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Ruby Parker Hits the Small Time

Chapter One

You can't stop things from 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 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 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 having happen to them. But I bet none of them dreams 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 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 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; 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 anymore.

But I'm not Ruby Parker, girl.

I'm Ruby Parker, Television 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 math on the last day of term, you'd have said I'm a pretty ordinary girl. Not the sort of girl who'd be singled out for any special attention, good or bad. Sort of medium height, sort of medium build (apart from the obvious, but more about those later), and sort of medium hair—hair that had been shiny and blonde when I was little but has gradually become browner and darker and danker and lanker. I also have average skin (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 around in the corridor waiting for Miss Greenstreet to arrive, some of the other girls are practicing 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, 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 split up and will be together forever and end up presenting a daytime talk 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, "Oy, Ruby, have you seen my football? Me and Mac lost our footballs and . . . oh, look, they're down your top! Give 'em back!" And they pretend to lunge at me and try to grab my boobs, then I scream and hit them over the head with my folder, and my best friend, Nydia Assimin, charges at them, which usually sends them packing, but still they shout 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 boys are always shouting and mucking around, 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 Sylvia Lighthouse's Academy for the Performing Arts. Every single one of the kids who was standing outside my classroom waiting to go in for math on the last day of the 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 o'clock, 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 (which might be why she hates me more than anyone else on account of my being on the telly). But even though I don't have that many friends, at least I have Nydia. And although it can feel like I'm always working and never have time to just relax, I love the school.

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Excerpted from Ruby Parker Hits the Small Time by Rowan Coleman Copyright © 2007 by Rowan Coleman. Excerpted by permission.
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