Ruby Parker Hits the Small Time

by Rowan Coleman

  Nydia looked puzzled. “Hang on a minute. You said you kissed that guy you met on holiday. You said so when we were all talking about kissing in the locker room last term, remember? So what’s the problem, silly? You have done it before. You might be a bit rusty, but—”

  “I was lying, you idiot,” I told Nydia, maybe too abruptly, “so I didn’t look so bad in front of Anne-Marie. She knows everything about kissing.” I squirmed uncomfortably.

  “Like how I looked bad, you mean,” Nydia said, obviously feeling hurt that I hadn’t told her the truth at the time. “So that was why you were so cagey about the details. You didn’t have any.”

  I gave her my best apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Nyd,” I told her. “But, well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? The point is, I haven’t kissed anyone ever and I don’t know what to do!”

  Nydia gave me the same look she gives her brothers when they’ve been especially irritating, and then she rolled her eyes and thought for a moment. “I know,” she said, holding up her balled fist. “We can practice on the back of our hands!”

  I looked at the back of my hand and made a “yuck” face. “How are the backs of our hands anything like Justin’s lips?” I asked her. “Only kids try snogging the backs of their hands! Anyway, slobbering all over my own hand isn’t going to give me any tips. It’s just going to make me feel icky.”

  Nydia bit her lip and thought for a moment longer. “We could practice on the back of each other’s hands?” she suggested mischievously.

  I picked up one of her pillows and threw it at her.

  “Nydia! Don’t be so disgusting!”

  She laughed and flopped back against her pillows. “I know! What about when you have rehearsal?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter if you’re crap in the rehearsal, does it? After all, that’s what they’re for. You can rehearse your kiss, and by the time you come to shoot it for real, you’ll be a pro.”

  I shook my head and sighed with exasperation.

  “First of all, we never actually rehearse things like kisses; we leave them until filming so they look all spontaneous and fresh. Second of all, I have to be brilliant the very first time I kiss him, not after a hundred takes. He’s not going to realize that he’s really been in love with me all this time if I kiss like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a fish!”

  Nydia laughed so much she nearly fell off the bed. “You’ve never kissed anyone,” she said once she got her breath back, “so how would you know what you kiss like?”

  “It’s a wild guess,” I told her. She was still laughing. “Nydia, pull yourself together and think of something! I really need your help here!”

  Finally, after several deep breaths, she calmed down and picked up her latest copy of Elle Girl for inspiration. “I know! How about we write in to the problem page here and ask them. I’ll get some paper,” she said, and before I could comment she had leaped off the bed and begun rummaging around under the mess that was her desk. I considered banging my head against her bedroom wall.

  “Nydia! I haven’t got time to write in to a problem page! And anyway, what with all the letters I get, my life practically is a problem page. I might as well write to myself.”

  Nydia stopped, mid-rummage, and looked at me. “There you go! That’s a plan. Let’s write to you and see what you say.” She was still giggling. For some reason, she wasn’t taking me completely seriously.

  I buried my head in my hands and closed my eyes. “Nydia! I can’t answer my own problems! If I could, I wouldn’t be here in the first place practically having a panic attack over the most important moment of my life!”

  Nydia sat back down on her bed and thought for a long moment. At least she’d stopped all the hysteria at my expense. “We need help,” she said finally.

  “I know, but I can’t afford counseling,” I said with a squeaky laugh.

  This time Nydia didn’t laugh. She leaned her head in her hands. “No, I mean we need someone who really knows what they’re talking about. We need an expert consultant to teach you how to kiss.”

  I uncovered my face a little bit and looked at her. She was either a complete loony or a genius. I just wasn’t sure which.

  “An expert?” I asked her tentatively. “What are you talking about?”

  Nydia shrugged. “Well, it’s obvious when you think about it. We know totally nothing, so we need someone who knows totally everything—or nearly everything. We need someone who, say, knows everything about kissing.”

  My hands fell away from my face, my jaw dropped, and I shook my head in horror. She was officially a complete loony.

  “Oh, no!” I spluttered. It took me a moment to let the full horror of what she was suggesting sink in. “No way. No way!We are not asking Anne-Marie Chance to tell me how to kiss Justin. She’ll laugh her head off and then tell everyone. You might be able to handle the daily ritual humiliation, but I can’t. I would truly die of embarrassment. They’d be able to make a documentary about me and put me on National Geographic: ‘People Who Die of Ridicule: A Case Study.’”

  Nydia pursed her lips and crossed her arms like she does when she thinks I’m being too dismissive of her ideas. “Ah, but we’d make it so she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone,” she said with a hint of menace, nodding at me as if I should be in on a secret that I had no idea about.

  I shook my head. “You mean give her concrete stilettos and sink her in the Thames?” I wondered if my voice would ever stop squeaking and return to its normal pitch. On the other hand, if my career flopped I could always get a job doing voice-overs on Charlie and Lola.

  “No, silly,” Nydia said. “I mean we’ll bribe her to keep quiet.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out three pounds and eighty-nine pence. “What, with this? Because this is all I have left out of my allowance, and it’s only Wednesday. I don’t think it’ll cut much sway with a millionaire’s daughter, do you?”

  Nydia looked at the coins languishing in my palm. “What about your trust fund?” she said.

  “No way, José,” I replied. “I can’t touch it. And anyway, Anne-Marie would never—”

  “I know!” Nydia’s eyes lit up, and I could see the worst had happened. She’d had one of her mad plans again, the kind you can’t get her to leave alone—the kind that always, always gets us into trouble. Only this time I had the feeling she was going to surpass herself.

  “You said your mum is feeling guilty, right? And your dad too? Well, we’ll find out what Anne-Marie wants—a mobile phone that can take photos or a PSP or something—and then get them to buy it for you and then we’ll give it to her. Easy peasy.”

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said. “They feel bad, but …oh, Nydia, this plan is ridiculous! It’s never going to work. Anne-Marie won’t help us, even for a cool mobile phone. And even if she would, my mum would never buy me one. You know what she’s like about me being normal! Anyway, it doesn’t seem very fair to Mum or Dad to rip them off like that.”

  Nydia took both my hands in hers. “Have they been fair to you?”

  I shook my head, the bleak reality of what was waiting for me at home surging back for a second. All these plans, all this excitement over Justin: It was mad and silly, but it was better—anything was better—than thinking about that. I boxed up all thoughts of home and shoved them to the back of my mind.

  “And besides,” Nydia continued, “it would only be a one-off. It’s not as if you’d do it every week. You deserve to get something out of all this, Ruby, don’t you?”

  I nodded uncertainly. The only thing I really wanted was my family back the way it always had been. But I couldn’t have that, so I’d just have to be tough. It was the only way to get through it.

  “Have you got a better idea?” Nydia asked pointedly. I shook my head.

  “And do you want to be able to kiss Justin so well that he’ll be blown away at what might be your only chance?”

  My heart plummeted. But it was no good. I just couldn’t do
it.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t get Mum and Dad to buy me something to give to Anne-Marie. Even if I don’t like them much at the moment. I’m sorry, Nyds.”

  Nydia squeezed my wrist and thought for a second longer. “Yes, you can,” she said excitedly. “And you don’t even need your mum and dad to do it. You’ve got the one thing that Anne-Marie wants more than anything else.”

  I looked confused. “What? A bra the size of a battleship?”

  “No, silly. Fame. You’ve got fame and she hates that.

  If you told her that you could maybe help her get a part on the show …”

  “But I can’t,” I protested. “I’m barely holding on to my own part.”

  Nydia shook her head quickly. “Yes, I know that, and you know that. But she doesn’t, does she? She’d go for it. I bet she would. She dyed her hair orange to try to get the lead in Annie. If she’d do that, she’d do anything.”

  I nodded. “Maybe …” I said. Maybe I was overtired and overwrought, but Nydia’s plan did have a mad kind of logic to it. And so what if it would mean lying to Anne-Marie? It’s not as if she’d ever been anything but nasty to me.

  Nydia was looking pleased with herself. “Well then,” she said, “all we have to do is just call Anne-Marie and we’ll see what she says, OK? There’s no harm in that, is there? We won’t say exactly why we need her help to start off with—just that we do. And if she turns us down flat, the worst she’ll even be able to say around school is that we tried to suck up to her. If she agrees, then she’ll have to keep her mouth shut or she won’t get your help. It can’t fail.”

  “It can fail,” I said bleakly. “In fact, it probably will fail. But, oh well. Let’s do it anyway.”

  Chapter Ten

  "OK, I’ll do it,” Anne-Marie said.

  Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that.

  Nydia and I didn’t just breeze up to Anne-Marie’s posh mansion in Highgate the very next morning and sail past the security gate. We didn’t just waltz into the marble-floored entrance hall, sweep up the curved staircase, pop into her suite of three rooms (including her own bathroom and dressing room), sit down on her balcony, and agree to it all over chilled Diet Coke.

  First off, there was the phone call. Nydia decided that if we didn’t put the wheels in motion right then and there we would chicken out the next day. She grabbed her mobile phone and called Anne-Marie’s number without giving herself a chance to think. I don’t know how or why she had Anne-Marie’s number. Maybe it was left over from the time when we all first got mobiles, and it seemed more important to have a lot of numbers in your phone than whether the person was nice or not.

  I had Menakshi’s and Jade’s numbers in my phone for about a week before I realized they were never going to call me and I was certainly never going to call them, and so I deleted them. Nydia, on the other hand, still harbored these fantasies that we were living in a real-life teen movie where the lame kids like us eventually become cool and everybody is friends in the end. That’s the kind of optimistic person she is.

  Anyway, I thought Anne-Marie would see it was Nydia calling and just ignore the call without even picking up, but it looked like she must have deleted Nydia’s number, because she answered. I pressed my ear to the other side of the phone to hear the conversation. My heart was thundering in my chest.

  “Hi-iiii!” Anne-Marie sang into the phone.

  “Hi, Anne-Marie. How are you?” Nydia said.

  “Fine, fine. Who are you?” Anne-Marie replied archly.

  “It’s Nydia, um, from school. Listen I was just wondering—”

  “Nydia?” Anne-Marie was clearly shocked. “How did you get my number?”

  “You gave it to me,” Nydia said, looking slightly hurt. “Anyway—”

  “I don’t remember giving it to you. Anyway, whatever it is, no. No, I do not want to come to one of your lame sleepovers, or join in on one of your stupid film projects, or even walk on the same side of the street as you. OK?”

  Nydia looked at me and rolled her eyes. I shook my head, drawing my forefinger sharply across my throat in what I hoped was the universal sign for “Cut!”

  But Nydia ignored me. “Hang on,” she said quickly. “Just listen for a minute. It won’t cost you anything to listen—and it could be to your advantage.” She tried to be all mysterious but instead sounded like she had a nasty cold.

  Anne-Marie nearly choked on her own laughter. “I’m listening because, luckily for you, I’m alone and bored and could do with a good laugh. But hurry up.”

  I pictured her tapping her pink nails impatiently.

  “Well,” Nydia took a deep breath, “Ruby and I need your help. We need you to coach Ruby with a scene that’s coming up on Kensington Heights. Sort of like Method acting. It’s an area where Ruby hasn’t had much experience and, well, we thought you could maybe offer your advice? Because you’re such a good actress, after all.”

  There was a pause, and I imagined the expression on Anne-Marie’s face was somewhere between disbelieving hysteria and horror. After all, I more or less felt like that, and I wasn’t even her.

  “Me? Coach Little Miss I’m So- Brilliant-and Famous?” Anne-Marie barked out a harsh laugh. “No way. If she’d ever wanted any help from me she should have gotten off her high horse years ago and stopped acting so snotty about being on TV. She’s got everything! She doesn’t need me! And even if she did, I certainly wouldn’t help her. I mean, she’s so high and mighty that she can’t even ring and ask me herself; she has to get her little servant to do it.”

  My jaw dropped and I looked at Nydia. Anne-Marie calling me snooty? Me stuck-up? I tried to grab the phone from Nydia to tell Anne-Marie exactly what I thought of her, but she tussled it out of my hands, held me at arm’s length, and glared at me until I signaled that I would listen quietly again.

  “I know,” Nydia said with surprising calm. “You’re right. She can come across as a snob sometimes, but it’s basically only to cover up her many insecurities. She didn’t phone you tonight because, well, I haven’t told her I’m calling you. I wanted to see if you’d help us before I raised her hopes. She really does respect you, Anne-Marie. More than you know. She actually looks up to you.”

  I stuck my finger down my throat and mimed vomiting onto the floor.

  Nydia motioned for me to shush. “And just think, if you help Ruby now, maybe she’ll be able to get you some introductions on the show like she did for Danny Harvey—”

  “Danny’s got a part on Kensington Heights?” Anne-Marie exclaimed. “I knew she fancied him; it was so obvious! God, how sick is that, trying to buy a boyfriend? If it wasn’t for the fact you’ve got no other friends and no one else would even talk to you, I’d tell you to drop her, Nydia.”

  Nydia winced as if Anne-Marie had slapped her face and, taking a deep breath, put on her stage smile.

  I felt horrible. She was only putting herself through all of this for me. She really was the world’s best friend.

  “No! No, she doesn’t fancy Danny. Not at all,” Nydia exclaimed. “They just talked a bit during the school play last year and she decided to help him out. She could help you out too—get you on the set and introduce you to a few important people.” She paused for a moment to let the idea sink in before adding, “Apparently they’re looking for a new teenager …”

  Anne-Marie was silent again for what seemed like forever.

  “How do I know you’re not just feeding me a pack of lies?” she said, her voice as cold as ice.

  Nydia and I exchanged looks. That was a tricky one because, after all, that’s exactly what we were doing.

  Nydia steeled herself. “Because we need you to help us,” she said evenly, looking at me and crossing her fingers. “And because you can trust us.”

  “Trust you two? The original stupid twins?” Anne-Marie snorted, sounding like a pig. “As if !”

  “OK, then,” Nydia said quickly. “Fine. We’ll drop it. But when you see someone
else with the part, don’t go blaming us.”

  Anne-Marie sighed. “No, no …hang on a minute. Tell me exactly what I’d have to do and I’ll think about it.”

  “Er, we can’t tell you exactly how you’re helping us until we meet you tomorrow, and you must never tell anyone anything about this. Ruby will arrange for you to get on the set and meet all the right people, but that will only happen after completion of the agreement. So what do you say? Will you do it?” Nydia held my hand so tightly the tips of my fingers went white.

  “You know, Nydia, it’s lucky for you that you know Ruby, isn’t it? Otherwise your fat little life would be really boring.” Nydia flinched again, and I squeezed her fingers back. “You’d better not be winding me up. If I find out this is one of your stupid little scams, I swear I’ll make you pay.”

  Nydia looked at me and winked. “It’s not a scam.

  Ruby can make it happen. She’s on the telly, remember?” Nydia said it in such a way as to remind Anne-Marie that she wasn’t on the telly, never had been, and hadn’t even done an ad in a year.

  There was a long and agonizing silence.

  “OK, I’ll do it,” Anne-Marie said. So we arranged to go to her place in the morning and sort it all out then. Just like that.

  “You heard her,” I said later—after we’d calmed down and stopped jumping on the bed like idiots. “She’s totally going to kill us. At least now she just ignores us. After this she’s going to …she’s going to …well, kill us.”

  Nydia smiled and gave me a hug. “Relax, Ruby. It’ll be fine. We’ll worry about that after we’ve got your kiss out of the way. She’ll probably just forget about it anyway.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Yeah, right!” I exclaimed. All my excitement was suddenly gone. I felt sick again. “You shouldn’t have told her that I helped Danny. I didn’t even know he was going to be on the show until today! I mean, I just very nearly got sacked myself. The last thing I have is any influence.”