Seeing Stars by Diane Hammond

just die . She thinks Zac Efron is so cute.”
    “You’re not going to get within eighty feet of them, you know,” said Allison. “Mimi just told you that so you’d sign up. One time she made us work on a movie with Ashley Tisdale in it for a week and we never saw her once, just her stand-in.”
    “Wow,” said Bethany.
    “Her what?” said Ruth.
    “Her stand-in—her double. Boy, you guys really are new. Big stars aren’t going to just stand there for half the day while the tech guys work on lighting and camera angles and stuff, so they hire someone who’s about the same age and size to stand there for them. I knew a girl who was Keke Palmer’s stand-in for Akeelah and the Bee , and she said it was the worst job ever . She had rickets or shingles or something by the time the movie wrapped.”
    “You could probably be Ellen Page’s stand-in. You’re as good an actor as her,” said Hillary loyally. She was Allison’s self-appointed sidekick, an elfin, precocious child who made it known that she’d gladly put her entire future in jeopardy for just one Victoria’s Secret push-up bra and something to put in it. “We saw Juno , and she was awesome,” she explained to Ruth.
    Allison elbowed her in the ribs. “Ellen Page is like four foot ten and she has really bad hair. She should get extensions. I’m serious.”
    “Well, you have nice hair,” Hillary reassured her.
    “Well, yeah, compared to Ellen Page.” Allison sank back in her seat, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. Ruth suddenly recalled a comment Angie Buehl had made about Allison: “She’ll either be famous or pregnant by the time she’s seventeen.”
    “I hated that set,” Reba was saying from the backseat. The third Orphan was the most unfortunate of them; she was sallow, sullen, overweight, and numbingly untalented. “It was so boring . You couldn’t go to craft services unless they told you to, plus even once you could, the food sucked. The union extras got like a Hawaiian luau and we got a couple of hot dogs and some Jell-O.”
    “Yeah,” echoed Bethy in a chorus of aggrievement.
    “Craft services?” said Ruth.
    “The food caterers,” said Allison. “Man, you guys.”
    “Then why aren’t they just called caterers?” Ruth asked.
    Allison shrugged. “Anyways, we told Mimi we didn’t want to do this stupid movie but she’s making us, anyway.”
    And so there they were, sitting in Ruth’s car and benefiting from Ruth’s services free of charge. Ruth still couldn’t figure out how, exactly, Mimi had talked her into driving these girls and chaperoning them once they were on-site—but then, it was widely acknowledged that Mimi had a special genius for pawning the Orphans onto new, hapless studio moms. “Bethany’s audition is at two o’clock,” Mimi would warble, “and please take Hillary with you, too, because I know you’ll have room in your car and she’s going in for the same part.” You could always tell who’d been conned because of the trapped, glassy-eyed look the women developed at finding themselves saddled with girls as unruly as magpies.
    They were making no progress in the stalled traffic. Ruth was sweating lightly. Out of habit she glanced in the rearview mirror and was appalled to see fat Reba drinking a Slurpee and eating a Hostess Ho Ho. It was eight fifteen in the morning.
    “Honey,” she said, “why don’t you save that until lunch? You could have it for dessert.”
    “That’s okay,” Reba said, chewing complacently. “I can eat it now. They always feed us on set.”
    “I know, but what I meant—”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Allison said. “She has them every morning. That, or those cupcakes with the white squiggle.”
    “They’re really not good for you,” Ruth said. Reba shrugged. The other girls just looked out the windows, bored.
    “What do you eat for lunch?” Ruth pressed.
    “Funyuns,” Allison answered for her. “She lives on Funyuns.”
    “I do not,” Reba