Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond Read Free Book Online Page B

to this. Good girls—and she’d seen this time after time—rarely had staying power. Bethany Rabinowitz was one of those, a mama’s girl, a pleaser. Allison, on the other hand, had a talent for forming strategic friendships and playing her looks like a high poker hand—which was not to say that all the girl’s qualities were good, merely that they were useful. Mimi wasn’t blind to the flip side. She knew, for example, that Allison was a notorious classroom cheat. She’d been outed by any number of tutors and proctors whom Mimi had hired to monitor her boarders’ homeschool work. Allison looked up answers in the backs of her textbooks and brazenly copied the other girls’ homework assignments, and when she was caught—and she never made much effort to disguise what she was doing—she and Mimi had terrible arguments, brawls, really. Mimi knew better than anyone that Allison might need to find an alternate career one day; and if so, she’d need at least a basic education. Allison did not agree. “I don’t care about algebra!” she’d scream. “I don’t give a shit where in Europe you can find Mongolia! That’s what librarians are for, to answer stupid questions like that. You just call the Los Angeles Public Library and you ask for the reference desk and you say where is Mongolia and they tell you Spain or whatever!”
    But the fact was, Mimi was tired. Now, when it was all but too late, what she dreamed of—the only thing she still dreamed of—was a client who loved her. In Allison Addison—beautiful, beautiful child—she knew she’d found what she was looking for: the one who would have her. Mimi wasn’t a fool; she’d seen the furtive cuts running up Allison’s arms like needle marks. But in her line of work you accepted as normal a certain degree of damage, and cutting wouldn’t kill the girl. Chances were, she’d outgrow it. In the meantime they fought about school, and their arguments generally ended with one of them storming out of the house or the studio. The farthest Mimi had ever gone was San Francisco; Allison, who had more limited resources, had gotten as far as Tarzana. But their reciprocal abandonment was pure show. By now she and Allison were bound together as tightly as if there’d been chains.

Chapter Three
    A S R UTH UNDERSTOOD IT, THERE EXISTED A DICHOTOMY of opinions about the relative merits of working as a television or movie extra if you were an unemployed actor. There were the Once an extra, always an extra ideologues on the one hand, and the Anything to become a SAG member pragmatists on the other. Mimi belonged to the latter camp, explaining to Ruth that sending Bethany to work as an extra on a Screen Actors Guild feature film was the first in a two-step strategy by which Bethany would become eligible for SAG membership as soon as possible. A SAG membership, as she described it, would open up worlds.
    So three days after the disastrous Raven callback, Ruth was back on Barham Boulevard, fighting the morning rush-hour traffic on the way to Hollywood’s old Rialto Theatre. Bethany sat beside her and packed into the backseat of the car were the Orphans. The four girls would be working as extras on a union feature film called High Fivin’ the House . Ruth strongly suspected that Mimi had signed the Orphans up not so much to keep Bethany company or for the work experience, but to keep the girls busy and out of her hair for the day.
    The Rialto was being used as a location for the tween/teen Disney film about a close-knit, interracial, interethnic, socio-economically diverse group of kids in an experimental high school who form an alternative cheering squad. It starred Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale—of course—and Mimi had said if they were lucky the extras might catch a glimpse of them on set. Now, from the front seat, Bethany was telling the girls in the back, “My mom brought her camera, so if we see anyone we can get our pictures taken. Rianne, my BFF back home, would