We make it back to the bus in record time.

“Okay, Bec, you’ve got thirty minutes of downtime to chill,” Vi says. “I’ll be back with your dinner.” I nod, and she closes the door to my bus-bedroom.

I unload the necklaces and bracelets lining my neck and arms, peel off the sticky leather jeans, and pull on some stretchy leggings, a hoodie, and Becca’s bunny slippers. I have a pair almost exactly like them at home, and I’d wear them to school if my mom would let me. They’re that comfy.

I’m about to curl up with a magazine when there’s a knock at my door.

“Come in!” I shout. Vi nudges the door open. She’s got her cell phone in one hand and she’s covering the mouthpiece with the other.

“So sorry to bother you, Bec, but I’ve got Jonie Lake on the line,” Vi says. Jonie Lake? Sister of a striped stegosaurus! Jonie Lake is the infamous, thousand-year-old entertainment journalist who gets her kicks ripping celebrities apart in her gossip column for Starz magazine. She’s had so much plastic surgery she looks like a cross between the Joker from Batman and one of those creepy dolls whose eyes are supposed to close when you lay her down but they get stuck open all the time. Talk about scary with a capital S.

“What does she want?” I ask nervously.

“What she always wants,” Vi says. “A comment on her absurd, made-up story. This time, she’s going to be writing about how all of your Becca Starr merchandise is manufactured by underpaid children in Chinese sweatshops.” Vi sighs and shakes her head. “No comment, I assume?”

“But…but…why wouldn’t I comment?” I stammer. “That’s a horrible thing to print!” Then I have a terrifying thought.

“It’s not true, is it?” I ask.

“Oh Becca, of course it’s not true,” Vi assures me. “Nothing that vile woman prints is true! You know that.”

“Then…shouldn’t I defend myself?” I ask.

“You certainly can,” Vi says. “You just usually don’t want to deal with it.”

“Well, I feel like dealing with it today,” I tell her. “I’ll take the call.”

Vi lifts both eyebrows but says nothing as she hands me the phone. I take a deep breath before speaking into it.

“This is Becca Starr,” I say with confidence I definitely don’t feel. “May I help you?”

“Jonie Lake here,” she growls. “So, you got kids in China, working their little fingers raw for peanuts so you can make millions selling piece-of-junk dolls that don’t even look like you, if you ask me. Any comment?”

“First of all,” I say slowly, “I’d like to know where you got this information.” It’s not just a stall tactic. In my journalism class at Sacred Heart, you weren’t allowed to make any sort of claim without being able to back it up. That’s pretty basic stuff, in fact.

“Can’t reveal my sources, sorry,” Jonie snarls. “You got a comment? I’m on a deadline here.”

“My comment is that it is absolutely not true, not a single word of it,” I say. “All of my products are made right here in the United States. And for your information, I don’t make millions off those dolls. In fact, I don’t make a penny. I donate every single cent I make on my merchandise to the Pack It Up Foundation. You are welcome to confirm that with them.”

I so nailed that! Stella and I have watched the Becca Starr documentary at least a dozen times, so I’ve actually seen her manufacturing plant. It’s in somewhere like Detroit or Pittsburgh or one of those other cities where they make a bunch of stuff. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m positive it’s in the United States because they made a big deal about it in the movie about how hardly anybody makes anything in the United States anymore, which is sad. Then later in the movie, there’s this whole scene about Becca’s work with Pack It Up. Every year, she gives them money to buy backpacks and fill them with school supplies for kids who can’t afford to buy them. Becca even helps them pack those bags herself. I’d never even thought about not having enough money to buy a pencil before I saw that. It’s a tearjerker of a scene, and after we saw it the first time, Stella and I both took our entire allowance and stuck it in an envelope and mailed it right off to them, along with my favorite Crazy Kitten pencil case packed with as many supplies as we could stuff in there.

“Well, that’s not what my source said, so I guess you don’t really have anything to add,” Jonie grumbles. And then there’s a click.

Is this some kind of joke? She was asking me about me! And I told her the truth and she didn’t even care. And now she’s going to print her evil article full of lies, and there’s nothing I can do about it? It’s so totally not fair.

This is almost exactly like that time at Sacred Heart when somebody started a rumor that Sally Keester had six toes on her left foot. Nobody even knew how the rumor started, but it sure did spread like wildfire. As if it wasn’t bad enough having to go through life with a last name that’s another word for backside, that poor girl walked to school in the snow wearing sandals all winter, just so people could count her frozen toes for themselves. (There were only ten. And she asked me to count them, for your information.) Even after Sally nearly got frostbite, kids still said she had one little piggy tucked underneath the others. Some of those kids still call her Six Toe Sally to this day. Why are some people mean for no good reason? It should be against the law.

I look at Vi helplessly and hand her the phone. A tear slips out of the corner of my eye. Vi sits down next to me.

“Sweetie, this is all part of being a star, you know that,” she says, hugging me. “People are going to say what they’re going to say and think what they’re going to think, and all you can do is keep being you. You know as well as I do that this will only make headlines until she makes up something even worse about somebody else. Until then, all you can do is ignore it. Besides, who cares what a bunch of strangers think? Those of us who know and love you are the only ones who matter, anyway. Right?”

I nod and look down at my lap. Vi stands and slips quietly out of the room. Who knew being a rock star would be such a roller-coaster ride?