmed.

  SAMMY

  Oh … No, I get it. This place can be tough on new kids. Heck, I was a new kid once. Like, six weeks ago. I hated it here.

  GIRL

  And now you like it?

  SAMMY

  No, I still hate it. But now I hate it a little less. (He smiles at her) As of two minutes ago.

  THE GIRL LAUGHS AND BLUSHES

  GIRL

  That is very sweet of you.

  SAMMY

  Sweet’s my middle name. But my first name’s Sammy. And my last name is Powell.

  THE GIRL LAUGHS AGAIN

  GIRL

  You are funny. Thank you for being funny.

  SAMMY

  Don’t thank me. But you can tell me your name.

  GIRL

  My name is Clarissa.

  SAMMY

  Clarissa what?

  THE GIRL HESITATES

  SAMMY

  What? Just Clarissa?

  CLARISSA

  I am sorry … but my complete name is quite long.

  SAMMY

  Come on. How bad can it be?

  CLARISSA

  Very well. My full name is Clarissa de Richemont Au Valle Excelsior Beauchamps Les Filles Du Roi.

  SAMMY

  Wow. That is bad.

  CLARISSA

  Yes, very bad.

  SAMMY

  Do you mind if I ask what the heck that all means?

  CLARISSA

  They are all the names of the royal bloodlines of my family. And the last few words mean “daughter of the king.”

  SAMMY (not believing his ears)

  Daughter … of the …

  CLARISSA

  My father is Pierre X, King of Malvania.

  SAMMY

  Making you …

  CLARISSA

  Princess Clarissa of Malvania.

  SAMMY

  Whoa.

  CLARISSA

  Yes. “Whoa.” Whatever that means.

  SAMMY

  It means you probably aren’t going to want to be hanging around with the likes of me very much. My roommate Croft is probably going to be more your speed.

  CLARISSA GIVES HIM A LONG LOOK

  CLARISSA

  We shall see about it.

  SAMMY

  You mean, “We shall see about that?”

  CLARISSA

  Yes, Sammy. We shall see about that.

  8

  WHO’S THAT GIRL?

  CHARLIE JOE AND I READ the whole scene about ten times before we both decided we were completely sick of it.

  “Wow, you make a great princess,” Jake told Charlie Joe.

  “I can’t wait for this movie to come out!” said my sister Sylvia. “Whether you’re in it or not!”

  Timmy picked up the script pages and started looking through them. “I want to meet Clarissa. I bet she’s totally beautiful.”

  Jake laughed. “You know Clarissa’s not a real person, right?”

  “Of course I know that,” Timmy said, not entirely convincingly.

  “Anyone knows that,” I added. “I bet Malvania doesn’t even have a king.”

  “There is no Malvania,” said Jake. “It’s a made-up country. The whole thing is made up. That’s why they call it a movie.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed. I said dumb things like that all the time. I was kind of famous for it. But it wasn’t because I was dumb, I swear. Sometimes I just say things without thinking. That’s different than being dumb, right?

  “Let’s go play Xbox,” Charlie Joe suggested. Nothing can change the subject better than Xbox.

  But after we’d been playing for about five minutes, Jake said, “The girl who’s playing Clarissa will have to be gorgeous.”

  The rest of us nodded in agreement.

  “Maybe they’ll ask Eliza to try out,” suggested Timmy.

  I suddenly had this weird uptight feeling. I was supposed to be the only kid from middle school who was asked to audition for the movie.

  “You really think they might?” I asked, trying not to sound too against the idea.

  Charlie Joe shook his head. “I doubt it. They don’t just go around to schools looking for people to be in their movies.” He smacked me on the back. “You’re the only one, dude. You’re it.”

  I quietly breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Well, all I know is, she’s gotta be superpretty,” Timmy said. “Which is why she’ll take one look at you and be like, ‘Is this a joke’?”

  Charlie Joe and Jake cackled and high-fived each other.

  “Very funny,” I said, but a part of me was thinking the same thing. I wasn’t exactly considered movie-star handsome. Maybe she would think it was a joke!

  I picked up the controller, started to play, and tried not to think about it.

  But it was pretty much all I thought about for the next week.

  9

  THE BEST PART ABOUT BEING IN A MOVIE

  FIVE DAYS LATER, on a Wednesday, I was sitting in school when there was a knock on the door. One of the women who worked in the office came in and handed a note to Mrs. Albone, the teacher. Mrs. Albone looked up and gestured for me to come up to the front of the class.

  “Good luck,” whispered Katie Friedman, as I walked by.

  “You’ll do great,” whispered Hannah Spivero.

  “Say hi to Clarissa for me,” whispered Charlie Joe.

  “Don’t forget your lines,” whispered Evan Franco. “No wait, do.”

  I hope Evan Franco gets food poisoning from a fish stick.

  After Mrs. Albone signed the note, I got my coat, headed down the hall, walked out of the school, and got into my mom’s car.

  In other words, I left school in the middle of English class to go to my audition.

  Did you catch that? In the middle of English class!

  Man, it would be so great to be in a movie.

  10

  THE AUDITION

  I SPENT THE WHOLE TRAIN RIDE into New York City studying my lines. I knew them by heart, but I studied them anyway. Mainly because I was too nervous to do anything else.

  My mom came with me. She was already not in the greatest mood because she wasn’t at the restaurant helping my dad. She was hoping we’d get to the production company office, do the audition in five minutes, be told thank you very much, and then be on our way.

  So imagine her reaction when we walked through the door and saw about twenty other kids, all around my age, sitting there waiting their turns.

  My mom marched up to the woman sitting at the desk. “Excuse me, can you tell me how long this is going to take?”

  The woman looked up at her like she seriously couldn’t be bothered. “Name, please.”

  My mom looked flustered. “Anna Milano.”

  “Child’s name.”

  “Peter.”

  The woman flipped through some papers very, very, slowly. Finally she looked back up at my mom. “Shouldn’t be more than a few hours.”

  “A FEW HOURS?” my mom exploded. “The letter said be here at 2:15!”

  “Right,” said the woman, as if that explained everything.

  My mom spun around and stared at me. I was sure she was going to tell me we were leaving, so I started thinking about how I could get her to stay. But instead, she said, “I need to call your father.” And she plopped down in a seat with a sigh.

  Phew, I said to myself. I still have a chance!

  I looked around and realized there were only boys. Where were all the girls? After a while, I noticed something else: The boys were getting called into another room one by one,
but they weren’t coming back out.

  That spooked me out a little.

  After about an hour, I went up to the woman at the desk. “Um, excuse me. Can you tell me where all the other kids are going?”

  She didn’t look up from the nail she was polishing. “They exit through another door, so they don’t come back in here and talk about the audition in front of the other actors.”

  Actors?

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She looked up at me and finally decided to be nice. “You’ll do fine,” she said, actually kind of smiling. “Just try to relax.”

  “Okay.”

  Ha! Fat chance.

  I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind, but all that kept coming back was obnoxious Evan Franco telling me to forget my lines. So then I opened my eyes, but all that kept coming back was Evan Franco still telling me to forget my lines. So I tried to think happier thoughts, like what I was going to say to Evan when I got the part, how I was going to laugh in his face and tell him that I’d never invite him to the big movie premiere, and he would never get to meet any of the famous movie stars I became friends with, and how—

  “Peter? Peter Milano?”

  I jolted back to reality. My mom put down her book. There was a guy standing there. He had long hair, a clipboard, and a Sharpie.

  “Uh, yes?”

  The guy half nodded. “I’m Will. Come with me please.” He looked at my mom. “This won’t take longer than ten minutes. You can meet us in the outer lobby.”

  I got up, waited as my mom straightened out my collar, and followed the guy through the door into another room. It was huge. The back wall was made completely of mirrors, so I could see myself everywhere. That was superweird. At the front of the room there was a long table with about five people sitting behind it. Iris was smack in the middle.

  “Pete!” she said, coming over to shake my hand. She turned back to the table. “This is the one I was telling you about, who stole the pom-poms,” she said. The other people—two men and two women—all nodded, but none of them said anything. “Anyway, Pete, take a seat, and let’s get started,” Iris said. “Tell us a little bit about why you came in today.”

  Huh?

  “Uh … because you told me to?”

  The people at the table tittered.

  “Lovely,” said a guy who was wearing a big scarf, even though we were indoors and it wasn’t cold. “But what makes you want to be an actor? Do you have a need to perform? To act out? To tell stories?”

  This was totally not going the way I was expecting.

  “Well … does acting out in class count?”

  “Absolutely,” said a woman whose eyeglasses were approximately the size of a small country.

  “And I do tell a lot of stories. Usually as a way to try and get out of trouble. But since they’re all true, I end up getting into more trouble than I would have in the first place.”

  No one said a word. They all just looked at me. Will, the guy who brought me into the audition, started heading to another door on the other side of the room, like he was getting ready to ask me to leave. Then I saw Iris whisper to the scarf guy, who shook his head. Iris whispered to him some more, and finally scarf guy nodded.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s bring in S.F.”

  Iris winked at me, which I figured was a good sign. Then Will actually went to a third door—one that I hadn’t noticed before, which was actually part of the mirrored wall—and opened it.

  After about a minute, a girl walked out. I stared at her. I couldn’t stop staring. I tried, but I couldn’t. She was totally, totally, incredibly pretty—but it wasn’t just that.

  Will got a chair and put it right next to me. The girl came over and sat down. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five inches away. Possibly twenty-six.

  “Hi,” she said, with a smile that looked like ten toothpaste commercials rolled into one.

  “Hi,” I tried to say back, even though it probably sounded more like Flughffff.

  She looked at the people behind the table. “He’s kinda cute,” she told them.

  That gave me the confidence to actually say a complete sentence. “Has anyone ever told you that you look a lot like Shana Fox?”

  She laughed. “Yup. Probably because I am Shana Fox.”

  OMG.

  Shana Fox, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is basically the most famous girl in America. She’s been a big deal since practically before she was born. Fox Rox! is one of the most popular shows on TV. Plus, she’s had like five hit songs. And she’s been on pretty much every magazine cover ever invented.

  Whoa, I thought to myself. The last few weeks have been really weird, but things just went to a whole new level.

  “Okay, you two,” Iris said. “Let’s get to work.”

  I fumbled in my pockets, looking for the pages I’d studied, but immediately realized to my horror that I’d left them in the lobby. I tried to think of my lines but couldn’t remember a word.

  Freakin’ Evan Franco, I thought to myself.

  Sweat started forming above my eyebrows … but then a miracle happened.

  “If you’re looking for your pages, don’t,” said the scarf guy. “We’re not going to be doing the scene.”

  I froze. “We’re not?”

  “Nope,” he said. “We just want to talk, hang out, get a bit of a conversation going between you. Checking for chemistry, that sort of thing.”

  “Chemistry?” I said “Uh-oh. I’m not very good at science.”

  That got a big laugh out of everyone.

  “Chemistry just means how you and Shana interact,” Iris explained. “To see if you’re good together.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said, completely not getting it.

  But before I could think too much about it, Shana turned to me and asked, “So, do you have a girlfriend?”

  “A girlfriend?”

  She nodded, her giant eyes not blinking.

  “Well, actually, I do,” I said. “Her name’s Mareli. She’s pretty awesome. She’s kind of out of my league, just between you and me.” I thought for a second. “Actually, not just between you and me, since the whole school agrees.”

  Shana giggled. “I doubt that. You’re adorable.”

  I think I turned redder than twenty fire trucks right then.

  “I am?”

  “Totally.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked her. “I bet you have like a million boyfriends.”

  “Maybe,” Shana said. “It’s kind of hard, though.”

  “You mean, because you’re like one of the most famous girls on the planet?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to put it quite like that, but yeah, I guess so.”

  I was starting to feel my breathing return to human levels.

  “What about Dex Bannion? Weren’t you guys going out?” Dex Bannion was on her TV show. He was almost as pretty as she was.

  Shana laughed out loud. “Don’t believe everything you read on those stupid websites, Pete!”

  The lady with the giant glasses suddenly piped up from behind the table. “Pete, I need to remind you that the confidentiality agreement you signed outside precludes you from discussing any aspects of this conversation with any form of media outlet, or even friends and family.”

  “Huh?” I said, confused.

  Shana leaned over and whispered, “You’re not allowed to talk about this conversation with anyone. You can’t even tell anyone that you met me.”

  “Are you serious?” I said, louder than I meant to.

  “Very,” said glasses lady.

  “But my friends are going to freak out when I tell them I hung out with Shana Fox!”

  Shana put her hand on my arm. It kind of felt like she had shock buttons on her fingertips.

  “Well, imagine how they’ll feel if you tell them that we’re making a movie together.”

  I felt a warm rush spread through my body. “Wait. Does that mean I got t
he part?”

  “We’ll call you,” scarf guy said, which was Will’s cue to steer me toward the door.

  “Soon,” Iris promised, shaking my hand as I was hustled by.

  “It was nice to meet you, Pete,” Shana called out.

  “Bye, Shana!” I said, but there was no way she heard me, since the door was already closed.

  11

  ALMOST FAMOUS

  THE NEXT DAY, I went to school and made my first mistake.

  At recess, everyone crowded around me to ask about the audition. I told them about the room, and Will, and the guy with the scarf, and how nervous I was. By some miracle, I did manage to leave out the part about Shana Fox being the star of the movie and sitting twenty-six inches away from me and touching my arm with her electric fingertips. But everything else I said seemed to indicate that I was going to be a movie star any second.

  “Did you find out who’s playing your girlfriend?” Charlie Joe asked. “You know, the Princess of Wherever?”

  “Malvania,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know if she’s my girlfriend in the movie,” I said. “Just because of that one scene. Maybe she’s somebody else’s girlfriend back home in her country. We’ll just have to see when I get to the set.”

  “The set?” asked Timmy.

  “That’s what they call where you make the movie,” I told them. Lately I’d been Googling everything about the movie business. “Sometimes it’s in a big studio with tons of lights and cameras and stuff, and sometimes it’s on location, which means a real place, like a street or a house.”

  By now, a lot of other kids were crowding around and listening in.

  “Where will your movie be made?” asked Phil Manning.

  “Are you going to Hollywood?” asked his girlfriend, Celia Barbarossa.