Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings (2 page)

Today, I’m busy admiring a John Galliano wedding dress when Jenny grabs my hand and yanks it.

“Ow!”

“Look!” she whispers so loudly she might as well shout it.

“What?”

She starts to giggle. “I think Edie’s going to be out of luck today.”

I follow the line of her stare. Sitting in front of my favorite cabinet—the one with the eighteenth-century embroidered court dress—is a little black girl with a satchel and a notebook, who’s busy sketching. I see what Jenny means. The girl is wearing overalls, but they’re swamped by an oversize pink practice tutu and there’s a tattered pair of pink fairy wings slung over her shoulders. She’s topped it all off with a sky-blue crochet beret scattered with beads and fake pearls. London is a trendy fashion capital, but even so, this outfit is distinctive.

She’s staring intently at what she’s doing and doesn’t notice us.

“Should we say something?” Jenny asks.

I shake my head. “Not our problem.”

“But Edie mentioned ‘mega-trouble.’”

“We can’t go up to some stranger and say she needs to be in reading practice. She’d think we were nuts.”

“She’s not exactly supernormal.”

I take this as a personal insult. People who choose to dress differently from the crowd should not be labeled and judged, in my opinion. I sniff in an offended sort of way and walk off. Jenny rushes after me.

“Sorry, Nonie. I didn’t mean … You know what I meant.”

In the café, we drink our smoothies in silence. I’m trying to look hurt, still, but actually I’m feeling guilty. Jenny’s probably right. The girl will be due for some dire punishment and we probably should have helped her. I’m just not as brave about these things as Jenny is.

Jenny’s looking anxious again. In the end, I give in and ask her what the problem is.

“Nothing. Just … thinking about next week, that’s all.”

I feel guiltier still. This is supposed to be a cheering-up day, before all the interviews and publicity and being on her best behavior.

Some fourteen-year-olds would be itching to live the Hannah Montana life and be on a red carpet beside Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive and gorge, seventeen, green-eyed Joe Yule (Joe Drool to the press and the rest of his adoring public). Not Jenny. She seems to
be particularly dreading her big moment, and we’re not making it any easier.

At least her father will be there to keep her company. This is the father who left her mother for his second mistress/third wife when Jenny was two and didn’t acknowledge his daughter’s existence for FIVE YEARS, but he’s been a bit friendlier recently so we’re giving him a second chance.

Despite her father, who’s an ex–theater director, Jenny has wanted to be an actress since she was four. Her imitation of Simon Cowell watching an act he doesn’t like on one of his talent shows is so funny it physically hurts to watch it. She also does the act in question: usually a middle-aged break-dancer or a little poppet who can’t quite hit the high notes. Most times we have to beg her to stop so we can catch our breath.

A couple of years ago she starred as Annie in the school musical. Our school is BIG on musicals and anything theatrical. Some of the kids go straight on to drama school. Jenny was twelve and was acting with children six years older than her. Even so, she was funnier, louder, and more entertaining than any of them. It helped that the part called for a cute redhead with a big voice, but you have to have talent to get that many standing ovations.

One of the parents in the audience turned out to be a casting agent for the movies. Next thing Jenny knew, she was chatting to Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive beside the pool of their glamorous beachside mansion. They were on the lookout for a girl with an English accent to be Joe Yule’s younger sister in their new action movie called
Kid Code
. It’s an adventure about a boy from London who can decipher hieroglyphics:
The Mummy
meets
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, with a teenage hero and unfeasibly attractive parents (guess who).

So off Jenny went to Hollywood, and all around the world on location, chasing baddies, getting chased by baddies, and sharing witty repartee with Joe Drool. As you do.

The trouble was, nobody thought to give her any training in acting for the screen. She’d tell me about it in long e-mails, written late at night after a busy day’s filming. There was hardly any time for rehearsal. You were just supposed to learn your lines and go out there and do them. And she kept on being told
not
to act. Everything she’d learned about doing things bigger onstage she had to unlearn. For the movie camera, she had to do things smaller. The director would tell her to act with her eyes and then go crazy with frustration, shouting
that her eyeballs were “EXHAUSTING HIM WITH THEIR PERPETUAL MOTION.”

And when she wasn’t acting, she said the boredom of just sitting around waiting was unbelievable. There are only so many Sudokus and Mario Kart games you can do before you start to wonder if your brain is melting.

I don’t think Jenny spent a single day on that set being truly happy. And now that filming is finished, every time she meets a journalist, she has to say what a fantastic privilege it was to work with so many talented people and how much she’s looking forward to the movie coming out.

To cheer her up, I put my smoothie aside and lie through my teeth, assuring her that the red dress will be superamazing once she’s got her hair done and her control-top underwear on and everything. She almost believes me.

Then I get her to do a few impressions of recent talent show hopefuls. At first she refuses, but soon she can’t help herself and comes up with a would-be teenage tenor who has me collapsed in giggles. We start to get funny looks from other tables and decide it’s time to leave.

When we get back to the costume section, the girl in the tutu is gone.

Chapter 3

N
ext day, the strangest thing happens.

I’m in the kitchen getting myself a drink when Mum and my brother, Harry, come in to talk about something. The kitchen is the place where stuff usually happens in our house. It’s big, white, and full of designer gadgets that we don’t know how to clean. The table is Italian marble (“Don’t touch it, don’t sit on it, don’t draw on it, and for God’s sake don’t spill anything on it”). The floor is limestone (“Don’t touch it” blah blah blah). The walls, like the rest of the house, are covered in framed photos and paintings. It looks like one of London’s West End art galleries with a cappuccino machine. But it’s actually quite homey when you get used to it.

Harry places some photos down on the table (very carefully) for Mum to look at. Harry’s five years older than me and is studying art at Central Saint Martins, which is THE BEST ART SCHOOL IN THE WORLD. I’d be planning to go there, too, if my sketches didn’t look
like stick figures and my attempts at perspective weren’t like some sort of weird 3-D puzzle. As it is, my ambition is to make tea and do the photocopying for the Olsen twins or Vivienne Westwood, but I haven’t told ANYONE because it would be fashion heaven and I don’t want to jinx it.

At the moment, photography is Harry’s thing. Before that, it was screen printing. I don’t think he’s decided exactly what sort of artist he’s going to be yet, but he’s definitely going to be GOOD.

Harry is Mum’s golden boy. I should be jealous, but I can see what she means. He is supercool, because he doesn’t try. He’s wearing old jeans, frayed by his bike rather than by some designer, a T-shirt from some bearded indie band he saw in a field about three years ago, and flip-flops. His hair is dark brown and curly, like mine, and he keeps forgetting to get it cut, so it flops over his eyes. His voice is low and it always sounds as if he’s about to tell a joke.

I’m pretty sure Edie fancies him, although she won’t admit it. If it wasn’t for the massive age difference, and him being my BROTHER, they’d make a good couple one day, because, like Edie, he’s superkind and, unlike Edie, he’s also quite charming, so he might balance out her diplomacy malfunctions.

Harry takes after Mum, who is still beautiful, even after all these years. She has that bone structure thing that models have (“Cheekbones, darling. What a pity you got your father’s”), and smooth skin, and lips that look as though they’re pumped full of beeswax, but they’re not. Mind you, you should see my granny—she makes Mum look positively ordinary by comparison and she’s old enough to be, well, my granny.

Anyway, Harry’s got the three photos laid out on the kitchen table. He needs to use one for a project he’s doing and he wants Mum’s opinion on which is best.

“The theme’s street style,” he explains. “I’ve been taking pictures of local people who’ve caught my eye.”

The photographs are black-and-white, and Harry has blown them up large. He’s obviously used the fancy new lens he got recently, because the foreground is sharp and the background is very blurry. He’s extremely proud of that lens. I’ve never seen so many blurry backgrounds since he started to use it.

Anyway, we all look at the first photo, which is of a woman in a black burka, with only her eyes showing through a narrow slit in the fabric.

“I wouldn’t exactly call that style,” says Mum. “I’d call that irony. Next.”

She gives Harry a sharp look and he sheepishly pulls forward the next one. Mum starts peering at it through her glasses, but I don’t even notice it because I’ve already spotted what’s on the photo behind it.

“Watch out! Careful!”

Oh no. I realize I’ve spilled my drink in shock and there is water ALL OVER THE MARBLE and getting dangerously close to the burka. Harry gathers up his photos and I’m dispatched for a towel. Mum purses her lips in the way she does.

“What was
that
about?” Harry asks crossly when I’m done mopping up. Thank goodness it wasn’t Coke.

“The girl in your last photo. It’s just … I’ve seen her.”

“I’m not surprised,” he says casually. “I took it near the V&A and you practically live there, don’t you?”

Harry puts the photos back. Mum unpurses her lips and focuses on the last one.

“Oh, this is the best, definitely. Who is it?”

I look at it again, still shocked. The girl is resting against a railing, drawing something out of frame. There are the tutu and the fairy wings. The satchel and the notebook. They’re unmistakable. This is positively creepy.

“I don’t know who she is,” I say, “only that Edie tutors her in reading. I just heard about her yesterday and now I’ve seen her twice. Is this some kind of trick, Harry?”

He shakes his head and looks innocent.

“She told me her name was Crow,” he says.

“Crow what?”

“Just that. Crow. I’d love to shoot her again. She looks so tiny and fragile, but there’s this air of, I dunno, exuberance about her. She photographs beautifully. But she wouldn’t give me her address.”

“I should think not!” Mum bursts out, horrified. “Darling, please do
not
go around asking for the addresses of young girls. You’ll get arrested. Anyway, it’s a very good shot. Excellent use of natural light. Use that one.”

Mum deals in art and photography now and she’s pretty successful, so what she says goes. Harry packs up the photos and I dash upstairs to call Edie and Jenny and tell them all about it.

“Spooky!”

Jenny is suitably impressed. “It must be some sign or something.”

Edie, on the other hand, finds the whole thing perfectly logical and takes it all in stride.

“People like that stand out,” she says calmly. “Once you know to look out for her you’ll start seeing her everywhere. It’s a phenomenon.”

I take her word for it.

“Crow did show up yesterday, by the way,” she continues. “Just in time. She was about to get loads of detentions and a letter to her guardian.”

My guilt for ignoring her yesterday washes over me again.

“You can meet her if you like. It’s her school bazaar next weekend. The day of Jenny’s premiere, but we’ll have time for both. I promised I’d go. Crow’s going to be selling some stuff she makes. And if Harry wants to see her, I’m sure he can come, too.”

As I say, I’ve always suspected that Edie has a soft spot for my brother. I wonder whether this is just a ploy to spend an hour or two in his company. But it seems as though fate is definitely trying to get me to meet this girl. I decide to give in and say yes. I also volunteer to ask Harry.