Rebecca's Rules (5 page)

‘No, no, NOOO!’

It was Vanessa. ‘They didn’t cheer!’ she screeched. ‘They’re all meant to be cheering and they didn’t! Just the ones at the steps were cheering!’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Sarah in a soothing sort of voice, like she was talking to a maniac who had to be kept calm in case she went on a killing spree. Which I suppose she was. ‘We’ll do it again. Okay, everyone from St Dominic’s, this time I want you to all cheer and jump up and down when Vanessa comes down. Okay?’

We all just stared at her. A few people mumbled, ‘Okay …’

‘Right,’ said Sarah. ‘Let’s get the tank back to the bottom of the drive and reshoot.’

The tank rumbled off. Cass, Alice and I stared at each other.

‘I’m not cheering for that goon,’ said Cass.

‘What do you think will happen if we don’t?’ I asked. ‘Maybe Vanessa will turn the tank on us. I wouldn’t put it past her.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Alice, bravely. ‘One of my great-grand-dads was shot for standing up to the Nazis! If he can do that, we can stand up to Vanessa.’

‘Well, when you put it like that …’ I said.

‘Alice,’ said Cass, ‘I don’t think you can really compare
standing up to Vanessa to standing up to Hitler.’

‘I know,’ said Alice. ‘That’s my point. If he was brave enough to stand up to fascism, we can do this little thing. Who’s with me?’

It was very inspiring, to be honest. I crossed my arms and clamped my mouth shut so it would be very obvious that I wasn’t cheering.

‘But maybe,’ said Ellie, who was next to us, ‘if we don’t cheer they’ll keep making us do it again and again until we give in. And I’m freezing. To be perfectly honest, I will do anything to get indoors.’

‘Oh,’ said Cass.

Ellie was right, it was very cold. The tank was coming back up the drive again, and as it approached Jessie and Ellie and Emma started going ‘Whoo hoo!’ in a sort of sarcastic way. Alice kept her mouth shut and folded her arms. Cass and I decided to compromise and clapped very, very slowly. I hope Alice’s great-granddad wasn’t looking down on us from heaven in disgust at our cowardice.

Luckily, enough people were cheering to please Princess Vanessa, and when she got to the steps she waved and cried, ‘Hi, everyone! Great to see you all!’ as if she hadn’t just seen
us all two minutes earlier when she’d been screaming at us like a psychopath. A sparkly pink ladder was produced and Vanessa got out of the tank and climbed down it. Her dress was very tiny and glittery, and she was wearing gold shoes with red soles. She went up the steps and all the glossy music and theatre people started squealing and jumping around and hugging her.

‘Hey, where’s Caroline?’ said Cass, which was a good question. We thought Caroline was Vanessa’s best friend, but now she was nowhere to be seen.

‘Wait,’ said Emma. ‘There she is, look! Behind that orange girl in the black dress.’

Caroline was at the back of the crowd of music and theatre people. She was just standing there while Vanessa hugged and squealed at the others.

We all felt a bit sorry for her, to be honest. Her devotion to Vanessa is annoying, but the least she deserved was to be, like, acknowledged at Vanessa’s stupid party. She was wearing a very nice dress, but she looked a bit uncomfortable. She certainly wasn’t shrieking as much as the others. Suddenly Vanessa grabbed her and gave her a giant hug. From a distance, it was hard to tell whether it was a real hug or whether she was just
doing it for the camera. I’d like to think Vanessa appreciates Caroline, even though both of them are pretty irritating.

Then Sarah appeared and told us all to go into the main hall. Vanessa and her mysterious new friends led the way and strutted into the building as the rest of us followed behind (not strutting).

The hall was a big room panelled in wood with a small stage at one end between two sweeping flights of stairs. There were giant pink bean bags in the corners.

‘This is actually not as fancy as I expected,’ said Cass. ‘I thought there’d be, like, a throne, or something.’

Then, suddenly, Vanessa was up on the stage with a microphone in her hand. It wasn’t an ordinary microphone, though, like the ones we use at gigs. It was bright pink and sparkly and it wasn’t attached to a lead and an amplifier.

‘Hi, everyone!’ Her voice boomed from the speakers on each side of the stage thing. ‘Thank you SO much for coming! It means so much to me!’

‘It means so much to me to be on telly, more like,’ muttered Cass.  ‘Like she cares whether any of us came or not. We’re just here to yell and make the room look full.’

‘Ssssh,’ said Ellie. ‘If we talk over her, she’ll have another
tantrum and do it again and we’ll be here all day.’

‘Good point,’ said Cass.

‘At least we’re indoors,’ said Emma. ‘And warm. Which is better than ten minutes ago.’

Then we all shut up because Vanessa had obviously noticed that people were talking. She looked like she could be on the verge of another fit of rage, and none of us wanted that.

‘I just want to say,’ she said, ‘that you’re all very welcome to my big … birthday … bash!’

And then we all did shriek because about a million shiny pink balloons suddenly fell down on top of our heads. None of us had looked up at the ceiling when we came in because we were so busy wondering about Vanessa and her mysterious new friends, so we hadn’t noticed the balloons up there.

‘There is a LOT of pink at this party already,’ said Cass, fighting her way through some balloons.

‘And we haven’t even got to the pony yet,’ I said.

‘That pony had better turn up,’ said Cass, ‘or I’m going to be very disappointed.’

Terrible cheesy music started to play, and all Vanessa’s new friends started whooping and dancing around. I looked at Cass and Alice.

‘This is going to be a very long day,’ said Alice.

‘Ooh, look!’ said Ellie. ‘Food! And drinks!’

Waiters in pink uniforms were moving through the crowd, carrying trays. Some were filled with glasses of fizzy drinks, others with lots of delicious-looking canapé things. We grabbed some Cokes and – yes! Mini-burgers! – and watched the crowd. Some girls from our class were dancing, but most were just standing around wondering what to do. All the cameras were on Vanessa’s new chums, though. They were laughing and throwing their hair around and high-fiving each other.

‘They don’t look real,’ said Alice. ‘I mean, they’re like characters from
Laurel Canyon
or something.’

‘They can’t live in our neck of the woods,’ I said. ‘We’d have noticed them by now.’

‘Yeah, because one of them would have hit us in the face with her ginormous shiny mane,’ said Cass. ‘They’re flicking their hair around so much they’ll put someone’s eye out.’

‘In fairness,’ said Emma, chomping on a mini-burger, ‘the food is pretty good.’

Emma was right. We sat in a corner on one of the giant pink beanbags and stuffed our faces and talked. It was quite fun for a while.

‘You know, even though the music’s pretty awful,’ I said, ‘this isn’t so bad. I mean, there’s mini-burgers, and bean-bags …’

‘And dancing goons,’ said Cass, pointing at the glossy gang, who were pouting at the cameras. ‘Speaking of goons, where’s Vanessa?’

She was nowhere to be seen. Poor Caroline was dancing slightly awkwardly next to all the hair-flickers, but there was no sign of her ruler. Then the music stopped.

‘Ooh, maybe the pony’s coming!’ said Cass. There was a trumpeting sound, and the two big doors at the end of the hall opened (some more cameras were already directed in that direction). Loads of smoky dry ice floated out the doorway, lit by pink spotlights. I have to admit, I did hope the pony was about to appear.

Then a booming voice cried, ‘All hail Princess Vanessa!’ And suddenly Vanessa appeared in the doorway. She had changed into a long flowing sparkly dress like something Alice’s Barbie had when we were little (I never had a Barbie because my mother didn’t believe in them. She thought Barbie was a bad role model for little girls. And after seeing Vanessa today, I had to admit for the first time that she might have had a
point). As if the Barbie dress wasn’t mad enough, she was also

wearing a crown. ‘Oh my GOD,’ said Cass. ‘Are we expected to, I dunno, bow down and worship her now?’

‘I certainly hope not,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m not doing it even if we are,’ said Alice. ‘I’d rather die.’

‘I don’t think you’re going to have to choose between death and worshipping Vanessa,’ I said. Although really, if Vanessa had her own way, I’m pretty sure she’d love to shoot anyone who didn’t do whatever she wanted.

Vanessa was waving regally to the crowd, most of whom were just gawping at her. The dancing goons, of course, were cheering and whooping and jumping up and down. I bet they have no voices left tomorrow.

‘Come!’ cried Vanessa. ‘Come and join the revels at my fairytale ball!’ And she turned around and swept into the next room, her flowing skirt fluttering after her.

‘Her WHAT?’ said Cass.

‘Has she actually gone mad?’ said Emma. ‘I think she has. This is great.’

We all followed the rest of the guests into the next room.
And I have to admit, I was impressed. It was a giant old-fashioned ballroom, with big old gold-framed mirrors on the walls, and there were little twinkling lights everywhere. The lights were all pink and purple and people were throwing glitter down from a sort of balcony thing high up above the entrance so the light was all sparkly. There was a band at one end of the room playing swirly classical music.

‘Wow,’ said Alice.

‘Okay,’ said Cass. ‘This is kind of cool. Ooh, look, I think there’s actually a throne over there!’

Then Vanessa popped up on yet another podium/stage thing with a microphone on it (there seemed to be one in every room) and said, ‘Let the fairytale princes sweep you away!’ And then, as romantic music started to play, we realised there were all these strange boys in posh suits standing around the room. They started coming up to people and asking them to dance. As the cameras rolled, one of the fairytale princes whispered something in Karen Rodgers’s ear, and a moment later she was whirling around the dance floor.

‘Oh my God,’ said Alice. ‘Has she … hired people to dance with our class?’

‘I hope none of them come near us,’ I said.

‘This is like when you go to a pantomime and someone comes off the stage into the audience and tries to get people to join in,’ said Cass. ‘In other words, my worst nightmare. Can we hide somewhere?’

Luckily, in all the dry ice and pink sparkly glitter, it was easy for me, Cass, Alice, Jessie, Ellie and Emma to sneak back into the hall. Everyone else was in the ballroom so it was nice and peaceful out there. We kicked our way through the balloons and over to a pile of beanbags. But when we reached the bags there, to our surprise, was a girl we’d never seen before. She was lying on a beanbag eating a mini-burger.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, sitting up.

‘Um, hello,’ said Alice. ‘Why aren’t you in the ballroom?’

‘I think I’ve done my duty for one day,’ said the girl.

‘What do you mean?’ said Ellie.

The girl looked at us. ‘Are you good friends of Vanessa?’

None of us said anything. We didn’t want to tell the truth, in case this girl was one of Vanessa’s best mates or her cousin, or something.

‘I’ll take that as a no,’ said the girl. She had a round, friendly face and glossy black hair with a very nice sleek fringe, the sort of fringe I wish I could have but never can because of my
stupid weird half-wavy hair. ‘Well, I’m not a friend of Vanessa either. I’m in her dancing and theatre class. Or at least, the class she joined a month ago. She came along to learn how to do a special dance for this crazy party, and she got a bunch of people from the class to come along to the party to dance around in front of the cameras.’

We all stared at each other. So that’s where the shiny orange people had come from.

‘So why aren’t you, well, dancing around in front of the cameras?’ asked Alice.

‘Hmmm,’ said the girl. ‘It’s not really my sort of thing. I mean, I like dancing, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be in the class, but not … well, not dancing at a mad stranger’s party, pretending I’m her best mate. No offence,’ she added quickly, ‘if you are her best mates.’

‘We’re not,’ said Cass firmly. ‘I’m Cass, by the way.’

‘I’m Jane,’ said the girl.

‘So none of those dancing people are Vanessa’s friends?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it,’ said Jane. ‘She’s only been going to the class for about a month. She said she wanted all of us to come to her party cos she wanted there to be – these are her words, not mine
– at least a few people who looked good in front of the camera.’

We all stared at each other.

‘Well!’ said Alice.

‘Just when you thought she couldn’t get any worse,’ said Cass.

‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t think she was including me in that group,’ said Jane. ‘I just don’t think she had the nerve to tell me to go away. Although,’ she added, ‘I think she might have wanted me in there as the token Asian girl. You know, to make everything look glamorous and multicultural and stuff.’

‘That does sound like the sort of thing Vanessa would do,’ agreed Cass.

‘I should probably warn you, she’s got us all to do something really terrible later,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t tell you, though, because it’s top secret and if it got out that anyone knew, she’d probably have me shot.’

‘I knew it,’ said Alice.

Even though we were all horrified by Vanessa’s awfulness, it was kind of fun sitting out there. The whole thing was so weird and unlike our normal daily life that I had totally forgotten to think about Paperboy. It was like the olden days before my heart was broken and I became a miserable shell of
a girl. We were all just laughing and messing about. Maybe if we had a crazy big party every day – or even every week – I’d feel like me and Cass and Alice were properly close again.

Jane was really cool. It turns out that she’s from Glasnevin, like Vanessa, and she’s known Vanessa since she was tiny (the rest of us have only had to put up with Vanessa for the last year and almost-a-half, but poor Jane has had fourteen years of her). Vanessa’s mum and Jane’s mum are friends, which is how Mrs Finn found out about the dancing and theatre and whatever-it-is class.