“Bad,” I managed to say as I scraped back the remaining empty chair they had been saving for me. “Really bad.”
“No, it didn’t! I’m sure it didn’t,” Miss Greenstreet said kindly, patting the back of my hand. “I’m sure you were wonderful. I’m sure that all of you girls were just wonderful.”
It was then that I burst into tears.
“So remember what we said?” Mum said, picking up my fork, piling it high with risotto and then aiming it at my mouth. She did this, my mum, sometimes: when things were especially difficult, she’d forget the intervening twelve years and ten months since my birth and treat me like a baby again, even down to spoon-feeding me. I looked at the fork and then at her, and she laid it back in the bowl.
“What did we say?” she said gently, refusing to let go of babying me completely.
“That it’s not the end of the world,” I recited, seriously unconvinced.
“Because you did your best, didn’t you? And that’s all you can do, isn’t it?” Mum added in the slow, soft voice she used to comfort me with when I grazed my knees.
“I know,” I said darkly.
“And there will be other chances,” Mum said. “Lots of them.”
“Yes,” I said heavily. “There will be other chances.”
“And after all,” Mum seemed determined to wade on through her pep talk despite my total failure to be pepped up by it, “you have to get used to lows as well as highs if you want to be an…”
“An actor!” I snapped. “Yes, I do know, Mum!” I sighed and slumped in my chair, pushing my bowl of risotto away from me so that it slid to a stop by Everest’s neat little paws. He licked his lips.
There was no point in being angry with Mum. She wasn’t the one who had messed up the audition so badly that it could well go into the number one slot of the Top Ten All-Time Most Messed-up Auditions Chart.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” I said. “It’s just, well, I know all about taking rejection and getting used to it and picking myself up and dusting myself off and getting ready for the next challenge; we have classes on it at school. After all, one of the reasons I left Kensington Heights was so that I could experience all of that—stretch myself, find new challenges. But, well…I suppose I didn’t expect it to happen to me. Not really.” I chewed at my bottom lip. “Maybe it means that I can’t act. Maybe I’m really rubbish, after all. I only ever really played myself in Kensington Heights.”
It was true. When I left the show, my character Angel was a quite shy, not very popular and ever-so-slightly-dumpy thirteen-year-old—and so was I. I thought that if I played another character, one like Polly Harris, I might change too. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Ruby, you are not rubbish,” Mum said, using her old no-nonsense voice again. “You are wonderful! Look, you had one bad audition—it’s not…”
“The end of the world,” I finished for her, suddenly wishing more than anything that it was because anything—even an apocalypse—would be preferable to having to go to school in the morning.
“Oh, shut up, Menakshi,” Anne-Marie said as we walked back in from netball practice the next day, dogged by Menakshi Shah and Jade Caruso, who had been compulsively teasing me since news got round about my terrible audition. “What do you know anyway?” Anne-Marie snapped at them. “Neither of you two were even good enough to get into the first audition.”
“Well, we should have been,” Menakshi said sharply. “At least I wouldn’t have chucked up everywhere—in front of Art Dubrovnik! Not quite as professional as you think, are you, Ruby? What’s it like being one of the crowd again now you’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame? Ready for a lifetime of lame?” She and Jade cackled like a pair of witches.
“Well, at least her fifteen minutes was in a top-rated soap and not in a nit commercial, Jade,” Nydia said, joining us from the bench where she had been first sub again. “And it was much longer than fifteen minutes that Ruby was famous for.”
Jade laughed. “Peaked too soon, that’s your trouble,” she teased me. “For the rest of us things can only get better; for you it’s downhill all the way. Career over at thirteen—what a shame.”
“Jade.” Anne-Marie stepped in front of the other girl so that her pretty little nose was about two millimetres from Jade’s, and she snarled at her like a tiger. “I told you to shut up, all right?” For a moment Anne-Marie showed all her old qualities that Nydia and I had known and feared last school year, back when she had been our mortal enemy. I never thought we would end up being friends, but it was just before I decided to leave Kensington Heights, and I had just found out I had this kiss scene with Justin de Souza, who I used to really, really fancy. I had never kissed anybody before in my life, so I sort of panicked, and Nydia said the only thing to do was to get training from someone who definitely had kissing experience. And the only person we knew who definitely had kissing experience was Anne-Marie. We had to bribe her to help us, and even then it was extremely scary, very emotional and rather dramatic. And somehow at the end of all that the three of us ended up as best friends. Which meant it was easy to forget that Anne-Marie could still be totally ruthless, completely hard and the fastest insult-hurler in the school when she wanted to be. I was relieved that she was our friend now instead of our mortal enemy. They seemed like much more appealing characteristics to have in a friend, especially when I had Menakshi and Jade crowing in my face.
“One more word and…” Anne-Marie said in a low, soft voice. She didn’t have to add anything else to the sentence. Just her tone made Jade and Menakshi fall back into their pack to carry out further bitching at a safe distance, while the three of us stalked across the fields towards the academy.
“Thanks,” I said to Anne-Marie.
“No worries,” Anne-Marie said, all sunshine and smiles again. “Look, everybody will stop talking about it soon, won’t they, Nyds?”
“Yes,” Nydia said, dropping her arm round my shoulders and giving me a squeeze. “Soon no one will be interested in you at all. I mean they will,” she added hastily. “But in a good way.” I lifted my chin and made myself smile at my two friends.
“It’s OK anyway,” I lied. “I’m fine about it now, really I am. I don’t care any more at all. Not a bit. And I’m the one that messed up. There’s a really good chance that you two might get called back for a second audition. So I’m rooting for you two now. As long as one of us three gets it then it will be brilliant!”
I didn’t feel as upbeat as I sounded but I didn’t want to spoil it for Anne-Marie and Nydia, making them walk on egg shells around me, pretending that they didn’t mind either way if they got a part in a Hollywood movie.
“Really?” Anne-Marie asked me, jumping on my words. “Oh, good, because I’ve been dying to show you two this.” She dug into the pocket of her gym skirt and brought out a folded-up clipping. “It’s from Hiya! Bye-a!” she said, referring to her favourite celebrity magazine. “It’s about the film, Ruby. I didn’t want to make you feel bad by looking at it in front of you and it felt wrong to look at it behind your back, but if you really are OK…You sure you don’t mind us looking at it?”
I made myself laugh happily. If only I had been this good at acting during the audition.
“Of course not!” I said cheerily.
She handed me the clipping and I unfolded it. The title read: “Imogene shouts ‘Action!’ for her next big role.”
“You read it out,” I said,