Shooting Star (11 page)

“Hey, Ruby, hey, everyone.” Henry was already at the pizza place when Mum dropped us off. He looked really nice, in a red shirt over black jeans and his cowboy boots.

“Hey, Henry,” Sean said, with half a smile.

“Hi!” Nydia beamed.

“Hello, young man,” my mum said. It turned out that she’d decided to follow us in. “I’ll be back at 10.30 to pick you all up. Ruby, you have my number so call me if you need me to come sooner.” She did her best motherly frown at Sean and Henry. “I’m depending on you boys to keep these girls safe, OK?”

“Yes, Mrs Parker,” Sean said.

“I’ll give it my best shot,” Henry said, winking at me which made me laugh.

Mum didn’t laugh though. “Hmmm,” was the last thing she said before she went. And as it turned out she was right to be worried.

The pizza place was called Bella Fortuna and it
was really more of an Italian restaurant, but it was famous for serving the best pizzas for miles around. The waitress sat us at a round table in the centre of the restaurant and made a big deal about treating us as adults. It was really nice of her to make the effort, but it was quite embarrassing too and none of us really knew what to say. But things improved when our pizzas arrived. Food usually makes things better, I find.

“So, Ruby, what bands do you like?” Henry asked just as I took a huge bite out of my pepperoni feast.

“Bands?” I was taken aback. I liked music, but I had been so busy recently that I hadn’t really heard of anyone cool or new. I was a rubbish teenager; most of my life was taken up with choir practice or rehearsal. I could tell him my top five musical numbers of all time, but when it came to bands, I realised that I was officially uncool.

“I like…all sorts of music really,” I said. “What about you?” Henry reeled off the names of three or four bands that I’d never heard of, but I nodded along and occasionally said, “Oh, yeah, they are cool.”

Henry leant back in his chair and sort of half smiled at me. I wondered if he knew that I was just pretending to know these bands and that maybe he was making them up to catch me out.

“You should be in a band, Henry,” Nydia said. “You look like a rock star.”

“I was in one for a while, until I got sacked,” Henry said. “The lead guitarist was jealous of me. I might start my own band after this film though – want to be in it, Ruby?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I said. “I’ve got exams next year.” Everyone laughed and I belatedly realised why.

“You’re quite a geek, aren’t you?” Henry said, grinning at me.

I tried to be offended, but he was smiling as he said it and I think he sort of meant it as a compliment.

“Finally you’ve realised,” Nydia joked. “The thing that Ruby used to be most famous for was that she was really terrible at rebelling.”

“I kinda like that,” Henry told me. “You’re not trying to fit in or please anyone. You’re just you – and you are pretty cool, geek or not.”

I found myself smiling at Henry. I realised that I hadn’t been annoyed by him so far that evening and we’d been together for over an hour now. Maybe I could date him after all. Then I noticed Sean rolling his eyes across the table and looking moody.

“Thank you, Henry,” I said to annoy Sean. “That’s a nice thing to say.”

“Plus you’re way pretty,” Henry said. I blushed and
looked down at my hands. “I’d have told you that even if your mom hadn’t made you bring the chaperones,” he grinned. “But really I’m kinda hoping you’ll wind up being my girlfriend.”

At that moment a bright light went off in our faces. For a split second I thought that it was my brain finally exploding from boy-related confusion, but then I realised that it was a photographer. Even though we’d chosen Bella Fortuna because it was out of the way and on a block that the paparazzi hardly ever stalk, there must have been one walking past who looked in, spotted Sean Rivers and took his chance. Not only that, he’d marched right up to us and shoved his camera in Sean’s face.

“C’mon, Sean, gimme a smile,” the man said. Two or three more flashes went off as we shielded our eyes with our hands and everyone else in the restaurant turned and stared at us.

“Leave us alone,” Henry said, standing up. “You can’t photograph a group of minors against their will. Keep this up and I’ll call the cops.”

The photographer hesitated, then shrugged and took more frames. “I said
back off!”
Henry yelled, pushing the man back so hard that he crashed into the food-laden table behind. It tipped right over, leaving him flat on his back with his legs in the air.

“Where’s the manager?” I said, standing up. I couldn’t see a single waiter or waitress to ask for help.

“Maybe the waiting staff called the papers for publicity,” Henry said quickly. “We need to get out of here…”

And then I noticed another commotion outside. A crowd jostled at the plate-glass window and I realised that there was now an army of photographers outside. A bank of flashes went off in my face and I couldn’t see anything.

“We can get out the back way,” Nydia said. She grabbed hold of Sean who had frozen, looking like a deer trapped in the headlights. “Come on, Sean, quickly.”

“Don’t worry, son, I’m here.” Mr Rivers appeared almost out of nowhere, from somewhere at the rear of the restaurant. It seemed strange, but everything was happening so quickly I didn’t really have time to think about it.

“Dad!” Sean snapped into life, a look of relief on his face. “I’m so glad you’re here. Get us out!”

“Now take a breath, son,” Mr Rivers said, putting his arm around Sean. “The best way to deal with these guys is to give them what they want. Stand tall and give them one of your million-dollar smiles.”

Henry, Nydia and I watched uncertainly as Pat Rivers
turned Sean in the direction of the photographers, igniting another barrage of flashes that made Sean wince and blink. As he stood there next to Sean, a fixed grin on his face, Pat Rivers began talking to the other people in the restaurant, who were staring with open mouths.

“Sean Rivers is back and I can confirm to you right now that my son will be playing Sebastian in
Spotlight! The Movie Musical.
Go tell your husbands, wives, children and friends! Tell the whole world that you heard it here first.”

“Dad?” Sean looked confused and really upset, almost in tears.

“Keep smiling, son,” Mr Rivers said.

“I don’t want to…”

“The whole world is watching you, Sean.” The fake warmth in Mr Rivers’ voice had vanished and his words sounded like a threat.

“Get off him!” I found myself yelling.

“It’s fine,” Sean’s dad ignored me. “What better way to announce your return to the press? This will be all over the papers and magazines in the morning. The Rivers boys standing side by side for the whole world to see!”

“What about Mom?” Sean pleaded. “She’ll know that I’ve lied to her.”

“It had to come out sooner or later, Sean,” Mr Rivers said. “It was lucky I happened to be here.”

“I said get off him,” I yelled again, surprised by my own anger. I grabbed Sean’s arms and tried to drag him away, but Mr Rivers was holding on tight. “Sean, come
on
!”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Henry said steadily. “This is ruining my date.”

And then he charged, ramming his head into the older man’s stomach so that Mr Rivers released Sean and staggered backwards, collapsing into some chairs.

“To the kitchens!” Henry yelled at us as he picked himself up. “Run!”

We raced between the tables and out into the hot, garlicky kitchen, where all the staff were loitering as if someone had told them to stay out of the way.

“No way do you get a tip!” Henry bellowed at them as we ran out into the parking lot. He looked around. “We’ve got about five seconds before the paps work out where we are.”

Then Henry clocked a vegetable delivery van with the words ‘Greta’s Gorgeous Greens’ painted on the side, along with an assortment of dancing cartoon vegetables. Its back doors were wide open.

“Get in there!” Henry yelled.

“
There?”
Nydia looked dubious.

But then we heard the pounding of feet and yells of “This
way!” from the paparazzi. They would be on us in a second.

“Just do it!” I said. I took Sean’s hand and hauled him into the back of the van, swinging the doors closed behind Henry, who leapt in after Nydia.

Henry put a finger to his lips to remind us all to be quiet and we sat and waited.

It felt like we were in the back of Greta’s Gorgeous Greens’ van for ages, listening to the baying photographers and trying not to move or make a sound. After a while we heard Sean’s dad’s voice.

“You can go home now; you’ve got the photos I promised,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that there are plenty more Sean exclusives for you. You just make your editors run the story – Pat Rivers and son reunited again. Legendary Hollywood manager takes on his biggest star yet! You know the score.”

“Oh, Sean,” I whispered. He was sitting next to me on an upturned empty crate and I realised that I was still holding his hand. In fact he was clutching my fingers so tightly that it hurt a little bit. I didn’t let go though.

“I told him yesterday that we were coming here,” Sean said quietly. “He must have arranged this whole thing. And tomorrow the photos will be all over the papers and Mom will know that I’ve been lying all this time. Why would he do that to me? That’s not what he promised at all.”

“It did kind of ruin our date,” Henry said, looking at my hand in Sean’s.

“Thanks for getting us out of there, Henry,” Nydia said. “I couldn’t believe that you pushed that sleazeball over and then took out Mr Rivers!”

“All in a day’s work,” Henry grinned.

“You’re going to be in huge trouble,” I said. “You assaulted two adults.”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t think either of them are going to be keen to explain that they were harassing a bunch of kids – and besides I’ve been in a lot worse trouble than
that
!” Henry winked at me, and I gave him a small smile in return.

“So we’ll wait here until it’s all quiet outside and then we can slip out,” Henry told us as if he’d done this sort of thing a million times, which for all I knew he might have. “And then we’ll…”

But just as Henry spoke we heard the driver’s door open and slam, then a second later the sound of its engine turning on.

“We’re moving!” Nydia exclaimed as the van lurched off.

Henry looked thoughtful. “The question is, where are we going?”

As we sat in the van we tried to work out what to do.

“I should call my mum,” I said, reaching into my bag for my phone. “Tell her to come and get us.”

“But from where?” Henry asked. “We don’t know where we’re going.”

“We could tell her the name on the side of the van. She could tell the police to come and find us.”

“Which means more press and more publicity,” Henry pointed out. “I think that’s a bad idea.” He glanced at Sean, who was sitting with his head bent low over his knees. He was crying, but he didn’t want us to know, so we were very careful not to look at him.

“Look,” Henry went on. “This is a local business making local deliveries. Chances are that in a few minutes it will pull over at another drop-off and we’ll be able to get out. But be ready to run because when they find four kids in the back of their van, they’re going to be surprised.”

“I think Henry’s right,” I said. “We should wait until we get out. Then I’ll call Mum.”

“The only thing is,” Nydia said, looking at her watch. “It’s after nine now – exactly how late do vegetables get delivered?”

Half an hour went by without the van parking, but at least there was lots of stopping and starting, which Henry said was for lights and traffic and meant we were still in the city at least. Then all of that changed and it felt as if we were on a long straight road. A road that could easily be the highway and taking us to goodness knows where.

“I hear San Francisco’s nice this time of year,” Nydia said nervously.

“Or Vegas,” I added.

“Just as long as these aren’t Mafia grocers,” Henry joked, but no one laughed.

Then I realised that something was different. Sean had let go of my hand. He was sitting up straight, wiping his face on the back of his sleeve.

“You OK?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ll talk to Mom tonight,” he said. “I have to explain everything to her. She’s going to be so hurt and angry – she’s going to ask me why. And I don’t know what to tell her. But I know I have to
explain everything, before she reads it in the papers.”

“Look, Sean, you don’t have to tell us right now if you don’t want to,” Nydia said slowly, “but what
was
going on in there? Why did your dad turn up and start acting as if you were his…biggest client. I thought you hadn’t seen him for a year?”

Sean looked at me and I shrugged. “It’s all coming out now anyway,” I said.

“I guess,” Sean said. Slowly he began to tell Nydia and Henry the whole story.

“So you’re just going to ditch the rest of us at the last minute?” Nydia said crossly when he’d finished. “Sean, how could you?”

“Nydia,” I intervened, “Sean’s been through a lot. Now’s not the time to have a go at him.”

“I know that,” Nydia said. “If I’d known about this from the beginning – like you obviously did – then I’d have had a go at him ages ago. Sean, you know what we’ve been through to get these parts. Audition after audition – and half of what we were being tested for was how we acted with
you.
If you leave they’ll have to start from scratch again. Not only will it cost a fortune, but we might not even get to keep our parts.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I admitted, suddenly feeling suddenly a little sick. Then I looked at Sean’s
stricken face. “But none of this is Sean’s fault. It’s his dad’s. His dad has trapped him.”

“He truly has,” Henry put in. “Your dad knows that if you pull out now it won’t just be the other actors you let down, or the studio – it will be your fans. Millions of them are expecting you to be in the film of the decade. If you don’t do this film your career will effectively be over. No other studio will ever touch you, your reputation will be shot and your fan base too. Looks like your dad knew exactly what he was doing from the start. Man, you must earn him a lot of money!”

Sean shook his head and for a second I thought he might cry again, but he sniffed and took a breath and said, “I thought that dads had to love you. I thought that even if parents split up or other stuff happened they have to put you first. But that’s not true. It’s not true for a lot of kids. It’s not true for Anne-Marie or me. And the stupid thing is…the
really
stupid thing is that even now, even knowing all that, I still love
him.
I still wish he was the kind of dad I want.”

“What will you do, Sean?” I asked, putting my hand over his.

Sean shrugged. “The honest truth is that right now I don’t know.”

“Wait,” Henry whispered. The van had drawn to a
halt and the engine was turned off. Quickly Henry opened the back door just a millimetre.

“If we get locked in then we’re finished,” he said. And a moment later we heard the van’s central locking system clunk. After a few more seconds, Henry peered though the minute gap in the back door and then slowly pushed it open.

“The coast is clear,” he said. “Follow me.”

One by one we crept out into the night keeping our heads low. It looked like we were in the countryside, on a farm or something, because it was pitch-black and all I could hear were crickets chirruping.

“All we need to do now,” Henry whispered as we crouched on the far side of the van, “is work out where the heck we are.”

“Correction.” A shadowy figure loomed out of the darkness. “All you kids need to do now is explain to me what you are doing in my van and why I shouldn’t call the police right now.”

Luckily for us Greta Tartucci was not the head of the local Mafia. She was an organic vegetable farmer from San Marino who had happened to be making a last-minute delivery to Bella Fortuna when everything kicked
off. So when we explained what had happened, she was pretty understanding.

“I heard all the shouting so I ran inside,” she said. “I didn’t realise I’d left the van doors open. I was probably trying to call the police to come and clear those paparazzi rats away when you kids made a run for it – although the restaurant owner wouldn’t thank me. If that’s the kind of person he is I won’t be delivering my gorgeous greens to
him
again.” She folded her arms and looked at us.

“You don’t know how lucky you are that I’m not a psycho axe-murderer – you can’t just get into the back of a complete stranger’s van, you know. Anything could have happened to you.”

“But we didn’t plan to stay there,” I explained. “We were going to get out again – but then you drove off.”

“You should have banged on the partition,” Greta said. “Got me to pull over. I would have driven you home.”

“We didn’t know if you were a psycho axe-murderer or not,” Henry said.

“Or in the Mafia,” Nydia added.

“Well, you need to call your parents, right now, before they go out of their minds with worry. Then you can pass them on to me and I’ll give them directions to the farm.”

I nodded and dialled Mum’s number.

“Ruby!” Mum picked up on the first ring. “Where are you? I just arrived at the restaurant to pick you up and it’s closed. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, Mum,” I said. “We all are. It’s just that, well, we got a little bit lost…”

“So where are you?” Mum asked me.

“An organic vegetable farm in San Marino,” I told her slowly. “Near Pasadena.”

“Pasa—” But before Mum could say any more I handed the phone to Greta. There would be enough explaining to do later; I didn’t feel like starting now.

“Aren’t you going to ring your folks?” I asked Henry who was on his own in the living room looking out of the window at the moon, while Sean and Nydia sat at Greta’s kitchen table.

“Nope,” Henry said. “They’re not expecting me back until later. I figure I’ll get a lift home with your mom and go home from there. They won’t have to worry about me any more than usual.”

“They really don’t expect you home until after midnight?” I said, looking at my watch.

“They’ve given up setting me a curfew,” Henry explained. “I always used to break them, stay out all night, get into trouble. This way I usually get home at an OK time, in one piece, and everyone is happy.”

“You have very laid-back parents,” I told him. “My mum would kill me dead if I did that sort of thing.”

“I don’t rate your chances of surviving the night then,” Henry smiled at me. “Actually my parents are just really, really tired. I’ve worn them out. So now they just stand back and do the best they can.”

I frowned. “Why are you like that, Henry?” I asked. “Can’t you just, you know, be normal sometimes? Why do you always have to break the rules?”

Henry tapped his finger on the window pane for a second and looked back out at the moon. “Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” he said.

“Huh?”

“ADHD. I’ve had it since I was a kid – it’s this thing, some messed up wiring in my head that means I go crazy with boredom every five seconds. It’s really hard to concentrate or remember things – I say stuff that I know I shouldn’t, but it comes out of my mouth anyway. And trouble seems to follow me around. I might grow out of it, but then I wouldn’t be me any more. I don’t really know who I would be. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said, trying to take it in. I’d never actually known anyone with a condition before, unless you counted Jade Caruso’s dandruff problem. I was trying to work out if I should feel less annoyed with him
now that I knew he had ADHD, or if I should be scared. After all, exactly how mental was he?

And then I realised I was being stupid. He was still the same Henry now that he’d been five minutes ago, only he’d trusted me with the truth. Yes, he was a bit hard to take sometimes, but there was something about him I really liked. The bit that said what he felt and did what he liked; the bit that I didn’t have.

“They gave me these pills when I was little,” Henry told me. “But all they did was zombify me and make me feel down all the time. I’m lucky I guess that Mom and Dad didn’t want that for me either. They looked into alternative therapies, breathing exercises, changed my diet and stuff. I exercise a real lot and a couple of years ago I got into music and acting, and those things seem to keep me on track for longer than thirty seconds. And I’m doing pretty well actually. I’m pretty happy, even if sometimes I just wonder what would happen if I set off twenty-seven fire alarms in one afternoon.” He grinned at me. “Anyway you don’t have to worry. Most of the time I’m pretty normal, with a few exceptions.”

“Like what?” I asked him.

“Like when I’m overtired and I go really fruit loops, or like when I’m standing next to a really pretty girl that I want to kiss.”

“Really, what do you do when that…oh, you mean me.”

“Yes, I do,” Henry said. “And if I don’t kiss you now anything could happen.”

I glanced back into the other room where Sean was still sitting with Nydia and Greta, and then I thought – well, why not? So I leant over and kissed Henry before he could kiss me. It was a nice kiss, sweet and not scary. And I really hoped that I’d get butterflies or fireworks or any of the things that I got whenever I was around Sean these days. But I didn’t.

“So, Ruby,” Henry said as we looked at each other. “Before we get carted off home, can I ask you something?”

“Are you going to ask me to be your girlfriend?” I said.

Henry blinked. “Well, yeah, it was kinda going to be that.”

“Henry, I really, really like you,” I said. “And this has nothing to do with ADHD, but I can’t be your girlfriend.”

“It’s because of your giant crush on Sean Rivers, isn’t it?” Henry asked me bluntly.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked him.

“You might as well write it on your forehead,” Henry said. “So if you like him and he likes you, why
aren’t
you his girlfriend?”

“Because he was going out with my best friend,” I explained.

“Ah – it’s the whole girls’ honour code,” Henry nodded. “I never did get that. Anyway, in the mean time, you should know that I am very available to take you for dates and there’s a roughly ten per cent chance that all of them will end in total disaster.”

I smiled at him and said, “Henry Dufault, you are not nearly as bad as you make out.”

“Don’t you believe it, babe,” Henry said.

Then we heard a knock at the door and walked into the other room as Greta went to open it.

“Ruby Parker!” My mum marched into the room, followed closely by Sean’s mum, who was holding an early edition of the morning papers. “What on
earth
is going on?”