That morning Sean had not been his usual happy-go-lucky self at all. Oh, he had switched on his starriness for his scenes, but it had blinked out again the moment the cameras stopped rolling and he saw his father at the edge of the set waiting for him, tapping his crocodile-skin shoes impatiently. And I noticed that some of the dark and vivid bruises on Sean’s arms and legs were not applied by the make-up department.
“How did you get those?” I asked Sean as soon as I got a chance.
He shrugged but didn’t look me in the eye.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Messing around I guess. I went out on my skateboard yesterday.” I was fairly certain he was lying.
As I watched Sean go without saying goodbye, his head down and his shoulders slumped, I thought of how Sean had been in the corridor just before we left the premiere party, and I had a horrible feeling that maybe this Sean, this down, hurt and sad Sean was his usual self. And that maybe the happy, adventurous, spontaneous Sean I thought I had got to know was just another act, a brave front.
“Poor Sean,” I said, more to myself than to Imogene.
“And look at me,” Imogene continued.
“What about you?” I asked her. “You’re perfect.”
Imogene grinned and shook her head.
“Nobody is perfect,” she said. “Least of all me.”
“Yes, you are!” I protested. “I bet you were born perfect. I bet you were never lumpy or spotty or greasy, were you?” I shrugged and smiled at her. “It doesn’t matter; I’m not holding it against you or anything. It’s just that some people in the world are perfectly perfect and some, like me, are not and never will be. I’m learning to accept it.” I sighed; that wasn’t exactly true. I was still hoping for a late surge that might get me from average-if-not-ugly ducking to drop-dead-gorgeous swan before I turned eighteen, but I had to face it, time was running out.
Imogene nipped at her lips as she thought for a moment about what I’d said and then she said, “Wait there a minute, I want to show you something.”
She slid out from her seat opposite and went into her bedroom. She returned a few moments later with a photo album and sat down again, but this time next to me.
She rested the red leather album on the table top and patted it fondly.
“I take this with me wherever I go,” she told me as she opened the thick pages. “To remind me of who I am. Look, I want to show you a photo.”
She thumbed through the stiff pages until she found the one she was looking for. It was an image of her from her first breakthrough role as a Vegas street kid in a thriller called Boiling Point. She only had a small part but every critic said she acted the other well-known stars off the screen.
I looked carefully at the photo of Imogene; she was just a bit older than me when it was taken. Shot against the hot red of a setting desert sun she looked incredible, almost alight, so fragile and delicate that you thought you might be able to see through her. But I still didn’t know why she was showing me the photo.
“Were you forced into acting too?” I asked her, frowning. Imogene shook her head.
“No.” She studied the photo for a second longer and ran her thumb down the edge of her slight thirteen-year-old figure. “I didn’t know it then, but when this photo was taken I was actually dying.”
“Dying!” I stared at her and then the photo in horror. “What of?”
Imogene thought for a moment and then uncovered the left-hand page of the album that her forearm had been resting on. “Here, let me show you another photo,” she said.
This time the photo was of an awkward and unhappy-looking girl posing in a very frilly and far too tight pink dress. She looked as if the smile she was giving the camera had been hammered on with nails. It took me a few seconds to realise that the girl was Imogene too.
“But you’re…” I stopped myself from finishing the sentence by biting my lip.
“Fat?” Imogene finished for me.
I nodded.
“No one forced me into acting, or into film,” Imogene told me. “I wanted it; it was all that I wanted. And being in school shows or the local drama group wasn’t enough for me. I wanted all of this…” This time she gestured around her at the Winnebago and I knew she meant her movie-star life. “And the cold truth of the matter in this shallow business, Ruby, is that fat kids, no matter how talented they are, hardly ever get it.” Imogene smiled with a kind of fond sadness at the pink-dress photo. “So without telling anyone I put myself on a diet. First of all I just watched what I ate, cut out candy and cakes, but when that didn’t work fast enough I ate less and less unil I actually couldn’t bear the sight of food. The thought of it in my mouth made me want to be sick. I made excuses not to eat with my family, and if I couldn’t get out of it I’d leave whatever my mom gave me, saying I’d eaten earlier, or that I just wasn’t hungry. If I did have to eat in front of them, I forced down a few mouthfuls and as soon as I could I’d make myself sick.
“Ew,” I said, wrinkling up my nose. I looked at beautiful, graceful Ms Grant. I just couldn’t imagine her doing anything so…ugly.
“It was gross,” Imogene said. “It made my breath stink and my teeth started to rot, but I didn’t think about that. All I thought about was being thin.” She tapped her prefect white teeth. “These are ceramic overlays. Anyway, I got thinner and thinner until I looked exactly like this.” She tapped the Boiling Point photo with her fingernail. “And I knew I was right to be doing what I was doing because I started getting jobs. And the people who counted started noticing me, so I kept going because I thought the thinner I was the more they would want me, and it seemed to be true.” Imogene shook her head.
“But whatever talent or ability Hollywood saw in me they still didn’t see the one thing that I saw.” She pointed at the pink-dress girl again. “Even when I was at my thinnest, whenever I looked in the mirror I’d see her, that dumb fat girl looking back at me. I wasn’t ever happy. I was never thin enough.”
There was a moment’s silence as Imogene and I stared from photo to photo and I thought about Nydia and her secret diet. I felt a sharp twist of fear knot in my tummy as I worried that she could go too far just like Imogene had.
“But you didn’t die,” I said in a small voice. “Dieting can’t really make you die, can it?”
Imogene shrugged. “It can; if you let it take over you like I did it can become a serious disease,” she said. “I was shooting my next film after Boiling Point. It was a much bigger, more important part so I was literally eating nothing at all so I could look good in front of the camera.” Imogene sighed wistfully.
“I’d only been on set a couple of days when I collapsed. I got rushed into hospital. They put all sorts of tubes into me. I had to have my heart monitored in case it failed. I got fed through a tube in my nose.” I wrinkled up my nose and rubbed it at the thought of having a tube inserted in it. “After a few days when I was stable again the doctor told me if I carried on as I was I’d be dead within a year. That scared me,” Imogene said with a little smile.
“That would scare me too,” I said.
“But if I’m really honest, I think what scared me even more was that I got dropped from the film. I was told I couldn’t work again until I was healthy and under control. That was what really woke me up: I was more afraid of giving up my dream than I was of dying. I think that was what made me accept the treatment and the counselling. And when it was out in the open, when my parents knew at last, it felt as if a sort of tent had been lifted from above me, and I could breathe and feel the sun on my face again. It took me a long time to get it under control, years to teach myself to eat properly again. I didn’t make another movie until I was nineteen.” Imogene seemed to look inwards for a moment as if she were watching those memories play inside her head.
“New York Angel,” I said, remembering the title of her second film. “Your first Oscar.”
Imogene nodded and shut the album, resting both of her forearms on it as if she were afr
aid something—the past maybe—might try and escape.
“Why did you tell me all this?” I asked her. She shrugged.
“Because I trust you and because you remind me a lot of myself when I was your age…”
“Do I?” I said, and must have sounded a bit worried because Imogene put her arm around me and hugged me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t mean I think you’re going to do something crazy like I did. It’s just that now is an important time for you, Ruby. You have a lot of talent—everybody thinks so. If this film does well things could go crazy for you—you could suddenly find yourself being pulled in all sorts of directions. If that happens I want you to think very carefully about what you are doing. Pause and take a breath. Don’t worry about being perfect. No one in this business is perfect. All we are is very good at hiding our imperfections, and sometimes we get so obsessed with it we start to destroy ourselves. It’s a real danger, Ruby. The best thing you can do is to just be you, otherwise this industry will burn you out before you’ve even begun.”
“Like Sean,” I said quietly.
“It would seem so,” Imogene said with a tiny smile. “It’s easy to let this life get on top of you when you are your age, especially if you haven’t got the right guidance. And it’s easy to let things get out of perspective and lose sight of who you are. just remember the best thing you have going for you right now is your school, your friends, and most of all your parents. Keep those steady and they will keep you steady. And never forget how lucky you are.”
I thought for a moment.
“I am lucky,” I said, sounding quite surprised. “I had forgotten how lucky I am.”
“I thought so,” Imogene said.
I thought about Nydia and Danny, Mum and Dad, and even Sean, and all the things I thought were so terrible in my life. When I thought about it none of them were things I couldn’t make better somehow. It was Just knowing where and how to start.
Suddenly I remembered something that Imogene had said earlier.
“You said that Sean’s mum’s heart was broken because of not seeing him,” I said. Imogene nodded and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Do you know her?”
“I used to,” Imogene said. “We worked together once a long time ago. This is the first time I’ve worked with Sean. It’s horrible that the rumours about his father could be true.”
“Well, if you can trust me, I can trust you,” I said, hoping I wasn’t betraying Sean by what I was about to tell her. “There’s something that Sean’s mum really needs to know.”
Chapter Nineteen
As I walked over to Sean’s trailer, wanting to tell him what I had told Imogene, I was stopped in my tracks by an unexpected but familiar voice.
“Ruby! It’s me!” I turned around and stared at Anne-Marie.
“Hello?” I said, not quite believing my eyes.
“It’s me, I’ve come to visit you,” she said excitedly. “Daddy is back home for a week and he’s got some business here so I pestered him until he said I could come too. Brilliant thing emotional blackmail, but I suppose there have to be some perks to having permanently absent parents.”
“What about school?” I asked her.
“Daddy said I could take the afternoon off,” she said. “It’s only games and geography and they don’t really count, Daddy says.”
Anne-Marie hooked her arm through mine.
“I thought,” she told me, dropping her head on to my shoulder for a moment, “that after everything you’ve been through you could use a friend to talk to. What with Nydia not speaking to you—or to anyone very much for that matter—and Danny chucking you, I thought you must feel terrible.” Anne-Marie gave my arm a little squeeze.
“Honestly,” she said, “I can’t believe the way he’s acting. I mean, I thought he’d be miserable for weeks and weeks, at least! But going straight out on a date with Jade Caruso—what on earth is he thinking? It’s obvious that Sean isn’t interested in you.” Anne-Marie glanced hopefully around the empty lot. “Is he around by the way?”
I stopped dead in my tracks and tried hard to remember what Imogene had told me—that I was lucky, lucky, lucky.
“He went on a date with Jade?” I asked Anne-Marie.
She clapped her hand over her mouth, her blue eyes wide with horror.
“Oh, no,” she moaned. “I’m so stupid. You must think I’m a cow! I just thought you’d know already, I don’t know why. Nydia would usually have told you but she’s not talking to you, is she? I didn’t mean to tell you like that. I was just excited about being here and I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “At least I know where I stand now.”
“Oh, babe,” Anne Marie said and she clasped me in a tight hug.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said in my ear as she hugged me. “Just the two of us and have really good girly…Oh, hi, Sean!” Anne-Marie let go of me suddenly as if I were a hot brick, and fluttered her lashes at Sean.
I turned around and gave Sean a half-hearted smile, completely forgetting what it was I was supposed to tell him.
“Annie!” he called out to Anne-Marie, using a nickname which everyone else in the world was forbidden from calling her. “My dance partner’s here—excellent!”
“She’s come to visit me,” I said rather obviously, still reeling from the news that Danny was dating Jade. “Only I’ve got to be on set in ten minutes, Anne-Marie. I can’t talk now—I’ll be at least two or three hours. Maybe you’d better find your dad and get him to take you home.”
“Or,” Sean said, carefully casual, “I’ve got nothing on till a night shoot on location later on, unless you count classes with Fran Francisco, which I don’t. Dad’s in town doing yet another new deal, so if you like I could give you a tour while you wait for Ruby?”
“Oh,” Anne-Marie said coolly, giving me a wink. “I suppose that would be OK.”
I watched the pair walk off together, feeling a bit miserable and left out.
“I’ll see you in my trailer later then?” I called out. “Mum will be there so just knock. Sean will show you where it is.”
“OK, Ruby,” she called back. “And just remember, the show must…”
“Go on,” I finished for her under my breath. I turned on my heel and made my way towards the set. At least for the next few hours I wouldn’t have to remember how lucky I was.
I’d be too busy fighting my evil father to the death, suspended above a vat of boiling molten lava.
It was dark by the time I got out of wardrobe and I didn’t expect Anne-Marie to still be waiting, but she was. I could hear her laughter before I even got to my little Winnebago.
She and Sean were sitting at the little table playing cards. Anne-Marie’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone brightly. They looked as if they had been laughing since the moment I left them, and I couldn’t help feeling an ungracious pang of jealousy.
I flopped down next to Anne-Marie, exhausted, and actually quite wishing that neither of them was there.
“Where’s Mum?” I asked through a yawn.
“She said she’d be back in ten minutes to take you to the flat,” Anne-Marie said, not quite answering my question. “Daddy will be here in a minute too.”
I glanced at them.
“You two look like you’ve had fun,” I said, my voice a heavy flat monotone.
Sean gave me a sympathetic smile.
“I’m afraid we did,” he said. He sighed deeply and looked at his watch. “But now I’ve got to go. It was good to see you again, Annie,” he said. “I hope I see you again before I go.”
“I hope so too,” Anne-Marie said, letting her cool façade slip, and sounding rather wistful for a moment.
“Well, whatever,” I said, feeling a bit grumpy. “Hope it goes all right tonight, Sean.” Sean shrugged.
“It usually does,” he said as he left. “Acting is the one thing I can’t seem to get wrong.” There was
a rush of cold air as he opened and closed the trailer door.
After he had gone I could see Anne-Marie trying her best to turn down her excitement as far as she could until she was able to rearrange her features in an expression which more matched my own. She patted my forearm quite firmly, so that it stung a little bit.
“How are you doing?” she asked me with a little pout, which made me smile for some reason. When it came to girl talk, even after months of being friends, Anne-Marie still wasn’t a patch on Nydia. But she was here, even if it was partly to see Sean, and she was really trying. I appreciated that.
“I’m fine,” I said heavily. “I mean, I am sad because I really liked Danny and, well…I just don’t know how this all happened. Over nothing at all really.”
“I don’t think that article in the paper helped,” Anne-Marie said seriously, before giggling a little bit. “Or that photo.”
I screwed up my face as I remembered it.
“I know,” I said. “But Jade Caruso? She is really pretty, I suppose—in an obvious way.”
“Pretty evil,” Anne-Marie said, and I managed to laugh. “Anyway, he doesn’t really like her. He’s just acting like an idiot again. Like the old Danny before you got to know him and brought him over from the dark side—grumpy and sullen and always hanging around on his own. He hasn’t really talked to Jade since the date or on it, if what Michael Henderson says is true. Whereas she hasn’t stopped talking about him.” Anne-Marie rolled her eyes and sighed. “The trouble with Danny is that he likes things to be complicated. He should be more like Sean; Sean likes the simple things in life.”
“What, like you?” I asked. Anne-Marie pursed her lips for a moment before extending them into a smile.
“I’m letting you get away with that because you’re depressed,” she said.
“Hang on,” I said. Suddenly I saw exactly how to fix things with Danny.
“What?” Anne-Marie asked.
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