Film Star by Rowan Coleman Page A

head.
    â€œI want tea,” she said firmly. I glanced questioningly at Anne-Marie who pulled down the corners of her mouth and gave a little shrug. I thought of the talk Nydia and I had had in the corridor just before I left to start on the film. About how unhappy she felt. She had told me that everything was fine just before I went, but I knew that it wasn’t. It wasn’t, and for some reason she didn’t want to admit it or talk to me about it. I took a sip of my hot chocolate and felt the warm sweetness on the back of my tongue. Hot chocolates in the café were a tradition for me and Nydia, long before we made friends with Anne-Marie and I somehow got Danny as my boyfriend—back when it sometimes seemed that it was me and Nydia against the world. About a million years before I got the part of Polly Harris, a part Nydia wanted and probably deserved much more than I did because she didn’t mess up her first audition. She was brilliant in her first audition.
    But it looked as if our hot-chocolate tradition was over, and I worried that those years and years of friendship were changing for ever too. I didn’t want that to happen. I had to stop it and find some way of getting Nydia back again. After all, not so long ago we had been so close we had practically been twins.
    I listened as Anne-Marie chatted on about some scandal at school with Menakshi Shah and Michael Henderson (“As if he’d ever go out with her when he’s still in love with me …”) and glanced out the window where two girls of around ten had been hovering for the last five minutes or so, as if wondering whether or not to come in. I smiled to myself; they reminded me of Nydia and I a few years ago, wanting to come into the café by ourselves and be grown up, but looking carefully at the menu to see what we could afford. These two were doing exactly the same thing, only they were taking a lot longer about it and giggling like crazy every few minutes.
    â€œWhat about school work?” Anne-Marie asked me, sipping the cappuccino which she didn’t really like but had ordered to be cool. “What’s it like working with a tutor? Nightmare of the total variety, right?” I thought for a moment.
    â€œWell,” I said, “it’s all right. My tutor is called Fran Francisco and I have to call her Fran, and it’s her full-time job to keep kids on film sets up with their school work, no matter where they’re from or what they study. So she sort of knows a bit about everything. And when Sean Rivers comes she’ll be doing the same for him, only American high-school stuff, I suppose. I don’t know if it’s very different but…” Anne-Marie pretended to faint, and half-slid down the back of her chair.
    â€œDo you mean that you are going to be in the same class as Sean Rivers?” she asked, clutching her hand over her heart. “Oh my gosh, imagine that, sitting next to Sean Rivers! You both reach for a biro at the same time…your hands accidentally touch…a thrill of electricity runs between you…you look up at each other…your eyes lock and…”
    I looked at Danny whose sweet smile was rapidly disappearing under a stormy cloud.
    â€œProbably won’t be,” I said. “Shouldn’t think I’ll see him at all when I’m not on set.”
    â€œBut you see ‘Imogene’ and ‘Jeremy’ all the time off set,” Anne Marie said, doing an annoyingly good impression of me as she mentioned the actors’ names. “You haven’t stopped banging on about them since you got back.”
    It was true that I had spent a lot more time with the stars that I had ever imagined. Imogene was the biggestsurprise; she was so friendly and always ready to talk if we had waiting time between takes or scenes. At first I had been in awe of her, and then as we talked about how she had started out or worked through scenes