I was supposed to be the child. I was supposed to be the one who did the leaning on both of my parents. But last night they had just pulled that security rug out from under my feet without thinking. So I’d just looked out of the window again and at the passing blur of traffic and said, “Nydia’s dad’ll drop me back before ten.”
“She’s feeling guilty so she’s letting me off all the ‘talking it through’,” I said to Nydia with my own much less-good impression of Trisha.
“OK, so let’s try to put the negative aside,” she said. “We should just focus on the positive.” Nydia tucked her legs underneath her on her bed and clapped her hands together, her eyes gleaming. “After all, you’re going to kiss the love of your life! Ohmygodhowexcitingisthat!”
I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline surge through me and fizz in the tips of my fingers and toes. Just the thought that the dream which sent me off to sleep every night might actually come true made me feel like floating a couple of inches above Nydia’s bed. And then it was as if I was on the roller coaster Cosmo had predicted and my stomach plummeted towards my feet and I felt sick.
“I feel sick,” I said.
“But why?” Nydia exclaimed, her eyes wide. “It’ll be great. Your lips will meet his, he’ll look into your eyes and realise that, yes, it’s you and only you that he’s loved all along; he’ll chuck that stupid girlfriend of his and go out with you and you’ll get a two-page spread in OK!” she finished dreamily. I shook my head.
“He won’t because I…I can’t kiss him, Nydia. I have no, literally, no idea how to kiss him! I haven’t kissed any boy – ever – except for Danny in the school play and that was just on the cheek!” I bit my lip hard. “What am I going to do? I mean, they’ve given me this second chance to make it on the show and I really have to be brilliant, and how can I act kissing him if I can’t even kiss in real life? And he’ll hate me for making him look like a fool, and instead of mostly ignoring me, he’ll hate me for ever and my life will be ruined.”
Nydia looked puzzled. “Hang on a minute,” she said. “But when Ms Logan made us stand outside for twenty minutes before letting us in to get changed the other day, you said then that you’d kissed a boy! So what’s the problem, silly – you have done it before. You might be a bit rusty but—”
I cringed at the memory. It was true – at least partly. Everyone had been standing around waiting to get changed after hockey. (Ms Logan makes us wait outside a lot; she’s says it’s a life lesson, but really it’s because she’s gone off for a cigarette break. I’d like to tell her that she’ll never get a boyfriend when she smells of stale smoke all the time, but as I’m not exactly one to talk when it comes to getting boyfriends I’ve never got round to it. Besides, she’d probably put me in detention for life.) All the girls had been going on and on about kissing: what it was like to kiss a boy, who’d kissed the most boys and who was the best kisser. Of course Anne-Marie and Menakshi made themselves out to be the experts, acting all giggly and flicking their hair round like they were so cool. And most of the other girls said they’d kissed someone too, even if in one case it was just their older cousin at a family wedding. I knew what was coming even before Anne-Marie locked eyes on me.
“What about these two?” Anne-Marie had said with that evil-genius grin of hers. “Let’s ask them who they’ve kissed. I would have refused to answer but Nydia still works on the principle that you should never overturn a gesture of friendship, even if it’s clearly a thinly veiled means of inflicting more ridicule on us. Nydia always thinks people are basically nice. Even people like Anne-Marie who have all the warmth and human compassion of a cannibal alien lizard from outer space. So of course she told everybody happily that the only boy she’d ever kissed was in her dreams, as if she was oblivious to the sniggers and giggles all around her. I was so horrified that when it came to my turn, I lied, I out and out lied to try and save not only my dignity but Nydia’s too, even if she didn’t know it needed saving.
“I’ve kissed a boy, OK?” I said. “So can we leave now?”
“Kissed who?” Anne-Marie demanded incredulously, looking around at the other girls with carefully staged disbelief.
“No one you know,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t spot that it was obviously a lie and put my bright red cheeks down to embarrassment rather than deceit. “It was when we were on holiday,” I blustered on. “It was a boy I met at the ice rink. It was then, OK?” Anne-Marie raised one of her plucked eyebrows and looked around at the other girls.
“It’s a miracle,” she said archly. “Some poor dope actually locked braces with little Ruby here. I bet he’s still getting over the trauma.” Everyone laughed and Anne-Marie tossed her hair again, clearly loving herself more than ever.
“I don’t wear braces any more,” I’d said angrily, praying for Ms Logan to finish her cigarette and open the changing room door.
“No,” Anne-Marie agreed. “But you’re still really ugly.”
It was a painful memory, one I’d tried hard to forget, even if, quite clearly, Nydia hadn’t.
“I was lying, you idiot,” I told Nydia, maybe a bit abruptly. “So I didn’t look so bad in front of the others?” I squirmed uncomfortably. I should have told Nydia straightaway instead of just telling her I wasn’t ready to talk about my first kiss yet.
“Like I did, you mean,” Nydia said, obviously feeling a bit 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,” I told her. “But, well, I mean it doesn’t matter now, does it, Nyd? 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 to the ceiling and thought for a moment. “I know,” she said, holding up her balled fist. “We can practise 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 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 a moment longer.
“We could practise 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 many pink and lilac pillows.
“I know, what about when you have a rehearsal? It doesn’t matter if you’re crap in the rehearsals, does it? After all, that’s what they’re for,” she said. “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 realise that he’s really been in love with me all this time if I kiss like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a turbot!” Nydia laughed so much she nearly fell off the bed.
“You’ve never kissed anyone, apparently,” 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 wi
th 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 having a panic attack about the most important moment of my life!” Nydia sat back down on the 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 counselling,” I said with a squeaky laugh. 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 to help us. We need an expert consultant to teach you 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, scored about fifty per cent on the innocence test?” 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. “No way. No way! We are not asking Anne-Marie Chance to tell me how to kiss Justin.” It took me a moment to let the full horror of what she was suggesting sink in. “Nydia! She’ll laugh her head off and then tell the whole school. 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.
“What? You mean give her concrete stilettos and sink her in the Thames?” I wondered if my voice would ever return to its normal pitch and if I would stop squeaking. On the other hand, if my career flopped I could get a job doing voiceovers on CBeebies.
“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, Nydia, 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 video mobile or a Game Boy or something, and then get them to buy it for you and then we’ll give it to her. Easy.”
I thought for a moment.
“I don’t know…” I said. “They feel bad, I know, but…Oh, Nydia, this plan is ridiculous – it’s never going to work. Anne-Marie won’t help us, even for a flash mobile phone and, even if she would, my mum would never buy me one. You know what she’s like about me being normal! And anyway, it doesn’t seem very fair on Mum or Dad to rip them off like that.” Nydia took both my hands in hers.
“Have they been fair on 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 sort of nodded: the only thing I 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. “And 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 he’ll be blown away at what might be your only ever 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 – even if I don’t like them much at the moment, I can’t do it. 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 really wants.” I looked confused.
“What? A bra the size of a battleship?” I asked her.
“No, silly. Fame. You’ve got it 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 only just 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 and 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 horribly nasty to me. Nydia was looking pleased with herself.
“Well then,” she said airily, “all we have to do is just call Anne-Marie and we’ll see what she says, OK? There’s no harm, 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, what the hell. 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 Highgate mansion the very next morning and sail past the video gate security. Or waltz into the marble-floored entrance hall, sweeping 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 it all over a chilled Diet Coke.
First off, there was the phone call. Nydia decided that if we didn’t put the wheels in motion right there and then we would chicken out the next day. She grabbed her mobile 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, but maybe it was left over from the time when we all got mobiles for the first time ever and it seemed more important to have a lot of numbers in your phone than if the person was cool or not.
I myself had had Menakshi’s and Jade’s numbers on my phone for about a week before I realised they were never going to call me and I was certainly never going to call them, and I deleted them. Nydia, on the other hand, still harboured these fantasies that we were living in a real-life teen movie where the lame kids like us eventually become cool and everybody’s friends in the end. I don’t think this has to do with us going to the academy. I’m sure that even if we we
nt to a proper school she would be just as hopeful. That’s the kind of positive, optimistic person she is. Anyway, I thought Anne-Marie would see it was Nydia calling and just cancel 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 began.
“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. I must have been ill that day. Mentally ill. Anyway, whatever it is, no. No, I do not want to come to one of your lame sleepovers, or join in with one of your stupid film projects, or even walk on the same side of the street as you, Nydia, 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 sound 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 that you could maybe…offer your advice? Because you’re such a good actress.” There was a pause, when 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.
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