Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings (4 page)

“I suspected she was being bullied at school,” she says, “but now it’s obvious. No wonder she hates it so much. This is her fourth school already, you know.”

I can’t believe I’m standing in the heart of London’s West End, within camera-phone distance of THE TWO MOST FAMOUS PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, and Edie is talking about school bullies. Only Edie.

“What d’you think of my outfit, by the way?” I ask.

She looks at me appraisingly. “Bizarre, obviously. But not bad. It suits you.”

“It’s Crow’s stuff.”

“No!”

It turns out that the strange nylon things were skirts. They look like nothing at all when they’re folded up, but as soon as you put them on they puff and billow into beautiful shapes. Each one is different. I’ve tried on
all six of them, and tonight I’ve gone for the violet one with points shaped like inverted tulip petals. I’m also wearing the knitted thing I bought, which looked like a lump in the bag but morphed into the warmest, lightest sweater. It’s like wearing a cobweb crossed with a puffer jacket. Perfect for this cloudy weather. And it’s somehow managed to give me hips, which (like cheekbones) I absolutely don’t possess in real life.

More famous people troop across the red carpet. Edie spots a junior cabinet minister. I spot two Black Eyed Peas. Then, finally, yet another car with darkened windows pulls up and a familiar pair of knees emerges from the back door.

“Here she is!” I squeal. Even Edie has the decency to squeal, too.

Gradually, the knees give way to a glimpse of Spanx and the bottom of the cherry tomato. Cameras flash. Holding firmly to the hem of her dress, Jenny inches nervously along the rest of the seat and maneuvers herself out of the car. I can see why finishing schools have classes in this sort of thing.

She stands beside the car, waiting, while a fat old man in a dinner jacket squeezes out beside her. We scream to grab her attention, but everyone else is screaming, too, so she doesn’t hear us. Her hair has been curled
into tight ringlets. Someone has decided it would be a good idea to give her lots of shiny green eye makeup. And whoever did the fake tan got more than slightly carried away. She is orange from the thighs down.

Not so much a cherry tomato anymore. More of a traffic light.

Jenny smiles nervously into the bank of flashing cameras. Fat bloke beside her (her father) takes her by the elbow and some men in black suits with walkie-talkies guide them both toward the red carpet. From the look on her face, it might as well be the guillotine.

Once she’s there, Hollywood’s Sexiest Female Alive gives her a brief wave of acknowledgment. Her husband flashes a smile. Joe Yule, on the other hand, is suddenly busy signing things for a group of fans and talking into their phones.

Jenny’s dad works hard, on the lookout for TV reporters to talk to and grinning madly at anyone with a camera, including the crowd. For a while, Jenny wafts around vaguely in his wake. Finally, she spots our frantic waving and gives us a bit of a smile. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I would swear she looks almost tearful. Then suddenly the men with walkie-talkies are closing in and she’s ushered through the doors and into the cinema. It’s all over.

“How d’you think she looked?” Edie asks. This is, after all, my area of expertise.

I try for a few seconds, knitting my eyebrows with the effort, but nothing will come.

When your best friend has just been standing outside the biggest cinema in Leicester Square, near one of the sexiest women in the world who happens to be dressed in formfitting Armani Privé, sky-high Manolos, and matching husband, and your friend looks like a traffic light, standing next to a fat, baggy guy with fake hair, there is no fashion vocabulary that can adequately capture the moment.

Chapter 6

T
he next day, I’m trying to catch up on some French grammar in the garden when I get a text: In Drchster 1/2 hr break, pls cm nw. HELP!!!!!

Jenny’s doing her promotional tour. She’s installed in the poshest hotel on Park Lane, faced with a stream of journalists who’ve seen the film and want to talk to her about it. She gave me her list of instructions for managing their questions:

• Don’t talk about Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive, except as actors.

• Don’t talk about Joe Yule’s girlfriend (rumors they are splitting up).

• Don’t talk about that incident with the peanut butter, the honey, and the fire extinguisher in Egypt.

• Make sure the film poster can be seen behind you at all times.

• Tell the funny story about the monkey when you were on location in Morocco.

• Don’t say what Hollywood’s Sexiest Female Alive said to the monkey.

And so on for pages and pages. She’s already told the monkey story about fifty thousand times. And she didn’t find it funny the first time. And every journalist’s first question is always about Joe Yule’s girlfriend, so she has to start every interview saying she can’t comment, which she hates. I can imagine that she needs a quick shoulder to cry on, so I shove one of Crow’s skirts over my hot pants (I’m not sure if the Dorchester allows hot pants) and tell Mum where I’m going. Ten minutes later, I’m there.

Edie obviously got a text, too. We meet at Reception. Edie’s in a gray, printed summer dress that covers her knees and matching ballet flats. I doubt she needed to change. She was probably wearing it to do her homework.

“She’s on her way down,” says a tall bloke behind the desk. “You might like to wait outside.” He’s looking at my
legs. It turns out the petal skirt is transparent in daylight and I might as well not have bothered.

But outside’s good. As soon as Jenny sees us, she flings her arms around us and takes us across the road to Hyde Park, where the sun is shining, the grass is endless, and the hot pants seem totally appropriate.

Then she promptly bursts into floods of tears.

She’s clutching some folded sheets of paper. Edie takes them from her and spreads them out. They’re from one of the Sunday papers. On the front page are two pictures: one of Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive looking gorgeous in Armani from last night, and another of Jenny half-hiding behind her dad, looking traffic-light-ish. The headline says:
EXCLUSIVE! THEATRE KNIGHT’S HAPPY ENDING
. Inside is the article. As Jenny sobs on, Edie reads out the opening paragraph:

“‘Last night, Sir Lionel Merritt was proudly accompanying his daughter, Jenny, on the red carpet at the premiere of the new blockbuster
Kid Code
. As the cameras flashed and the stars posed, few people could imagine the great man’s recent heartache, and the happiness he has finally found with the woman who rekindled the flame in theatre’s
enfant terrible
. …’”

It turns out that Sir Lionel has decided that now’s the time to leave his third wife for his latest mistress, and Jenny’s premiere is the ideal way of getting the publicity to finance the divorce and the “exquisite Cotswolds home” he’s setting up with wife-to-be number four. There’s an awful lot about Sir Lionel and his various stage productions thirty years ago, but newspapers need family appeal, so he’s padded it out with the few bits of Jenny’s childhood he was around for, her mother’s “tragic” nervous breakdown (which coincidentally happened around the time he left her for wife three), and Jenny’s embarrassment about her boobs, zits, and weight. He rounds it off by wishing her well and promising he’ll always stick by her, as “theatre is in the Merritt blood.”

Edie finishes the article with a look of disbelief.

“That man is evil!”

“He’s just … Dad, I guess,” Jenny mumbles. She’s at the hiccuping stage now. “He needed the money. The funny thing is, he invited me to that country house in the Cotswolds last night. He said if I wanted to spend the summer there, I could. It sounded quite nice. Mum wants to murder him, of course.”

I look back down at the paper.

“Has anybody mentioned it?” I ask. “Today, I mean. In there.” I indicate the Dorchester, across the road.

Jenny looks at me as though I’ve gone barmy.

“
Mentioned
it? I was all ready with the lousy monkey story. I was geared up to talk about Joe Yule’s incredible talent till I was blue in the face. And all they’ve asked me all morning, for the last four hours, is ‘What’s it like growing boobs when you’re in the public eye?’ ‘What do you use for your zits?’ ‘Have you got any messages for fat teenage girls?’ ‘What’s it like growing up with a famous father?’ And I don’t even know, ‘cause he was never there.”

I look at her, hunched up on the grass, makeup streaming. (She doesn’t normally wear it, but they slap it on thick for those TV interviews.) She’s in her usual jeans and some black cotton top they’ve given her, which billows over the boobs while suggesting that underneath its capacious covering they may be the size of hot-air balloons. A large, fierce pimple has emerged on her cheek since last night and is sitting there defiantly, soaking up the midday sun.

“Anyway,” she says, desperate to change the subject, “what did you think of yesterday?”

There’s a long pause while I will Edie not to mention
the traffic-light effect. Luckily, she’s distracted before she can say anything. A bus is heading down Park Lane with a picture of Jenny’s face on it, six feet high, beside Joe Yule’s. She looks spotless. Literally. And supermodel thin. It’s kind of surreal to see her this way. Especially as real, runny-makeup Jenny is sitting beside us. Edie bobs up and down and points. We look over.

“They airbrushed me!” Jenny says, affronted. “They even airbrushed my neck! I would’ve said that was the one bit of me that wasn’t fat or broken-out, but they had to airbrush that.”

Edie and I exchange despairing looks. Our cheering-up job isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I absentmindedly play with the petals of my new skirt while I try to think of something positive to say.

“That’s unusual,” Jenny says at last, looking at the skirt. “Did you make it?”

Relieved at the chance not to talk about
Kid Code
or Sir Lionel Merritt for a moment, we tell her all about the bazaar. Edie explains about The Three Bitches. I butt in with Edie’s superamazing rescue mission and the library card. We both interrupt each other. Jenny’s eyes swing between us as if she’s watching a tennis match. By the time we’ve finished, her eyes have dried and her streaky face is smiling.

“If only you
had
been from
Teen
magazine.”

We all look a bit helpless for a minute. We are so NOT from
Teen
magazine. If it exists, even.

“Those girls have to be stopped, though. I’m going to complain to the people I volunteer with,” Edie says, miffed. “There must be something they can do.”

“I think her main problem was the nylon,” I add.

Edie and Jenny both look at me as though I’ve completely lost it.

“How can I help?” Jenny asks Edie. She’s obviously given up on me as a lost cause.

This is tricky. Jenny’s going to be out of the country for the next few weeks.

“Maybe you could e-mail her descriptions of what people are wearing in New York and Tokyo?” I suggest. “To give her ideas for making stuff.”

Edie maintains her pitying look.

“She can hardly read and she hasn’t got a computer. Apart from that, brilliant.”

I’m crushed.

“Maybe you could bring her back stuff, then,” I mumble.

“It’ll do as a start,” Jenny says. Then she suddenly realizes that she’s overrun her break time and is hopelessly late.

“I’m in such big trouble!” she wails dramatically, then giggles. “What can they do to me, though? Edit me out of the film?”

We accompany her back to the hotel’s reception area, where FOUR PR people are standing in their black suits, on various phones and BlackBerries, looking out nervously for her. It’s like being met by four angry parents after missing curfew. Much as we love her, we leave her to it. She doesn’t seem to mind too much. She’s used to it by now.

It’s only later, back in the sunshine, that I realize I forgot to ask her about Joe Yule. Something strange was happening on that red carpet yesterday. Was he deliberately avoiding her? Too late now. I know she won’t trust anything sensitive to texts or e-mails while she’s away—she’s been warned about them being intercepted. Honestly, knowing a couple of Hollywood stars is like joining the CIA. So it may be a while until I finally wheedle the truth out of her.

Chapter 7

I
t’s near the end of the school year, so exams are over, classes are winding down, and homework is minimal. This gives Edie plenty of time to think about The Three Bitches.

“I’ve told the people in the guidance counselor’s office,” she informs me one day in math. “But I’m not convinced they can do very much. The one thing they did say was that Crow needs more friends. I’d have thought that was obvious. They suggested I should try to befriend her more. I’ve tried, but we don’t really have much in common.”

She gives me a look and the light comes on in that superbrain of hers. For once, I’m right there with her.

“Invite her over,” I say. “She can come anytime.”