Stars

by Sophia Bennett

  A few faces look round, pityingly. This is the worst bit. One of them is Liam’s. The boy with the black curls and blue, blue eyes. But no half-amused expression this time. In fact, he looks perplexed. Presumably he’s wondering how any girl can wear a kimono in public outside Tokyo. As, at the moment, am I.

  I shrug my shoulders back at him and try to imagine impressing him instead, by leaping off a relative’s yacht. But to be honest, I think it would have the same effect. I am destined to perplex boys I like and attract weird and unreliable ones, like Alexander last year – the ballet dancer with the lowest kissing ability in London. Thank God Harry’s getting married, because this is the nearest Mum’s ever going to get to planning a wedding in our family.

  On Saturday Vicente arrives from Brazil, and Mum throws a party to celebrate.

  Mum doesn’t throw parties very often. When your house is mostly white, apart from the delicate artworks on the walls, which have been given to you by old friends and are extremely precious, you don’t like the idea of filling it with dirty shoes and alcohol-filled glasses – or, as we would say, guests.

  But to be fair, when Mum parties, she PARTIES. She’s called some company that can do decorations and cocktails in a hurry, and when I get home from school on Friday they’re already busy hanging lanterns around the place and setting up a mini-disco in our sitting room. By Saturday morning, every surface in the kitchen is covered in boxes of glasses or canapé trays and I have to eat my toast on the stairs.

  It’s handy having a resident DJ. Harry’s busy in his bedroom, making the playlist to end all playlists. This is only the second time he’s had the chance to DJ in front of his dad. (The first time was during Rio Fashion Week last year, and no, I didn’t tell The Belles he was working there.) You’d think, at twenty-three and running his own successful business, that he might have moved out by now, but it simply hasn’t occurred to him. With his job, he’s almost always travelling, so if he got a flat he’d hardly be in it. Plus he’s usually going out with a supermodel, so if he needs to kip somewhere cool, he can do it at one of her places. Plus our house is really, really nice.

  It’s nice anyway, when it’s just Mum, Harry, Crow and me, all quietly doing our thing in our different rooms and not talking to each other much. But the place is fantastic when it’s all dressed up for a party. I wander around, checking out the lanterns, the glitter balls (there are several), the coloured lights and the flower arrangements. The place is suddenly full of white roses. Mum explains that Vicente has sent her a hundred of them – her favourite – as a sort of ‘hello’ present.

  Crow arrives to start work on some new dresses. When she’s not making them to order for clients, she makes them for a stall in the Portobello Road. People love wearing her experimental shapes and flattering styles. They love their friends saying, ‘Oh my GOD! You look incredible! Where did you get that?’ Which happens a lot when you’re wearing Crow’s handmade masterpieces. The stallholder is always asking her for more dresses to sell.

  Meanwhile, I take the chance to have another look at the sketches she did for Isabelle.

  ‘Is this the wedding dress?’ I ask. ‘It looks, er, great.’

  Crow comes over. ‘Oh, those are just doodles. I wasn’t sure about them. They’re wrong for her, aren’t they? I was aiming for romantic, but I think I went too far.’

  ‘So you’re definitely doing the dress?’ I check. ‘Isabelle asked you?’

  Crow nods. ‘On the way back from Paris. Didn’t I tell you? She wants to have three dresses for different bits of the day, but she wants me to do one of them.’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me. But yaaay.’

  Why can’t I sound enthusiastic when I talk about Harry’s wedding? What’s wrong with me? And why do I feel the need to change the subject?

  ‘Those men were back in touch,’ I add. ‘The matching overcoat ones.’

  ‘Oh,’ Crow says. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Your email address.’

  She grins. She likes not having one. If she did, she might end up having conversations about investment vehicles. Instead, two minutes later, she’s busy at her desk, working on a new design for Isabelle.

  I leave her to it. I have a bit of a wardrobe crisis to resolve. I need to impress Mum’s and Harry’s friends with my amazing style savvy this evening. More of them than I care to imagine will have seen the kimono moment in that magazine and I have lots of catching up to do. I try not to think about the fact that Isabelle’s friends will be there too, and ninety per cent of them are models. Even in the normal world, I am short, flat-faced and cursed with wonky dark hair. Tonight, I will look positively deformed beside the average guest. But, to quote Granny again, life goes on.

  I reject the brief idea of a burka, and consider my more serious options.

  Doesn’t she look beautiful?’

  Vicente has slipped in beside me at the party and we’re both admiring Mum as she chats to some of her arty friends. I nod in agreement. Mum’s in a vintage floor-length Halston dress she’s had since her modelling days, and a long gold necklace with a large topaz rock at the bottom of it. Even without much makeup – she never wears more than lipgloss nowadays – she’s still pretty stunning. The soft light helps, of course. I enjoy teasing Mum about her age, but actually, it doesn’t bother her. She says she’s having more fun now than she did when she was modelling. This can’t be possible, of course. She just sits around working most of the time. But at least she doesn’t complain about it.

  Vicente is not bad himself. Jet-black hair. Angular face. Granny wasn’t joking when she called him classically handsome. But more than that, he is totally charming. He’s been charming all evening and he keeps it up as he guides me onto the dance floor and makes a decent job of grooving on down to some Rolling Stones that Harry has put on in his honour.

  ‘Mum loved the roses,’ I shout across at him. Harry is not shy about loud music. The neighbours have been round to complain twice already. I think even the walls are rattling.

  ‘Good to hear it,’ Vicente shouts back. ‘That reminds me . . . do you mind?’

  He eases his way across the dance floor and invites Mum onto it. I don’t mind, really. They make such a good couple.

  Crow and Jenny are clustered in a corner. I go and join them and we all watch Mum and Vicente doing their thing.

  ‘They’re naturals, aren’t they?’ Jenny shouts across at me.

  I nod.

  ‘You’d think they’d been together for the last twenty years.’

  I nod again, hoping that my sudden blurry vision is due to standing too close to a speaker, and nothing else.

  ‘Why didn’t they stay together, anyway?’ Jenny asks.

  I want to say something, but I’m still trying to find the words when a red-faced man suddenly appears in the middle of the dance floor, shouting and waving his arms around in an extremely unfunky way.

  Harry, shocked, turns the music off.

  ‘I SAID,’ the man bellows, going a dangerous shade of maroon, ‘TURN THE BLOODY MUSIC DOWN OR I WILL SUE!’

  As the room is actually totally quiet by now, apart from him, he surprises even himself with his personal volume. Fifty pairs of eyes are looking at him. He coughs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Let me rephrase. Thank you very much for turning the music down. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my dinner party.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mum exclaims, her hand going to her mouth. ‘You were having a dinner party? I’m so sorry. I had no idea. What can we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the man says flatly. I recognise him as our next-door neighbour, the grumpy guy who moved in last year. ‘My more sensitive guests have gone home. The others are nursing Nurofen in a darkened room. I should get back to them. Oh, congratulations, by the way.’ He says this to Harry. ‘I heard the news. Hard to miss it. I assume this means you’ll be moving out?’

  Harry grins, looks sheepish and nods.

  The man smiles with grim satisfac
tion and disappears. Harry turns the music back up to half its original volume.

  Jenny, thank goodness, forgets what she was talking about and instead goes back to complaining about how Edie (not here – debating rehearsal) never has any fun any more, and how amazing the latest styles look on all the passing models.

  ‘By the way, I like your outfit,’ she says to me eventually, as an afterthought.

  I know she’s being polite. I’m in a black knitted dress I’ve borrowed from Mum. It’s skin-tight Azzedine Alaïa and totally fashion-safe. But it was made for a taller person than me and, bizarrely, makes me look like a slightly fashion-conscious nun. Better than the kimono, but not one of my greatest moments.

  ‘Doesn’t Isabelle look incredible?’ Jenny adds.

  This is easy to agree with. My future sister-in-law has turned up in an oversize white cotton shirt worn as a dress, with a seashell necklace and a dog lead worn as a belt. Oh, and a pair of sculpture ankle boots borrowed from the Dior couture collection, to show she’s making an effort.

  Me, Azzedine Alaïa – nun. Isabelle, white cotton shirt – sex goddess.

  I love Harry, and Isabelle’s adorable, but couldn’t he have gone out with a normal human, just for once?

  I wonder whether to try and adapt the Alaïa for Keep your head down Friday, but decide against it. Even though – with a bit of customising and a black cardigan – it would make me practically invisible, I don’t think Mum would appreciate me taking my scissors to her vintage wardrobe.

  Luckily, Maybelle was in the audience for a quiz show that will be on TV tomorrow, so most of French class is talking about that. Madame Stanley is struggling to make them at least do it in French, but as none of us know the words for quiz master, studio, retakes or broadcast, it’s a painful process.

  I’m sitting with my head practically between my knees, secretly checking my phone for messages. I’m expecting something from Jenny any minute. We’re not technically allowed our phones in class. We’re DEFINITELY not allowed to check them. But I’ve known people start and end whole relationships by text in the course of a single lesson. My phone, though, stays dark and silent the whole time.

  Jenny’s been in New York for five days. She hasn’t been in touch since Tuesday, when she rang to say that Isabelle’s flat was gorgeous and she was sitting in it, eating fries and watching American Idol on Isabelle’s outsize plasma screen TV. As it was three o’clock in the morning in London when I got the call, I wasn’t as thrilled for her as I might have been. Since then, everything’s gone quiet.

  Jenny has a habit of getting into trouble when she’s off doing her drama thing. Sometimes it’s boy trouble (being kissed by the two-timing Teenage Sex God while making her movie). Sometimes it’s girl trouble (being upstaged, for a while at least, by the girl the sex god two-timed her with). Sometimes it’s critic trouble (being compared to dining furniture for her wooden performance in the movie). This is the first time she’s had to perform in a foreign city all by herself, without even her mother for support. Her silence is worrying me.

  It’s not helped by Maybelle and her friends whispering things like, ‘So where’s Sandra Bullock Junior then? Gone to the Oscars, has she? Hahahaha. Maybe Miley Cyrus needs her for a co-star.’

  ‘She’s off sick,’ I mutter. I can’t believe that Miley Cyrus had to put up with this. Except I’m sure I read somewhere that she did. She must have had lots of days ‘off sick’, I suppose.

  I tell Edie about the lack of contact over lunch. She looks as worried as me.

  ‘Have you heard from Phil, by the way?’ I ask, while we’re on the subject of people we like who happen to be in America right now.

  ‘Yeah,’ she sighs. ‘He says I’m working too hard. He says when he was at high school, he was out surfing most afternoons.’

  ‘The web?’

  ‘No. The Pacific.’

  ‘Oh. Huh. That’s kind of him, rubbing it in.’

  Edie sighs again. I’m sure there are many things she’d like Hot Phil to rub in, but references to surfing aren’t one of them.

  ‘He says I really need to go over there and he’ll take me out and show me the coast and give me a chance to chill out.’

  This sounds pretty good to me, but I can tell from Edie’s expression that, even though she spent Christmas with her face glued to his, she thinks it’s the stupidest idea she’s ever heard.

  ‘He just doesn’t have a clue,’ she says. ‘This is the biggest exam year of my life. Apart from next year. And I need the holidays for music practice. And to revise for SATs and rehearse my interview techniques. Plus I need to keep my website up to speed. If it doesn’t constantly have new stuff on it, people will stop looking at it.’

  She makes the whole experience sound such fun. Not. I know what I’m about to say will be wrong for some reason, but I say it anyway.

  ‘But does it really matter how many people look at your website? I mean, I know it’s an amazingly large number, but can’t it dip for a while?’

  She looks at me, horrified.

  ‘No, it can’t! It’s part of my personal statement for Harvard that I run the site and it’s got this many visitors a week and we’re raising enough money to buy those computers next year. Remember?’ She sees my expression. ‘What?’

  I can’t really tell her what I’m thinking. Because I’m thinking that this isn’t exactly Edie at her best. Normal Edie wants to buy those computers for the schools we support because the children need them. Not because it will make her look good in front of a bunch of professors at Harvard. Maybe Hot Phil’s right. Maybe she should do a bit less stressing out and a bit more surfing.

  ‘I’m thinking about Jenny,’ I lie. ‘You know, hoping she hasn’t lost her voice or anything.’

  ‘Oh, great. Thanks for all your support,’ Edie says with maximum sarcasm. But I still think the Jenny answer was better than the ‘you’re turning into a self-centred exam freak’ answer.

  Despite that, Edie doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon.

  As soon as Jenny gets back, I check anxiously for disasters. It turns out that I was wrong to worry, though.

  She arrives at school on Monday morning with a song on her lips. A loud, bouncy one from Mamma Mia. And a big smile. In reply to my questions, she assures me that she didn’t lose her voice, or get kissed by anyone unsuitable or upstaged by anyone more talented. Bill was thrilled with the way she did the songs and said so. So did the composer, Jackson Ward, who it turns out is one of the most famous men on Broadway and The Kind Of Person You Want To Impress.

  ‘He was so lovely,’ Jenny sighs dreamily, as she’s telling me all about it for the fourth time. ‘He said he loved my “perky personality” and he just wanted to adopt me. His daughter’s nineteen and we hung out a lot together. She’s called Charlotte and she’s really cool. She goes to Juilliard. You know . . . the music school.’

  Jenny actually has a slight American accent as she says this. She’s still mentally on 42nd Street and clearly it is for her what Oxford Street and the V&A are for me. But I’m still nervous. I check whether Isabelle’s flat was really OK, whether Jenny was approached by any pervy men (I remember Mum’s modelling stories), whether she was bored or lonely or intimidated by all the amazing musical people she met. But no.

  ‘I didn’t get the chance to hang out with Isabelle’s friends. Charlotte Ward and the guys from the workshop looked after me, like, the whole time,’ she says, with her new transatlantic twang. ‘We went out together, we did crazy karaoke together. They told me all their stories about the shows they’ve done, the tours they’ve been on . . . And the singing was awesome. Even better than acting. It was . . .’ she pauses, searching for the right word, ‘. . . it was natural, Nonie. I mean, it was hard to nail the songs in the first place, but once I did, it was like I’d done it all my life. Except, of course, I never have. Not at that level.’ She sounds wistful.

  ‘One day you will,’ I reassure her. ‘You’ll go to drama school
and get some amazing theatre role and they’ll be begging you to go to America. And I’ll be helping Crow and she’ll be designing in some incredible studio in Paris . . .’

  I wait for Jenny to ask me more about the incredible studio in Paris. I’ve been picturing this for a while now. Crow with her own fashion house (we’ll be about thirty by then) and me running it for her. I’ve even worked out what colour we’ll paint the walls – sky blue – and what the logo might look like.

  But instead Jenny asks, ‘Did you know the Queen was only twenty-five when she became Queen?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I say, hoping this will satisfy her so we can get back to Paris.

  ‘There she was, madly in love, new husband, two little children. She just wanted to have a nice family life and ride horses, and suddenly she had to run a country. Not just a country. An empire.’

  ‘Mm hmm.’

  ‘Princess Margaret had a great life, though. Dancing. Cocktails. Friends. And she went to the ballet a lot and hung around with artists. And wore the most beautiful clothes.’

  ‘Mm hmm.’

  I say this in my most uninterested voice, but Jenny still doesn’t get the message.

  ‘Alanna – the girl who was singing Margaret – was absolutely awesome. She’s been in musicals since she was six. If the show ever goes to Broadway and she gets the part, I’m definitely going to watch her do it.’

  ‘Mm hmm.’

  Jenny finally looks at me, surprised.

  ‘You’re not listening, are you?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t there. I’m thrilled, though. Honestly.’

  She sighs.

  ‘So, did anything happen while I was away?’

  ‘Well, Hot Phil thinks Edie’s working too hard and he wants her to go surfing . . .’

  ‘Mm hmm.’

  Jenny is not riveted by the Hot Phil relationship, I can tell.