Rowan Coleman - Ruby Parker - Soap Star

For Lily

Cover Page

Title Page Ruby Parker: Soap Star Rowan Coleman

Dedication For Lily

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Teen girl! magazine

Ruby Parker Film Star

Also by Rowan Coleman

Copyright

About the Publisher

You can’t stop things changing, because other people – adults – think they always know what’s for the best. It’s like it’s sort of not officially your life until you’re grown up. As if the way you think and feel doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really mean anything : almost as if you don’t even really feel it. As if, because you are only thirteen, everything you think and feel is just in your imagination. I feel like I should have some say about what happens to me in my life, but I never do. My life just happens to me and other people make the decisions. The wrong decisions, mostly.

Just recently I’ve felt like I spend my life trying to keep things exactly the same as they’ve always been and it’s sort of felt like I’m running up a down escalator. Just when I feel like I’m getting somewhere, I lose my footing and off I go down and down until I find the energy to start going uphill all over again. Some of the things that have happened to me in my life have been amazing. Some of them have been the sort of things that other girls my age lie in bed at night and dream about happening to them. But I bet none of them dream about what happened to me this morning. It’s like a fairy tale in reverse with the happy ending at the beginning.

This morning I found out that I am officially the frumpiest thirteen-year-old in the entire history of the whole world. You might say, like my mum does, that everyone feels that way sometimes. That it’s a phase and I’ll get over it and that one day I’ll turn into a swan and boys will follow me around begging me to look at them. But it doesn’t feel like a phase any more, it feels like the end of the world. The end of my world, at least.

If I was just Ruby Parker, girl, it wouldn’t matter so much. OK I’d be doomed to a life of never having a boyfriend, but I could work on being interesting and funny instead and maybe be “unusually attractive” like the heroines of my mum’s books that I’m secretly reading. Once I got past about, say, thirty-five I expect I wouldn’t even mind that much any more.

But I’m not Ruby Parker, girl.

I’m Ruby Parker, Soap Star. And, in my world, being an ugly dumpy thirteen-year-old means the end of that, and the end of going to my school, and maybe the end of everything else I’ve been trying to hold together too.

If you saw me, Ruby Parker, standing outside the classroom waiting to go in for double maths on the first day of last term, you’d have said I’m a pretty ordinary girl. Not the sort of girl who’d be singled out for any special sort of attention, good or bad. Sort of medium height, sort of medium build (apart from the obvious, but more about those later), sort of medium hair: hair that had been shiny and blonde when I was little, but has gradually got browner and darker and danker and lanker. Average skin – you’d say not too many spots – quite a nice nose and not a bad profile.

You’d notice that most of the other girls in my class really don’t bother talking to me, although they frequently talk about me: usually in stage whispers behind my back to make sure I can hear everything they’re saying. And you’d notice that while I just hang about in the corridor waiting for Miss Greenstreet to arrive, some of the other girls are practising their ballet positions against the wall, and Menakshi Shah is reciting Juliet’s balcony speech from Romeo and Juliet, flicking her hair all around as she does it and trying to catch Michael Henderson’s eye. (Not that he’d look at her in six million years because everyone knows that he and Anne-Marie Chance will never spilt up and will be together for EVER and end up presenting a daytime chat show like Richard and Judy. )

Anyway, you’d have noticed that none of the boys talk to me either, although they sometimes creep up behind me and twang my bra strap and say things like, “Oi, Ruby, have you seen my football? Me and Mac have lost our footballs and…oh look they’re down your top! Give us ‘em back!” And they pretend to lunge at me and try and grab my boobs, then I scream and hit them over the heads with my folder and my best friend Nydia Assimin charges at them, which usually sends them packing, but shouting really nasty stuff like, “Watch out, it’s a herd of elephants!”

You’d also notice that almost all the boys are pretty well turned out for thirteen-year-olds. None of them smell and most of them wash their hair more than twice a week. Some, like Danny Harvey (who always smells of apples), wash it every day. And you’d notice that they’re all what my mum calls “natural extroverts”. You might think that all boys are always shouting and mucking about, but the boys at my school do it with excellent projection and perfect enunciation.

That’s because I go to a stage school. I go to Silvia Lighthouse’s Academy for the Performing Arts. Every single one of the kids who was standing outside my classroom waiting to go in for maths on the last day of term wants to be an actor, a singer or a TV presenter. Or all three usually.

We have all our normal lessons in the morning, and then after lunch we have dance, acting and music until four, which might sound like a laugh – and it is – but it’s hard too. Especially when your speech and drama coach is a raving lunatic, hung up about the fact that she never made it big and ended up teaching a load of snotty stuck-up posh kids instead (except for me and Nydia) which might be why she hates me more than anyone else on account of the fact that I’m on telly. But even though I don’t have that many friends, at least I have Nydia. And although sometimes it feels like I’m always working and never have time to just relax, I love the school.

School is the only place where I feel like I am actually me. The person I feel like inside and not the person everyone else sees, I mean. When I’m dancing or acting or singing it doesn’t matter that I’m not popular or very thin or don’t have a boyfriend. And although the teachers make you work twice as hard as other school kids and remind you that not everyone will make it, they do believe that sometimes dreams do come true. I don’t know many adults who do that.

I’ve been going to the academy since I was eight, but it was only when Nydia arrived on a scholarship last year that I made a real friend for the first time, because Nydia and I come from the same sort of background, the same sort of terraced house and normal mum and dad’s life. Everyone else here is super rich with parents that frequently feature in Hello!.

Nydia and I are only at the academy because she got the scholarship and I got famous by mistake, which pays fairly well as it turns out. Not that I see a penny. I have a trust fund where most of my money goes to keep it safe until I’m twenty-one. Twenty-one! That’s practically my whole life so far again before I get to see any of it! And despite the fact that I think I have quite a lot of money we have a very normal life. Mum says it’s important that I keep my feet on the ground so I don’t get into drugs and alcohol like some child stars. So I still have to ask her for stuff and she mostly still says no.