Star Rider

by Bonnie Bryant

  There was nothing along that aisle but shoe stores.

  “I think we’re turned around,” Stevie said. “We’re headed right for Jeans’ Korner. It’s a great shop for girls’ jeans, but not much for noisemakers.”

  They started to turn around when a couple of girls from the class ahead of Lisa’s emerged from Jeans’ Korner.

  “Oh, it’s Lisa!” the first one nearly shrieked. Her name was Patty, and she was prone to hysterical shrieks. She began running toward Lisa. “Is it true?” Patty asked breathlessly. “Are you really working with Skye Ransom!” She grabbed Lisa’s arm dramatically.

  Lisa flushed with embarrassment. She had no idea what to say.

  Patty seemed to sense this was slightly embarrassing for Lisa. She looked at her friend’s companions, and when she saw “Gavin,” she began to realize what was going on. “Oh!” she shrieked.

  Patty ran to get her friend. It was an escape opportunity The Saddle Club wasn’t going to miss. Everyone looked to Stevie for help.

  “This way!” Stevie hissed. She pulled her two friends and Skye into a perfume shop and dashed toward the rear of it. There was no time to ask questions. Everyone just followed Stevie.

  “Head for bubble bath!” Stevie instructed. They dashed down an aisle, ducked to the right, and turned left, avoiding a clutch of teenage girls trying to decide on a cologne. The racing foursome moved so fast, the teenagers barely noticed them—they hoped.

  Stevie took Skye’s hand and led him and her friends behind a large display for a variety of fruit-flavored bubble baths.

  “We’ll be safe here,” she assured them.

  Carole wasn’t so sure. She peered around the large cardboard fruit tree, trying to look a little bit like a peach. She suspected she wasn’t going to fool anybody. She withdrew into the shadows.

  “Swell,” she whispered. “Will we stay here until midnight, when the mall closes, or will we only have to wait until our parents send out the state police to search for us?”

  “Neither,” Stevie said. “We just have to change our cover.”

  Skye reached into his bag and pulled out the rainbow T-shirt. He slipped it on over Korman’s Exterminating. Then he went into another bag and retrieved one of the silly hats they’d bought for the birthday paty. He put it on. It was hardly a make-over, but it might do the trick. With the makeup he was wearing, he didn’t look much like Skye Ransom, and that was good, but he also didn’t look like the boy the girls had come into the perfume shop with, either.

  “Now, this way,” Stevie said. She pasted an innocent smile on her face and stood up. Her friends joined her. It wasn’t easy for Carole to look as if there were nothing unusual about hiding behind a seven-foot tall cardboard fruit tree, but she did her best. It turned out that nobody was looking.

  Instead of going back up to the front of the store, Stevie went to the other rear corner. There was a door there.

  “Where does it go?” Lisa asked.

  “Out,” Stevie answered simply. She opened it and they all went through it.

  They found themselves in a long, dim corridor with a lot of nondescript doors along it.

  “This must be some sort of back delivery entrance,” Skye observed. It made sense. It also meant that they should be able to get into any number of stores from it—if only they could figure out where the doors led to.

  They began opening them and peering through.

  “Lingerie,” Lisa announced.

  “No way,” Skye said. “Perfume was bad enough. Too many girls and women in those stores.”

  Carole opened the next door. “Movie rental—lots of men are in there. That’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Only if they’re not looking at boxes containing Skye’s movies,” Stevie said.

  “Oh, right.” Carole pulled the door closed.

  Stevie opened the next door. “Nuts,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?” Skye asked.

  “It’s a nut store,” she explained.

  “That sounds right for us,” Carole said.

  “Why? Because it’s full of men?” Lisa asked.

  “No, because I think we’re nuts.”

  The logic was compelling. The four of them slipped through the door and into the little nut shop.

  “I love cashews,” Skye said.

  “So does my dad,” Carole said.

  “Then let’s get some for the party,” Skye suggested. He asked for a pound. “See, shopping for a party isn’t all that hard, is it?” he asked while the man weighed the nuts.

  “It’s not hard at all as long as you’re willing to put on disguises and duck through back hallways in the mall,” Lisa joked.

  “It’s him!” came the all-too-familiar shriek of Patty’s voice.

  “So much for that bright idea,” Stevie said.

  They quickly paid for the cashews, and then the four of them hightailed it right back through the delivery entrance of the nut shop and fled along the hall.

  The whole thing might have been frightening if it hadn’t been so funny. Lisa tried to run, but she became overwhelmed by the ludicrousness of the situation and began giggling helplessly.

  Stevie noticed that Lisa had fallen behind and stopped to wait for her. Carole and Skye turned around. They saw Lisa leaning up against one of the plain gray walls, shaking uncontrollably.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Stevie asked. She sounded very concerned.

  “It’s just all so silly,” Lisa said, lifting her head. Her friends saw then that she was laughing, not crying. “Here we are, with one of the most famous teenagers in the world, hiding behind cardboard trees, slipping in and out of ridiculous costumes, running through empty hallways away from screaming fans. I just keep thinking about the article this would make for Teen Scene magazine.”

  Even under all the makeup he was wearing, it was clear to see that Skye had paled.

  “You wouldn’t …” he uttered.

  “No way!” Lisa assured him. “It’s just that it’s all so silly.”

  “I don’t know how silly it is,” Stevie said. “After all, those girls would tear the clothes off of him if they had a chance.”

  “Not my rainbow tie-dyed or my ‘We get the bugs out!’ T-shirts! I’ll never let them have them!” Skye joked.

  “And I bet this kind of thing happens to you all the time,” Carole said.

  Skye looked at her curiously. Then he looked down at himself, dressed to kill—cockroaches.

  He started laughing just as hard as Lisa. He laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks, smearing his makeup.

  “No,” he said to Carole between giggles. “But I wish it did.”

  That was when Stevie and Carole joined in on the laughter. At that moment everything became funny: Skye’s costume, their hiding place behind the tree, Patty’s shriek, which became even funnier when Lisa described the time Patty had shrieked at a mouse that had gotten loose from the science lab in the school. Then they laughed at the idea that Skye, in his exterminator’s outfit, should have been called in to help. They were totally exhausted from laughter by the time they finally found an exit to the parking lot of the shopping mall and tracked down Skye’s limousine. Still giggling helplessly, they piled into the back of the car and giggled until they could giggle no more.

  THE VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE whizzed by as Skye and The Saddle Club rode back to Willow Creek in Skye’s limousine. Skye opened the cooler and gave each of the girls a soda. They were thirsty after all their adventures in the back alleys of the shopping mall.

  “You didn’t tell us anything about your adventures in front of the camera today,” Stevie said to Lisa. “I mean, was it easier? Did you do everything in one take today like you’ve been doing all week?”

  Lisa felt a sudden letdown. They’d had such fun at the mall that she didn’t like remembering that things really hadn’t gone well on the movie set today.

  “Um, not exactly …,” Lisa began uncomfortably.

  “Oh, I
get it,” Carole said. “You forgot your line. Which was it today? The one about the dog, or just plain ‘Awww’?”

  “Um, well, a couple of things happened, and then there was the rain. We have to go back and shoot some things over tomorrow. It was no big deal, though.”

  She took a long drink of her soda, hoping she had managed to close the subject and hoping Stevie would shift to something else. No such luck, though.

  “Lisa, you’re trying not to tell me something,” Stevie persisted. “What happened?”

  “It was nothing,” Lisa said. “Really.”

  Stevie was one of Lisa’s best friends, and Lisa loved her an awful lot, but there were times when Stevie just couldn’t take a hint. This was one of those times.

  “I know! You tried to steal the scene and Skye’s jealous!” Stevie teased.

  “Stevie, please!” Lisa said, now almost irritated.

  Carole tugged at Stevie’s sleeve. That didn’t work, either. Stevie was about to come up with something else when Skye spoke up.

  “It was a terrible day on the set, Stevie,” he said. “And it wasn’t just because of the rain. Lisa is trying to be nice. She did everything right. I did everything wrong. We were filming an easy scene and I couldn’t get it. I had trouble with Pepper, but that wasn’t all. I had trouble with everything. Oliver is furious with me. We have to hold over the filming until tomorrow, and I’m going to hear an awful lot about how much that is going to cost. Even worse, I’m not at all sure I’m going to do the scene any better tomorrow than I did today. I was not meant to be a horseback rider. Period.”

  Suddenly Stevie was all seriousness. She could tease Lisa, but she’d never tease Skye. “Everybody has days like that,” she said, trying to reassure him.

  “Not me,” he insisted. “I wanted to blame the horse, but it wasn’t really his fault. I was the one who couldn’t control him. I was the one who couldn’t perform, either as a rider or as an actor. I know Oliver was upset.”

  “Oh, come on, Skye,” Lisa said. “You’re being hard on yourself. You just had a bad day. Tomorrow will be another day and it will be better.”

  “When tomorrow comes, I’ll have to get back on Pepper and I’ll have to pretend I’m not frightened. That’s going to call for more acting skill than I have.”

  Lisa felt bad for Skye. She and her friends loved horses and weren’t afraid of them. She hated to think how much fun she would miss if she were afraid of them and didn’t ride. But in Skye’s case, being afraid wasn’t just cutting him out of a lot of fun on horseback, it was interfering with what he did best—and that was acting.

  Stevie had another idea, though. “Sure you’ve got acting skills that you can rely on, Skye, but you’ve got something even more important than that. You’ve got The Saddle Club to rely on.”

  “Hear, hear,” Carole added. Skye smiled. “And now that we’ve taken care of that problem, let’s get on to the bigger one—Dad’s birthday party. After all, it is tomorrow night.”

  “We’ve got hats and nuts,” Lisa said, trying to be optimistic. “What else do we need?”

  “If you want my opinion, the best birthday parties are the classics,” Skye said. “I mean, when I think ‘birthday party,’ I think of games like treasure hunts and Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

  “Oh, come on,” Lisa said.

  “No, really. Or else how about the kind of party where they have a magician?”

  “Dad loves magic shows,” Carole said. “A magician would be just about perfect. And, to tell you the truth, I kind of like the idea of a sort of child’s birthday party for the child in my father.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Stevie confirmed. “Sometimes it seems that the child in your father is about eighty-five percent of him!”

  “Stevie!” Lisa said. “That’s not nice!”

  “Yes, it is,” Carole said. “And it’s true. It’s one of the things that makes Dad so wonderful. The other fifteen percent—the grown-up part—is lovable, too.”

  “And how about the half of him that sometimes drives you crazy?” Stevie asked.

  Carole and Lisa exchanged looks. “No wonder she comes to us for help with her math homework,” Carole said. Stevie had the good grace to smile.

  The glass window separating the girls and Skye from the driver lowered slowly.

  “We’re coming into Willow Creek, Mr. Ransom. Where to first?” the driver asked politely.

  “Once more around the park, James,” Skye said. “We’ve got some planning to do.”

  “Very good, sir,” the driver said. He winked at the four conspirators and made the window rise noiselessly.

  “I think I’m beginning to get the idea of how this is going to work,” Skye said. “Lisa, let’s make a list.”

  Lisa reached into her pocketbook and pulled out her notebook and pencil.

  “Now, here’s how it goes,” Skye began authoritatively. “First thing to put on the list is ‘one magician.’ ”

  Lisa wrote it dutifully, but Carole was more than a little concerned.

  “Where are we going to get a magician?” she asked.

  “And how are we going to pay for it? I mean our budget barely allows for a pound of cashews, much less a full-fledged magician. Maybe, if I could get Dad to let me take some money out of my college account, or even out of the money that I’m using to pay for Starlight’s boarding.… What are you doing?” she asked Skye when she realized that he wasn’t paying any attention at all to her talk about funding the magician.

  Skye was wiggling his fingers nimbly in the air, almost as if he were trying to do some warm-up exercises with them.

  “Yeah, what are you doing?” Stevie asked.

  “Oh, not much,” Skye said. “I was just going to see what that is that you have stuck behind your ear.”

  Then, before Stevie even had time to react, Skye reached for her head, brushed back her long hair, and pulled his hand back, revealing a quarter.

  “And somebody once accused me of being a gold digger,” Skye said. “I’m really much more interested in silver. But sometimes …” He reached for the edge of Carole’s sleeve. “I like copper.” He handed her the penny he had “pulled” out of her sleeve.

  Lisa’s eyes opened wide with wonder. “How did you do that?”

  “A magician never reveals his secrets,” Skye said mysteriously. “He does, however, rise to any occasion on which-his magic arts are required. Did you say something about wanting a magician for your father’s birthday party?”

  “You would?” Carole said, jumping ahead.

  “Why not?” Skye said. “After all, it’s something I can do—unlike riding a horse. And since we have to film tomorrow, I’ll just happen to be around. Do I get an invitation?”

  “Oh, Skye!” Carole said excitedly. “Dad is just going to love it!”

  She flung her arms around the surprised boy and gave him a big hug. He hugged her back.

  IT WAS HARD for Lisa to believe that this was actually going to be her last day of filming. The whole experience had been a little surreal—like a dream that was almost too real—but now it was nearly over. Lisa found she was getting used to the crazy schedule of classes one minute, rehearsals the next, tests, and filming. She was no longer confused by the arrival and departure of students in the class, or upset by retakes, close-ups, and cameras that sometimes traveled on railroad tracks to follow a moving performer. It had somehow all become routine.

  “Lisa, who was the French representative to the peace talks after World War I?” the tutor asked.

  “Georges Clemenceau,” she answered promptly.

  “Is this her last day?” Alicia asked. “I hope so, because she’s showing up the rest of us.” Lisa had the feeling she was only half joking.

  “Lisa applies herself to her studies,” the tutor said. “You might learn from her.”

  The classroom door opened abruptly. John stuck his head in. “Lisa, Skye, you’re wanted on the set. It’s time for the reshoot of scene twenty-t
hree.”

  Lisa and Skye stood up to leave. Lisa couldn’t help noticing a look of great discomfort on Skye’s face. Scene twenty-three was the one where he had to canter up to the stable.

  “You’ll be fine,” Lisa said, not thinking that anybody else would overhear her. She was wrong, though. Alicia overheard her, and she didn’t miss the opportunity to make the best of it.

  “That’s right, Skye. All you have to do is apply yourself,” Alicia said, mimicking the tutor. There were a couple of snickers.

  “Thanks,” Skye said good-naturedly, and then smiled. His grin, which had won the hearts of millions of moviegoers, took the sting out of Alicia’s teasing. “C’mon, let’s go,” he said to Lisa. “Let’s go break a leg.”

  “Pepper’s leg?” Lisa joked.

  Then all the kids in the class laughed. It was clear to everybody that what was wrong with scene twenty-three was between Skye and Pepper.

  MAVERICK GREETED BOTH Lisa and Skye warmly when they arrived at the paddock where the scene was to be shot. Lisa knelt down and gave the dog a big hug.

  “Good, Lisa, that’s just what we want,” Oliver said. “Now let’s hear your line.”

  Lisa looked up, imagining she was seeing Skye on horseback.

  “Beautiful dog!” she said. She was supposed to sound sincere. It wasn’t hard. Maverick was a beautiful dog. He was also licking her ear and it tickled. She laughed.

  “Nice job,” Oliver said, “except cut out the giggle, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lisa said obediently. That meant she was done with her part of the rehearsal. John showed her where to wait in the stable while Skye readied himself for the scene. One of the production assistants walked out of the stable with Pepper. Lisa gave him a reassuring pat. It was her way of telling Pepper to be good to Skye. She thought she ought to give Skye a reassuring pat, too, so he’d be good to Pepper!

  She held Pepper’s bridle while Skye mounted him. While she did that, she rubbed Pepper’s cheek. It was a pat that horses just loved. She thought maybe he smiled at her. That was a good sign. She just wished Skye could smile, too. He looked very uncomfortable. She wanted to help him in any way she could. She wished she could be with him in the woods when he began the canter toward the stable. That would help. Still, there was something …