Hollywood Star

by Rowan Coleman

  Mum nodded. “If that’s what you really want, then I will,” she said. “But hopefully, it won’t come to that.” She gave me a quick hug and kissed the top of my head.

  “Now wash your face and come down for lunch. I’ve just spoken to Suzie and she says they are really pleased with how you are doing. Also I have lots to tell you about the release of The Lost Treasure of King Arthur, including the premiere, so start thinking about what to wear!”

  A lot of the things Mum said to me as I picked at lunch washed over my head. I vaguely heard something about a premiere, some interviews and possibly even a photo shoot for some magazine. And then I heard Sean’s name.

  “Say that again?” I asked her.

  “Sean is arriving here next Friday, in time for the release of the film. He’ll escort you to the premiere. But before that, he and you will record an interview for The Carl Vine Show, all taped beforehand with no audience so much less pressure for you.

  “Sean’s coming in a week?” I asked. “And he’s taking me to the premiere? But that means photographers and press and that is exactly what he doesn’t want.”

  “Apparently Art has talked to him about how the film is being received by the critics and how important it is that he supports it. So, being an honourable young man, Sean has agreed to do this one last bit of publicity before retiring for good.”

  “Poor Sean,” I said, staring at my tuna salad.

  “Well I’m sure there are millions of fifteen-year-old boys who would love to be famous movie stars so I don’t think we’ll feel too sorry for Sean.”

  I looked at my mum in surprise. “Millions of boys might want it, but until you’ve done it you don’t know how hard it is,” I told her. “And it was harder for Sean than anyone.”

  “Well,” my mum said. “Maybe. Now eat up all that baby spinach leaf. You’ve got a busy week ahead and you’ll need all of your strength.”

  It‘s Your Life!

  The magazine for girls that have really got it going on

  GET TO KNOW…RUBY PARKER!

  This week we’re getting to know ihe latest export from Cool Britannia – Ruby Parker!

  IYL:If you could be a pet, which type of pet would you be?

  RP: I’d be my cat Everest, because he has the best life of any cat I know. All he does is lay in the sun all day or on a radiator and eat food.

  IYL: And who would you most like to feed you kitty treats?

  RP: Oh, I don’t know! Someone nice.

  IYL:If you were a cookie, what type of cookie would you be?

  RP: Easy. A double chocolaie chip cookie.

  TYL: Which is better, a night in with a movie and the boy you have a crush on, or a night out with your girlfriends dancing till dawn!

  RP: My mum wouldn’t like me to stay out until dawn, but I’ll pick dancing all night.

  IYL: Describe your personality in three words.

  RP: Gosh, um, fun, friendly and fashionable!

  So there you have it! Now you know Ruby Parker better than she knows herself!

  Mum was right about my busy week. It was a week of being an actual celebrity of being someone who wasn’t famous for her acting (because no one in America had even seen me act yet). But Just famous for being…well, famous.

  First of all, Adrienne and Nadine nearly went into hyperspace when I told them that Sean would be escorting me to the premiere of The Lost Treasure of King Arthur and that Wide Open Universe had invited all of the cast and crew of Hollywood High to it too.

  “Sean Rivers is taking us to the premiere!” Adrienne had shrieked at the top of her voice.

  “Well, me, technically,” I replied hesitantly, but then I saw that scary look in her eye and added, “But of course he’ll be with all of us.”

  And from that point on it got kind of embarrassing because the three of us (but mainly the two of them) never stopped talking about Sean and how wonderful it would be to meet him, and how he’d asked especially to meet Adrienne (I didn’t remember that bit, but I thought it was best not to contradict) and what we (they) were going to say, wear, think and do with Sean. Oh, and by the way, wasn’t it wonderful that Sean Rivers would only come out of hiding for Adrienne (me) and no one else?

  If Adrienne and Nadine didn’t get sick of the sound of their own voices then everyone else certainly did. The students who weren’t on Adrienne’s elite list of friends might have avoided me before, but now it was clear that they hated me. And I didn’t really blame them. It must have looked as though I was properly stuck up and that I considered myself to be too good for anyone else. The truth wasn’t like that at all, but Nadine and Adrienne had sort of taken me over. They told me how to look, what to say and how to act, and I let them. Without their help I would have been completely lost and stuck out on the edge of school society, which was somewhere I didn’t want to be, especially not in Hollywood.

  Besides, Adrienne could be funny even if she could be mean, and when I hung out with her I also got to hang out with Hunter. He still made me blush whenever he talked to me, but he made me forget about how much I missed Danny, and he knew how to make me laugh properly, and not Just because I was too frightened not to.

  One morning recess I discovered to my surprise that not all of the kids Adrienne hated, automatically hated me back. I was waiting outside the girls’ Ioo for Adrienne to finish her make-up before we were picked up and taken to the studio to film some scenes (where they would take off all that make-up and put some different stuff on) when Tina Petrelli went by. She walked a step or two past me, then stopped, turned around and said, “Hey, Ruby.”

  “Oh!” I checked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t greeting someone else. “Urn, hello,” I said with a smile. Tina hadn’t even looked at me since my first day when I had taken her desk.

  “I Just wanted to say that I love you in Kensington Heights. I watch it on BBC America. When you play Angel you get right under her skin. It was real deep. Not that glossy, shallow garbage they do on Hollywood High.”

  “Oh, don’t you like it?” I asked her, surprised.

  “Nobody cool likes it,” she told me with a shrug. “It’s for dorks.”

  “It’s very popular in the ratings,” I said.

  “Well, that goes to show there are a lot of dorks out there,” Tina said with a chuckle. When she smiled she looked like a different person; her face opened up and her bright brown eyes sparkled. She looked friendly, fun and although not exactly fashionable (my three stupid words from the ‘Get to know Ruby Parker’ article), just the kind of girl I’d enjoy hanging out with.

  “Kensington Heights seems like a long time ago,” I said, even though it was only a few months since I had left the show.

  “Your life has changed a lot recently,” Tina said sympathetically. “Are you happy, Ruby?”

  I paused for a moment, surprised by a question that nobody else had asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing, but then again I suppose I was doing that before and back at home it seemed a whole lot less frightening…”

  “So are you happy?” Tina pressed me for an answer.

  “Acting makes me happy,” I replied. “But sometimes all the stuff that goes with it is hard to deal with.”

  “Ah, yes,” Tina nodded sagely. “The trappings of fame.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “I’m in a theatre club,” Tina said. “I know its a bit obvious to be in a theatre club in a dramatic arts school, but some of us have devoted ourselves to theatre as an art form because we feel it’s more relevant to what acting is truly about.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said, and I meant it because although I’d done a lot of TV and even film in my short career, I’d never done any theatre. Not even a school play.

  “If you’re really interested, we’re putting on a production of The Seagull. Do you know it?”

  I shook my head slowly feeling a little bit stupid.

  “You’d love it,” Tina
assured me. She hesitated again, biting at her bottom lip. “Look, if you can get away from the witches, why don’t you come one day after school and see what you think?”

  “The witches?” I bit my lip but smiled. It was a pretty good description of what Adrienne and Nadine could be like, cackling and plotting all the time. “Well…”

  But before I could answer, the loo door swung open and Adrienne appeared, fully made-up and ready to face having her make-up redone.

  “Why are you hanging around?” she snapped at Tina sharply, looming over her in her heeled shoes. “Ruby doesn’t talk to you. She doesn’t even look at you, OK?”

  Tina didn’t move. She looked at me, her eyebrows raised in a question. “What do you say, Ruby?” she asked.

  Adrienne narrowed her eyes at me.

  I wanted to say that I would go to Tina’s theatre club because it sounded interesting and fun, and if I hung out with Tina, I might not be nervous and frightened of saying something wrong all the time. There was a chance, I thought, that if I said yes to Tina, Adrienne would be surprised but not offended and might even start to treat her a bit better. Or she could despise me and make my life for the rest of my stay at Beaumont a misery too.

  I Just didn’t feel brave enough to find out which. “I don’t think so,” I said, unable to look Tina in the eye.

  “I was so wrong about you,” Tina said in disgust. “You’re no better than they are.”

  “You dream about being like me,” Adrienne called out after her. “I have nightmares about waking up like you!” She swung an arm around my shoulder and led me off to find Nadine and Hunter and the others.

  “I don’t know how she had the nerve to talk to you. Loser!”

  I am ashamed to say that I didn’t disagree.

  And then that afternoon something weird happened on the set of Hollywood High.

  We were filming a fight scene set in the canteen. It was going to be a food fight started by Lady Elizabeth to try and make Sabrina look bad in front of Hayden. We’d been rehearsing it with bits of screwed-up coloured paper, each a different colour for a different type of food, and in one shot Adrienne and I had even had to have stunt doubles because the studio wasn’t insured for what injuries some chocolate cake in the face might cause us when travelling at speed.

  I was excited about shooting it because throwing food at Adrienne could never be anything but fun, and apart from that it would take my mind off the things I couldn’t stop thinking about, like Danny’s letter and Sean’s arrival.

  We’d done the first couple of takes which were really funny, and then we had to break while our stunt doubles took our places. (They put a wig and a school uniform on two very tough looking ladies who chewed gum and had scars.) Adrienne was having her yoghurt-caked hair restyled so I thought I’d get a glass of water from craft services (which is what they call the refreshments area on set).

  I was standing, all covered in jelly and yoghurt, when this man in a pair of overalls who looked like he might be one of the lighting crew came over to me.

  “How are you today, Miss Parker?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of water.

  “Fine!” I said with a laugh, gesturing down at my food-covered self.

  “Looking forward to the premiere of your film next week?”

  “Um, yes, thanks,” I said, a little bit surprised because none of the other crew had ever asked me anything like that. Usually they Just told me to get out of the way and stop talking during takes. I looked around. Everyone else, including most of the crew, was busy watching the stuntwomen throw each other across a table laden with food. I wanted to watch it too.

  “Well, must get on,” I said cheerfully, finishing my drink. “Bye!”

  The man stepped in front of me. He was smiling, but suddenly I felt uneasy.

  “It’ll be nice for you to see Sean Rivers again, won’t it?” the man asked me.

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to seem rude, especially not to a crew member, because Jeremy always said it was important not to act as if you were a superstar on set, because no one was anybody without the support of the technicians. And apart from that he was a grown-up and I was a kid. Mum was always telling me to respect my elders and not be rude to adults. All the same, I wondered what on earth he, a lighting man, was asking me those kinds of questions for.

  “Well, yes, Sean’s a good friend,” I said with a shrug. A cheer went up from the crowd around the set as Fake Adrienne landed head first on a crash mat.

  “So it’s not true that he’s cut you off because of your betrayal and is only making an appearance on The Carl Vine Show because he’s been bullied into it by Art Dubrovnik? Are you saying he doesn’t hate you for ruining his life?”

  I stared at the man. No one was supposed to know about the Carl Vine interview yet. Suddenly, I realised what was wrong. This wasn’t a lighting man. This was a Journalist who had sneaked on set to find me, deliberately to try and catch me out and make me say something about Sean.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted at him as loudly as I possibly could, thinking about the personal safety classes we’d had at the Academy one term. “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  I was aware of people running towards us, but in the seconds before they could arrive the man took a camera out of his pocket and a flash went off in my face, dazzling me.

  “Thanks for the interview, Ruby,” he said with a laugh, before running off into the maze of sets and corridors that ran through the studio. The security guards chased him, but later Suzie said he must have known someone on the inside because he’d got out through an alarmed fire door – and the alarm had not gone off.

  “Are you OK, Ruby?” Hunter asked. I had sat down with a cup of tea, yoghurt drying in my hair. I was shaking; I couldn’t believe that someone had posed as a lighting engineer Just to catch me out and try and make me say something he could use to upset Sean even more.

  “Not really,” I admitted. Hunter sat down beside me and put his arm around me, which didn’t do much for my shakes, but did make me feel better.

  “Don’t stress it, Ruby,” Adrienne said. “That kind of thing happens all the time. Actually you should think of it as kinda cool. They never pap B-Iisters. It means you’ve arrived!” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I wish he’d approached me, I’d have given him a quote about Sean.” She caught Hunter’s look. “To protect Ruby of course. Poor Ruby.”

  Suzie Blenheim came and knelt down in front of me. “I’ve called your mom and she’s on her way over. I know it was a shock and I’m really sorry that it happened to you here at work. We’ll find out how, I promise you. We take our security very seriously here, especially when there are minors being put at risk. When we find out who let that guy in we will fire them.” Suzie held my hands in hers and didn’t seem to mind their congealed stickiness. “Look Ruby, I hate to ask you, but do you think you can finish the scene? I know you’re feeling pretty wobbly, but if you can carry on that would be Just great.”

  The food fight had lost all of its fun, but I wasn’t here to have fun. This was work, work they were paying me quite a lot of money to do. I had to get up and get on with it no matter how shaky I felt. The show had to go on. Brett Summers, Jeremy Fort and even Imogene Grant would have said the same if they were in this situation.

  “Yes, of course,” I said to Suzie. “I’m fine to finish the shoot.”

  “Great!” Suzie said, dropping my hands. “Make-up! We need to freshen that yoghurt!”

  But not even shoving Adrienne’s face into a vat of custard could shake the feeling of fear and uncertainty that the journalist’s questions had started in me. It was bad enough that he had asked them. But what if…?

  What if what he had said about Sean hating me was true?

  By Wednesday Adrienne had formally launched plan “Get Zach to Take Ruby to the Dance Instead of Lisa”. Which involved me sitting with Adrienne, Nadine, Hunter and Zach for lunch. I had no idea how me saying nothing and laughing at everything Zach said even if it was
n’t funny (which it mostly wasn’t) was going to get him to take me to the dance. I didn’t even want to go the dance with him, or anyone especially, not after what had happened on the set. I didn’t want to talk to anyone because I didn’t know who I could trust. But Adrienne and Nadine thought it was hilarious, and as I was certain their plan was doomed to fail, I went along with it.

  Thursday I had more scenes with Hunter. Just the two of us (and the entire production crew, and some extra security, but still) in the set of his house. During the scenes Lady Elizabeth was supposed to get Hayden to fall in love with her by being all fake sweet and fake vulnerable, and telling him that Sabrina had done horrible things to her – which wasn’t true. At the very end of the scene Hayden had to lean in very close to Lady Elizabeth and almost kiss her, changing his mind at the last minute because he is an honourable boy who doesn’t kiss other girls behind his girlfriend’s back, even if it does look as if his girlfriend has suddenly become evil.

  “Cut!” Suzie shouted to my mixed relief and disappointment as Hunter’s lips were millimetres away from mine. As usual, I blushed. I didn’t know what it was about Hunter that made me blush; he was nothing like Danny – they were as different as day and night. Hunter wasn’t my type at all, not even back in the day when I was in love with Justin De Souza and had a thing for blond-haired, blue-eyed boys with dreamy smiles. And most importantly, he was the toughest girl in school’s boyfriend, a girl who I called my friend even if she did scare me half the time. And we all know that no true friend ever goes after her friend’s boyfriend; it just isn’t done.

  Still, every time Hunter was near me, whether as himself or Hayden, it played havoc with my skin tone. Maybe I was allergic to him in the same way I was allergic to horses.

  “Ruby!” Suzie told me. “I love that you blushed when he went in to kiss you. That is so sweet. And Hunter, you looked really tempted to kiss Ruby then. Good work!”