Beads, Boys and Bangles by Sophia Bennett Page B

school, we go home together to my house, to Google Sigrid. We meet Crow in the hall. Her school finishes earlier than ours and she usually beats us to it.
    ‘Sigrid’s in town!’ we say, all together, like some sort of stressed-out girl group.
    Crow looks at us calmly.
    ‘I know,’ she says. ‘She’s just left a message. She wants another dress.’
    For the next hour, we surf the web.
    Eighteen months ago, Sigrid made a smash-hit comedy with Joe Yule, Jenny’s heart-throb (and mine and half the female universe’s – but Jenny got an actual snog out of him before Sigrid came along). The movie’s being shown at a festival next week. Joe’s busy being the New Teenage Sex God on a film set somewhere, so Sigrid is going along to greet the crowds. Meanwhile, she’s staying in a chic little hotel in Soho, going to a couple of European awards ceremonies and generally ‘catching up with all her old friends from previous visits to the ancient city of London’.
    And some of her old enemies, apparently. Crow says she’s due for her first fitting tomorrow.
    ‘I have to go over to her hotel. She doesn’t have time tocome here. Can you come with me, Nonie?’
    At first I say yes, assuming it’s straight after school. But then it turns out Sigrid can only do an appointment at nine pm. And for once, I’m accompanying Mum to a private view by one of the artists she represents. She doesn’t ask me very often and I can’t possibly turn it down.
    Jenny can’t go, with rehearsals starting in a few days and lots of advance homework to do. And hating Sigrid’s guts, of course. Which is how Edie ends up agreeing to keep Crow company. We don’t think anything of it at the time, apart from the fact that Edie is very kind, which we knew anyway.
    We think a lot about it later, but by then it’s much, much too late.

‘ I t was fine,’ Edie says.
    We’re back in the school cafeteria. Edie has promised to tell Jenny and me exactly how it went last night.
    ‘And?’ I ask.
    ‘And?’ asks Jenny.
    Edie looks up from her shepherd’s pie, surprised. She thinks that ‘fine’ is a perfectly reasonable description of a Hollywood starlet’s fashion fitting in a posh London hotel.
    ‘And WHAT?’ asks Jenny at last.
    ‘Oh,’ Edie says. ‘Well, Sigrid was very nice.’
    Edie does this. If you ask her to describe someone in Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy she’ll use about fifteen adjectives you’ve never heard of and you need a dictionary to keep up. But normal people are just ‘very nice’. I think Edie spends most of her time thinking about chess club or orchestra or going to Harvard and hardly notices real people at all.
    Not that it’s a surprise to hear ‘nice’ associated with Sigrid Santorini. Despite being the Queen of Evil, this is how she comes across when you first meet her. The thing with Sigrid is, she doesn’t know she’s the Queen of Evil. She thinks she’s an adorable cutie and the rest of us just can’t wait to be a part of her fabulous world. She bounces around, smiling at everyone and radiating joy. It’s only later that you find she’s ripped your life to pieces, stabbed you in the back, stolen something precious and disappeared.
    And she seems to think even that’s OK, because simply being in the presence of somebody so famous will make everything better for you. What’s worse, she’s often right. The night she stole Crow’s star catwalk outfit last year she said to me that she’d wear it on television and we’d get loads of publicity out of it and we’d be really grateful. Well, she wore it to the Oscars and Crow became an overnight sensation. But she didn’t tell me she was saving it for the Oscars and in the meantime Crow had to make another one and I nearly died. So I’m not as grateful as I might be. And I still think she’s the Queen of Evil.
    ‘Nice HOW?’ asks Jenny. Jenny likes detail.
    ‘She offered us loads of stuff from her hotel suite. They had five kinds of juice and this