Chapter Two

On the way to the Tube, a couple of men in dirty denim jackets and jeans shout across to us from the other side of the street.

“Weirdo!”

“Get a life, silver legs!”

Edie puts a protective arm around me and Jenny holds my hand, but I’m used to it. I don’t really mind anymore. When some drop-dead fashion god rubbishes the way I look, I might be mildly upset, but guys in head to-toe denim aren’t really in a position to criticize.

Edie tries to change the subject. Sort of.

“You should see the girl I’m working with this afternoon,” she announces. “She’s seriously weird. She goes through different phases, but at the moment she’s into ballet tutus and fairy wings. I mean, fine if you’re five, but she’s twelve. I never know what to expect next with her. If she shows up at all, that is. She’s missed the last two sessions and she’s in mega-trouble if she misses this one.”

“What are you doing with her?” Jenny asks.

“Reading. She’s dyslexic. Seriously dyslexic. Her brain just isn’t wired up for spelling. Last time we were working on ‘chair.’ I have to give her reading strategies.”

Jenny and I have no idea what reading strategies are, but decide not to ask. Edie’s quite capable of spending the whole journey telling us.

On the train, she gets some books out of her bag and shows us what she’s brought to tempt the girl with this week. They’re all stories about small children and animals, with big letters and no word more than two syllables long. Then she pulls out the Jane Austen she’s in the middle of and settles down with it. Knowing her, she’ll have finished it by this evening.

***

Jenny and I get to South Kensington station and bid Edie good-bye. The V&A is a short walk away in the early summer sunshine. I love it. The buildings are large and chunky and colorful and rambling. You could get lost in them for days. As always, we go through the costume section to get to the café, so I can get my fix of inspirational outfits.

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.

Excerpted from SEQUINS, SECRETS, AND SILVER LININGS © Copyright 2011 by Sophia Bennett. Reprinted with permission by The Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.