Musical Star (10 page)

“A guy your bedroom walls are a shrine to,” Talitha said.

“Anyway,” Dakshima said, firmly turning to Nydia, “I wish we were allowed to have our mobiles because I’d vote for you right now.”

“Don’t worry,” Nydia said. “My mum’s got the whole
of our family promising to vote at least five times, and I’ve got a big family!”

Just as we were nearing the door of the ladies loo, Danny walked up the corridor. He saw me and I saw him, and then we both looked at something else – him at the floor and me at the picture of the stick lady on the toilet door.
Typical I should see him now,
I thought furiously.

Only Danny didn’t walk past me, he stopped.

I looked at Dakshima whose brows were sky high, and then with some effort I looked at Danny. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Danny said, glancing at Dakshima and the other queuing girls, who were open-mouthed from first seeing Sean Rivers and now Danny Harvey in the flesh. “Could I have a word?”

I considered my position. I’d been in the queue for so long that I now actually did need to go, but while I was happily able to chat to Sean, there was no way that I could speak to Danny in the line for the loo. I’d just have to hold on.

“OK,” I said, stepping out of the line. “See you in a minute,” I said to Dakshima as I followed Danny a little further down the corridor.

“Congratulations, by the way,” Danny said. “On getting in the chorus. It seems that you can’t quite leave show business alone after all.”

“Danny, I—” I began defensively.

“That’s not what I wanted to say,” Danny interrupted. “I want to say sorry for the other night. For assuming you’d come round to tell me you still liked me. I mean, of course you don’t still like me. I behaved like a right idiot. And I’m sorry about that too, but I wanted you to know that I really haven’t let
Kensington Heights,
the number one single or anything go to my head, not really. I’m still me and I always will be, even if I get this part.”

I looked at him for a long moment. “I know you’re still you,” I said. “And I’m sorry too for stomping off like that.”

“So why did you come over?” Danny asked me.

“I…” There was absolutely no way I could tell him the truth. Not after he’d made such a sweet speech telling me that he was still him. How could I say, “Actually, no, you’re not you, you’re a fake, only you don’t know it.”

“I came round because I thought it would be nice to say hi, wish you good luck, that sort of thing,” I told him.

“That’s really nice to know,” Danny said. “That’s…really nice.”

“Well, good luck then,” I said.

“Thanks, Ruby,” Danny said. “See you around.”

I raced back to the toilet to find the queue almost gone, as Carmen Baptista appeared at the end of
the corridor and called for us all to go back and take our places. The results were in.

This time, as the twelve finalists stood on their mark, there was tense and scary
dum-de-dum
music, which sounded like the beat of a heart on the verge of an attack. Brianna told everyone how many votes had been cast and that it had been a really close run thing. And then she prepared to announce which four finalists had won the lead parts in
Spotlight! The Musical.

“And the winner who will play the part of Serena is…”

“If she waits any longer I’ll have turned fourteen,” Dakshima whispered to me half way through the gigantic pause.

“Anne-Marie Chance!” Brianna read out. Anne-Marie leapt up about two metres in the air and screamed her head off in a most unladylike fashion. She skipped over to Brianna and waited as Brianna prepared to announce who would be playing opposite Anne-Marie.

“The part of Jake goes to…David Rubenfeld!” Massive cheers from the crowd.

I held my breath as I waited to see who would get the role of Arial. Maybe it wouldn’t be Jade. I still hoped and prayed that Nydia’s name would be called out.

The pause before Brianna read out the name seemed to go one forever. Then…

“Jade Caruso!”

My eyes darted over to Nydia, who dropped her head for a second before squaring her shoulders and smiling again.

“How did Nydia not win that?” Talitha said, unable to contain herself despite feeling Carmen’s watchful eyes on us. “She was the best singer by miles! What’s wrong with people?”

“It’s down to the public vote I suppose,” Dakshima said, glancing uneasily at me. “She should have won it. She blew Jade away.”

Finally Brianna announced the part of Sebastian. The heartbeat tension music was ramped up another level and this time Brianna’s pause seemed to go on for all eternity.

Finally she read out, “Danny Harvey!” and was drowned out by the rapturous applause.

As happy as I was for Danny, I found it hard to join in. Maybe it was wrong, but I could have taken the cheating if Nydia
and
Anne-Marie had got a part, but Nydia hadn’t. And it just wasn’t fair that she should lose out to a fake performance. And I was sure that if the voters at home knew that then they’d feel the same way.

“And finally,” Brianna said, “all that remains is for our winning chorus to sing us out with our four new leads, with the theme song from the show
Spotlight!
We’ll see you all again in a month for the charity premiere performance of
Spotlight!
right here in this studio. And don’t forget to catch up with the behind the scenes show bringing you all the action and gossip from the rehearsals –
Spotlight!: Change the Bulb
every weeknight at 5 p.m.” Brianna gestured at us all, waiting on our marks to sing the closing number. “Take it away guys…!”

“I’m really glad our choir has won the competition and everything,” I whispered to Dakshima out of the corner of my mouth under the swell of the music. “But I never imagined I’d end up singing in a chorus on stage with my worst enemy and ex-boyfriend.”

“Must be all that positive thinking you’ve been doing,” Dakshima said. “Like Anne-Marie says, it always pays off in the end.”

We sang the final song and as soon as Carmen let us leave the set, I raced off to find Nydia. I had to tell her everything so that she wouldn’t feel so bad.

“Where are you going?” Dakshima chased after me, catching my arm. I told her my plan.

“Don’t do that,” Dakshima said.

“What? Why not – we have to sort this out
now,”
I
protested. “We can’t pretend we don’t know any more, Dakshima. Not now.”

“OK,” Dakshima said. “Maybe you’re right. We do have to find some way to sort this out. But if we tell Nydia and she tells her mum and dad, what do you think is going to happen? They’ll find a way to make it look like we got it wrong or that we’re making it up. You and I are the only two people who know we know the truth and we need to keep it that way, for now anyway.”

“What shall we do then?” I asked her, anxiously.

“I don’t know yet,” Dakshima said. “But we’ve got just over four weeks of rehearsal ahead. We’ll think of something. I promise.”

Int. Day. The Rehearsal room at The School of Performing Arts. ARIAL enters stage right, picks up a bag she had forgotten. Turning she sees SEBASTIAN practising at the barre. Their eyes meet and there is an awkward moment.

Arial, I didn’t see you there.

(Holding up bag.) I forgot my bag.

(Walks to centre stage.) Are you OK after today’s lesson? Mrs Kaminski was pretty tough on you.

I’m OK, it’s just hard, I guess, being the new girl. Compared to all of you, I feel like such an amateur.

(Taking a couple of steps nearer.)That’s crazy talk. You won a scholarship to be here. You deserve this more than anyone else because you’ve already proved how talented you are.

Do you really think so?

(Taking Arial’s hand.) Sure. Listen…

(Cue intro music to ‘STARLIGHT DREAMS’)

Dakshima’s dad took us to our first full day of rehearsals the Saturday after the live show. The rehearsal rooms were around the corner from the TV studios.

Spotlight!
was written with hardly any sets or complex scenes to learn. Mick Caruso hoped that after all the publicity from the TV premiere it would be performed in every school across the country, and the rights income he earned from that would add to his millions. If it really took off big time, he planned to make a movie of it the following year.

Because we were all under sixteen there were only so many hours of rehearsal we were allowed to do before the TV premiere. Two afternoons after school during the week, and one full day at the weekend. David Rubenfeld, who normally lived in Scotland, was staying in a hotel with one of his parents, and a tutor to keep him up to speed with his schoolwork. As the rest of us lived in London, we got to keep going to our normal schools and living at home. We were all a bit miffed about that as we
wouldn’t have minded staying in a hotel and ordering pizza and fries on room service.

What I wasn’t prepared for as I walked into the rehearsal room was the camera crew. “Why are they here?” I asked Anne-Marie, who had already arrived and was stretching her legs at the barre.

“Another TV spin off,” Anne-Marie said. “They’re filming us to see if a bunch of kids can really perform a brand new musical live on TV after only a month of rehearsal. I expect they’ll be trying to create loads of tension and hoping we cry. But I’m not going to. Why would I? I’ve done school plays that are harder than this. All the minor roles are already cast and they’ve been rehearsing for weeks. All we’ve got to do is slot in and outshine them. Easy.”

I looked across the large, light, mirrored room to where a group of actors I hadn’t seen before eyed us suspiciously.

“Is that them?” I asked.

Anne-Marie nodded. “They don’t like us at the moment. They think we are a bunch of amateurs who don’t deserve our parts. Us, Ruby,
amateurs?
You go and ask how many of
them
have made a Hollywood movie – go on.”

“I’d rather not,” I said. “And besides, none of us have
done anything like this before, not professionally. I haven’t even done it at school. I never got picked for musicals.”

I glanced over that the film crew and was dismayed to see that the camera was pointed directly at Anne-Marie and me.

So far through this whole experience no one had seemed to notice that ex-child star Ruby Parker was in Highgate Comprehensive school choir, which just went to show, I supposed, how very ordinary I was when everyone wasn’t looking out for me.

I’d asked Mr Petrelli to just fill my name in on the form as R. Parker. And in the edited highlights they showed at the live final, the director focused on Dakshima and Adele. And after the show had wrapped, while I was waiting for Mum, Jeremy and Dad to bring the car round, I heard two ladies whispering behind me.

“Didn’t she used to be someone?” I heard one say.

“Possibly,” the other whispered back.

“Maybe my cousin Jenny,” the first one said.

“That’ll be it,” the second one said. “If she was someone, I’d have remembered.”

So that proved it. The moment I took myself out of the limelight I was instantly forgettable. Not Like Sean, who had been retried for much longer than me and still had
fan letters flooding in. People still missed him, magazines still talked about him. That was because he was a proper star. I wasn’t, I was just Ruby Parker, the girl who accidentally got famous for a bit.

Besides, I knew about behind the scenes shows like this. They made one of
Kensington Heights
when I was Angel MacFarley on it, and they’d set up my screen mum, Brett Summers, to look as if she kept a large bottle of vodka in her dressing room that she drank between takes.

The crew would always be working an angle, looking for a “journey” taken by one of the participants. Searching for characters that the audience at home could root for or despise. It didn’t matter what you were really like, with a few clever questions and a bit of editing, they could make you seem any way they wanted to.

They would have researched all they could about every single person here and, as I was fairly sure that I was the only one that had been in a TV soap, made a film, and run away from Hollywood because I couldn’t stand the pressure, it was only a matter of time before they sought me out.

Carmen Baptista still hadn’t arrived when a blonde woman from the camera crew jogged across the rehearsal room to where I was standing with Anne-Marie.

“Hi, Ruby,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Clara Robson, one of the producers on
Spotlight!: Change the Bulb.
We didn’t realise until today that the R. Parker on the list was
the
Ruby Parker. It’s so great you’re part of this, viewers will be thrilled to know that you haven’t disappeared from their lives forever. We’d love to talk to you about your career and why you’ve decided to make your comeback in this way.”

“I’m not coming back,” I said, as Carmen Baptista walked in. “I’m in a school choir that won a competition. That’s it.”

“And that’s great, just the thing that we’re looking for. Come on, Ruby, you know the score – this will really boost your profile, get you back out there again. The last year or so must have been hard. Parents divorcing, leaving
Kensington Heights,
making that dud film – what was it called? And all that business in Hollywood, your mother dating Jeremy Fort. How does that make you feel?”

“Take your places please!” Carmen told us, her voice echoing off the floor to ceiling mirrors.

“How about we have a chat at lunch break?” Clara persisted.

I sighed and looked at Anne-Marie, whose lips were pursed in disapproval. Whether it was because Clara
was talking to me or because she was
not
talking to Anne-Marie, I wasn’t sure.

“Look, Clara, you may have the right to film me as part of the chorus, but to interview me specifically you need my mother’s permission and you don’t have it. And seeing as I’m not going to ask her to give it to you, and there’s no way she would anyway even if I wanted her to, there’s no point in wasting your time. I don’t want to talk to you.”

Clara’s eyes narrowed. “So it’s true – you’ve become a right little diva,” she said cruelly. “How the mighty have fallen.”

“I do not come here to waste my time,” Carmen Baptista shouted behind us. “I count to five only. One…”

“Well it was bound to happen,” Anne-Marie said, as we joined a line at the back of the room. “If you really wanted to be left alone you should have done what my Sean did, and laid low at school. You have to admit, Ruby, your plans to stay away from showbiz didn’t exactly last.”

“I know,” I said, “but I didn’t plan this…I don’t even understand how or why.”

“That’s because you’re thirteen,” Anne-Marie told me. “It’ll be easier to deal with when you’re my age. Oh, look out, here comes Danny and Jade, and they are late.”

I watched as Jade entered with Danny at her side. Danny looked embarrassed and a little worried. Jade, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind at all.

“You are LATE!” Carmen Baptista shouted angrily. “I do not tolerate lateness!”

“Sorry, Miss Baptista,” Danny said. “There was traffic and…’

“Traffic?” Carmen Baptista nearly spat out the word. “Was there not traffic for everybody else in this room and did we not get here on time? There is
never
any excuse to be late.”

“Excuse me,” said Jade, putting her hand on her hip and cocking her head to one side. “Do you know who I am?”

“I do not care who you are,” Carmen Baptista said. “Except that you are late.”

“I am your boss’s daughter,” Jade said snootily. “And I don’t think that you should speak to me that way, otherwise you might find yourself out of a job.”

Carmen Baptista stared at Jade, her black eyes glittering with fury.

“Your father paid me ten times my usual fee to leave the production I choreographed in New York, to come here and save this show from certain failure. Your father
begged
me to come. And if you do not show me the same respect that your father has,
little girl,”
she growled,
“then it will have to be you who tells your father that Carmen Baptista walked out of this fiasco because she could not tolerate his spoilt little brat. Perhaps we should get him down here now and tell him why I am quitting. Would you like that?”

Jade stared at Carmen Baptista for a second longer, then she said something in such a low voice I couldn’t hear it, but I assumed it was, “Sorry I’m late, Miss Baptista, it won’t happen again.”

Because then, with her cheeks burning, she’d tossed her hair over her shoulders and went and stood next to Danny in the front row of the waiting cast and chorus members.

“Silence!” Carmen Baptista yelled at us even though we were all perfectly quiet. “Because of lateness we now only have twenty minutes to warm up. Before we start I want you to remember something. You are not here to enjoy yourself. You are not here to make friends. You are here to work, because it’s my reputation that is on the line and I will not have it compromised. Be most sure, if you don’t come up to scratch then you will be leaving. I don’t care what competition you won, how many people voted for you or who your father is. Is that understood?”

We all mumbles “yes”, shuffling and nodding, glancing nervously at each other.

“IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?” Miss Baptista yelled.

“Yes, Miss Baptista!”
we chorused as one, loud and clear.

As we stretched and warmed up our bodies, I whispered to Anne-Marie out of the corner of my mouth. “How has Nydia been this week? I haven’t seen her since Sunday. She sounds all chirpy and fine, but is she really?”

“She’s the same with me,” Anne-Marie told me as she stretched out her calves. “She acts all fine, but she knows that her voice was miles better than that Jade’s and even mine. She should have won a part, and knowing she didn’t because people at home didn’t like her enough – that’s a pretty harsh thing to deal with.”

“It’s more than harsh,” I said, bending forward to stretch my hamstring muscles as I glanced over at Jade. “It’s not fair.”

“But that’s show business, isn’t it?” Anne-Marie said. “It is harsh and it’s not fair. That’s what Sylvia Lighthouse is always telling us. Nydia understands that.”

“Yes but this time it really isn’t…”

“You two at the back!” Carmen Baptista yelled at us. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at us, including Jade, who was smirking.

“Come forward,” Carmen Baptista instructed us.

Anne-Marie and I filed reluctantly through the rows.

“What did I say? Did you not hear me? Are you deaf?”

Anne-Marie and I shook our head.

“You are in a working rehearsal, not the playground, and while you are here I expect you to do as you are told and work.”

“Sorry, Miss Baptista,” Anne-Marie and I said together.

“Good, now drop and give me ten!” Carmen Baptista bellowed.

“Ten what?” Anne-Marie asked, confused.

“Ten press-ups of course, you imbecile!” Carmen Baptista shouted right in Anne-Marie’s face. Someone behind us sniggered, but one look from Miss Baptista shut them right up.

Anne-Marie looked at me and, shrugging, dropped to the floor and started to do her press-ups.

“I’ve never done a press-up before,” I said hesitantly.

“Now you learn,” Carmen Baptista growled. “Right now, or I’ll double them.”

It came as an enormous relief when we realised that we would mostly be rehearsed by Carmen Baptista’s assistant, Tristan Blanc – to begin with, at least. Miss

Baptista would come in after we’d learnt the steps, songs and directions, and then polish us up like diamonds, as she put it.

Tristan was much less frightening than Miss Baptista, younger and really funny, so that half the time we were having such a good time that we forgot we were learning dance steps and song parts. As part of the chorus I didn’t have any lines to learn. What we did was come in on the big dance numbers and crowd scenes. But I had been helping Anne-Marie learn her character Serena’s lines after school, so I was getting to know the script pretty well anyway. Compared to some scripts I’d had to learn for
Kensington Heights
and
Hollywood High,
it was fairly easy.

“Mr Caruso wants you all miked up from the beginning,” Tristan explained as sound engineers came round and hooked us all up. “He says he wants you to get used to listening to your voice through the sound system. It’s not the norm in theatre, but I guess as this is a TV special it’s the right thing to do. Anyway Mr Caruso is the boss, so we do his bidding.”

As the tiny microphones were attached to our heads with a bit of invisible tape just below our hair lines, I noticed that Jade and Danny’s microphones looked just a little bit different to the others. And I couldn’t be sure,
but it seemed to me that their voices came out of different speakers. It had to be the Auto-tune Miracle Microphones. Mick didn’t want anyone to ever hear Danny and Jade’s real voices, and by insisting that we all used microphones from the start, he could make sure that didn’t happen. He had everything covered to protect his daughter.

The musical itself was quite simple to learn. It was the story of Arial, a girl from a poor background who wins a scholarship to a very exclusive stage school, leaving her family behind. Once there she battles against the prejudices of her classmates, including the fierce and feisty Serena, survives the extremely strict staff and makes friends with Jake. Finally she finds herself, falls in love with Sebastian, and
then
finds fame in the spotlight, which temporarily changes her into a not such nice person, before Sebastian reminds her what friendship truly means and everyone is happy again.

While Tristan was teaching us the big dance numbers, I really enjoyed myself. I almost forgot about how unfair it was that Nydia hadn’t won a part in the show and for a couple hours I didn’t think about Danny and Jade’s Auto-tune Miracle Microphones at all. It just felt good to be in the atmosphere of a rehearsal room again, with
that smell and those sounds and all of the feelings that I hadn’t realised I missed so much.