Model Misfit
Holly Smale
“My name is Harriet Manners, and I am still a geek.”MODEL MISFIT is the sequel to award-winning No. 1 UK debut GEEK GIRL.Harriet Manners knows a lot of facts.She knows that humans have 70,000 thoughts per day.She knows that Geek + Model = a whole new set of graffiti on your belongings.And that the average person eats a ton of food a year, though her pregnant stepmother is doing her best to beat this.But Harriet doesn’t know where she’s going to fit in once the new baby arrives. And with her summer plans ruined, modelling in Japan seems the perfect chance to get away.Can Harriet cope with the craziness of Tokyo, her competitive model flatmates and her errant grandmother’s ‘chaperoning’. Or seeing gorgeous Nick everywhere she goes?Will geek girl find her place on the other side of the world?The sequel to the award-winning debut GEEK GIRL.
Copyright (#ulink_62c9dab3-d20a-5ee1-a608-3dd27fa2ae3f)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2013
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Holly Smale 2013
Cover photographs © shutterstock.com (http://shutterstock.com); Cover typography © Mary Kate Mcdeveritt; Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Holly Smale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007489466
Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007489473
Version: 2015-12-17
For my sister, Tara. In calm or stormy weather.
fit adjective
1 Appropriate or suiting
2 Proper
3 Qualified and competent
4 Prepared
5 In good physical condition
NOUN
1 Fashionable clothing
2 An onset or period of emotion
COLLOQUIAL SLANG
1 To be really, really good looking
ORIGIN from the Old English fitt: ‘conflict or struggle’.
Contents
Cover (#ub67124fb-62f5-5db7-a4dd-efc2e19714d8)
Title Page (#u8372524e-6230-5cb2-9d69-cdbfb564ee58)
Copyright (#u7a6c7651-a5ac-58bf-834f-790a0339ffde)
Dedication (#u5f1e86f7-15db-58f8-b4b4-6f9eea420126)
Chapter 1 (#u3c28b5a1-20da-56ba-aa4e-99a5b4e0f0c6)
Chapter 2 (#u49f2440c-e90c-5d1a-8cb8-db042527e083)
Chapter 3 (#ud5556989-be52-57ed-8744-05e73bbbeacf)
Chapter 4 (#u188627b5-8927-5110-999c-44394687eea5)
Chapter 5 (#ua434f596-c987-50e7-b02a-c8748c26aff9)
Chapter 6 (#u99b60122-b9bc-5dd4-b768-e3d66315ea5e)
Chapter 7 (#ub21b396e-ab74-5f3a-87fb-631b1dfc06e8)
Chapter 8 (#u1493147a-f165-5396-85ef-3102c703c3d1)
Chapter 9 (#u58025578-0809-5197-bfe1-156901e51dec)
Chapter 10 (#uaca4e9f9-2a30-5e14-a9eb-12229dc2cb2a)
Chapter 11 (#u4812b830-5c3a-5939-b682-063ab07a7012)
Chapter 12 (#u92e0bf83-bff9-5b78-b0cf-1f7ea4028b7d)
Chapter 13 (#u97b226ce-29f4-5ead-82be-a95bcff07c08)
Chapter 14 (#u87ecda58-999e-5dc1-a0b5-6c33b078a022)
Chapter 15 (#u057507c1-4d7e-5162-a3bd-a0833a94c953)
Chapter 16 (#u2ee32bca-ec18-5ba0-9615-494b848b6244)
Chapter 17 (#u2c10716e-6e54-53ca-b459-6f9c717c94ed)
Chapter 18 (#ua4835eb9-4315-5560-b832-abcbbf3772c6)
Chapter 19 (#u8bf86b05-aebc-59ed-80ff-6aef1763e191)
Chapter 20 (#u694c6311-339b-54e7-ab8b-ac30d6f49088)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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y name is Harriet Manners, and I am a model.
I know I’m a model because:
1. It’s Monday morning, and I’m wearing a gold tutu, a gold jacket, gold ballet pumps and gold earrings. My face is painted gold, and a long piece of gold wire has been wrapped around my head. This is not how I normally dress on Mondays.
2. I have a bodyguard. The earrings cost so much I’m not allowed to go to the toilet without a large man checking my earlobes afterwards to make sure I haven’t accidentally flushed them.
3. I haven’t been allowed to smile for two hours.
4. Every time I take a bite of doughnut to keep my strength up everybody breathes in sharply as if I’ve just bent down and given the floor a quick lick.
5. There’s a large camera pointing at my face, and the man behind it keeps saying, “Oi, model,” and clicking his fingers at me.
There are other clues – I’m pouting slightly, and making tiny movements every couple of seconds like a robot – but they’re not necessarily conclusive. That’s exactly how my father dances when a car advert comes on TV.
Anyway, the final reason I know I’m a model is:
6. I have become a creature of grace, elegance and style.
In fact, you could say I’ve really grown up since you last saw me.
Developed. Blossomed.
Not literally. I’m exactly the same size and shape as I was six months ago, and six months before that. As far as womanly curves go, much like the netball captain at school, puberty is making no bones about picking me last.
No, I’m talking metaphorically. I simply woke up one day, and BAM: fashion and I were at one with each other. Working together, helping each other. Just like the crocodile and the little Egyptian plover bird that climbs into its mouth to pick bits of meat out of its teeth. Except obviously in a much more glamorous and less unhygienic way.
And I’m going to be totally honest with you: it’s changed me. The geek is gone, and in her place is somebody glamorous. Popular. Cool.
A brand-new Harriet Manners.
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nyway. The really great thing about being totally synergised with the fashion world is that it makes shoots very smooth and focused.
“Right,” Aiden the photographer says, “what are we thinking, model?”
(You see what I mean? What are we thinking: fashion and I are basically sharing a brain.)
“We’re thinking mysterious,” I tell him. “We’re thinking enigmatic. We’re thinking unfathomable.”
“And why are we thinking that?”
“Because it says so on the side of the perfume box.”
“Exactly. I’m thinking Garbo and Grable, Hepburn and Hayworth, Bacall and Bardot, but it might be best if you think reality TV show contestant and do the opposite.”
“Got it,” I say, shifting slightly in my position on the floor and moving my foot so that the sole is pointing towards me. Then I lean towards it gracefully. Mysterious. I grab the corner of my jacket and lift it slightly, like a butterfly wing, angling my face downwards. Enigmatic. Finally, I arch my back and poke out an arm so I’m staring at the crease of my inner elbow. Unfathomable.
“Got it.” Aiden looks up from the camera. “Model, Yuka Ito was right. These are some very strange shapes you’re pulling, but it works. Very edgy. Very high fashion.”
What did I tell you? Me and fashion: I walk in and out of its mouth and it doesn’t even try to eat me any more.
“Now point your elbow in the other direction for me.” The photographer crouches down, adjusts the camera shutter and then looks back up again. “Towards the camera.”
Sugar cookies.
“You know,” I say without moving, “enigmatic, mysterious, unfathomable. They’re tautological. Yuka could save a lot of room on the box by just picking one.”
“Just move your arm.”
“Umm, has she considered ‘baffling’? It’s from an old word used to describe a wind that buffeted sailors from all directions. It’s sort of appropriate for a perfume, don’t you think?”
Aiden pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Right. How about you show me the bottom of the shoe? We should try to get the contrasting sole in the shot.”
I clear my throat, mind starting to race. “Erm … but what about Saudi Arabia, China and Thailand? It’s considered culturally impolite to show the bottom of your feet there …” I look around the room in a blind panic. “We don’t want to risk alienating them, do we?” I sweep my arm out in a wide, persuasive gesture.
And something on my sleeve catches Aiden’s eye.
Oh no. No no no.
“What’s that?” he says, standing up and walking over to where I’m now scrabbling to get off the floor but my feet are caught in the enormous tutu. The photographer grabs my arm and peels a tiny gold sticker from the inside of my jacket elbow. “What’s this?”
“Hmm?” I say, swallowing and straining to make my eyes as round as I physically can.
Aiden peers at the sticker. “F = M × A?” he reads slowly. Then he pulls three more from inside the lining of the jacket. “V = I × R? Ek = ½ × M × V2? W = M × G?”
Before I can move he grabs the shoe from my foot, turns it over and pulls a sticker from the heel. Then he pulls one from my inside elbow and four from the inside folds of the tutu netting.
He blinks at the stickers a couple of times while I stare at the floor and try to look as small as humanly possible. “Harriet,” he says in a slow and incredulous voice. “Harriet Manners, are you studying maths in the middle of my fashion shoot?”
I shake my head and look at the air behind the photographer’s left ear. You know the crocodile and the bird? I think one of us is about to get eaten.
“No,” I answer in my littlest voice. Because a) It’s physics, and b) I’ve been doing it all the way through.
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K, so I may have stretched the truth a tiny bit.
Or – you know: a lot.
I haven’t changed. In fact, I’m even more of a geek than I used to be because:
1 the grey matter in my brain is still developing extra connections on a daily basis
2 I know even more facts than I did before
3 I’m just coming to the end of exams, which means my short-term cognitive abilities are on overdrive.
I’m also not graceful, elegant or stylish, but I guess you’ve already worked that out for yourself.
“Unbelievable,” Aiden mutters, clicking through the images as I slip behind a curtain at the back of the room to get changed into my school uniform.
“I’m so sorry, Mr Thomas,” I call out. “I honestly didn’t mean to disrespect you and the crocodi— erm, fashion industry. Did you get OK photos?”
“That’s not the point. Do you know how many other models wanted this job?”
Yes. Last time I was at Infinity Models, two of them locked me in a cupboard so I missed a really big casting. I had to wait until the cleaner came round to let me out again.
“I’m sorry, it’s just it’s my final GCSE today,” I try to explain as I tug off the massive tutu and smack an elbow painfully against the wall. “At 2pm, the British education system is going to decide whether I have any chance of ever becoming an award-winning physicist. My entire future is going to be shaped by today.”
I pull on my school jumper, which promptly gets caught in the gold wire still wrapped around my head. There’s silence while I hop in and out of the ‘changing room’ with my jumper over my face and my arms waving in the air like manic bunny ears.
“Hmm,” Aiden agrees still clicking through images. “You’re clearly a genius destined for a Nobel Prize.”
“GCSE physics is not about literal spatial awareness,” I puff, clutching blindly at my head and simultaneously smashing my knee against the wall. “It’s conceptual spatial awareness. Two very different things.”
Which is lucky, because the wire on my head now appears to be caught on everything in a two-metre radius. I have a detailed Get To School On Time Plan in my satchel, and nowhere at all does it say: Detach Myself From A Curtain Ring.
“It’s OK, Harriet,” I say, spinning helplessly in little circles. “You still have an hour and eleven minutes to get to school by train. Or an hour and sixteen minutes by taxi. You’ve got ages.”
“Erm … you know the clock on the back wall is slow. Right?”
I abruptly stop circling.
Oh my God. OH MY GOD. I knew there was a reason they made us study karma in religious education.
“No,” I squeak, ripping myself free from the wire at the cost of quite a few hairs, a scratch on my cheek, a curtain ring and half a school uniform. “How slow?”
“An hour,” Aiden says.
And – just like that – both my Get To School On Time Plan and entire life trajectory fly straight out the window.
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his is so incredibly typical.
The one time my dad isn’t at the back of a photo shoot, trying to ‘liven things up a bit’ by stealing bits of mannequin and pretending he has three arms and four legs, is the one time I really need him here.
But Dad’s at a job interview and I now have less than fifty minutes to get to a destination over an hour away.
As the taxi driver points out cheerfully after I clamber into the back and beg him to hurry: “I can only go as fast as the traffic, Goldilocks. I’m part of it, ain’t I?”
Which I would probably look at as a kind of poignant universal truth if I wasn’t preoccupied by trying to make myself as light as possible, in the hope that the decreased weight would allow the car to accelerate faster.
And also with correcting his grammar.
There’s nothing else I can do. Thanks to the laws of physics – and irony – the factors dictating how fast I get to my exam apparently do not include a) crying, b) hyperventilating or c) repeating ‘sugar cookies’ until the taxi driver shuts the internal window and flicks the switch that stops him being able to hear me.
So I may as well use the remaining time constructively to update you on what’s been happening in the past six months.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
1. I’ve become even less popular. Geek + Model = a whole new set of graffiti on your belongings.
2. I’m trying to cry less about it. We each expel an average of 121 litres of tears in a lifetime, and I can’t afford to dry up before I even hit sixth form.
3. My dad is still out of work, and Annabel is still working as a lawyer. This is worth noting, because my stepmother is now seven months pregnant, and Dad is definitely not.
4. Apparently the average person eats a ton of food a year: the weight of a fully grown elephant. Annabel is doing her best to single-handedly challenge this statistic. She is huge.
5. My best friend, Nat, has turned sixteen, and I have not. This means that Nat can now legally play pinball in Georgia, USA after 11pm and fly a plane solo in the UK, and I cannot.
6. I have modelled twice for Baylee, gone on a few go-sees (when not spending time productively locked in a cleaning cupboard) and that’s it.
7. I’ve finally reached the painful conclusion that my hair is not strawberry blonde.
8. It’s ginger.
And that’s it. Everything else has stayed exactly the same.
My stalker, Toby, still orbits me like some kind of slightly snotty moon and my nemesis, Alexa, still inexplicably hates me.
My agent, Wilbur, still makes up words whenever he feels like it, and the fashion designer, Yuka Ito, is still totally terrifying.
My dog, Hugo, is still fond of sampling anything sticky he spots on the pavement and I still keep my textbooks lined up in alphabetical, chromatic and subject order.
Because that’s how real life is: people and situations and dogs don’t change that often, even when you have written very careful plans and tried to force them to.
And if I could leave my list there, I would. Because it’s a nice list, isn’t it? A lovely, positive list that looks forward to an entire summer with Nat, a brand-new graffiti-less satchel next term, and – quite soon – the legal ability to fly planes on my own whenever I feel like it.
But I can’t leave it there, because one more thing happened. And – for a little while, anyway – it made all the other points seem less important:
9. Lion Boy dumped me.
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Reasons Not to Think About Nick
1 He told me not to.
on’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds.
I mean, in some ways it’s exactly as bad as it sounds. Four months after our first kiss, Nick told me we shouldn’t see each other any more and then he abruptly disappeared from my life. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Not a text. Not a phone call or a voicemail. Not an email. Not a tweet or a Facebook message. Not even a fax (even though I’m not sure who faxes these days, but the option is still sort of there, isn’t it?).
But it’s totally OK. You don’t spend nearly sixteen years reading novels about love and scanning poetry about love and listening to songs about love and watching films about love without coming away with a pretty good idea of how love stories go.
Everybody knows the dramatic ups and downs are what make the difference between a real love story – the kind that people make into films – and a boring one that nobody bothers writing or singing about.
Would Pride and Prejudice bepopular if Darcy and Lizzy hooked up at the first ball?
Would Wuthering Heights be a classic if Cathy chose Heathcliff?
Would Romeo and Juliet be studied in school if they dated for a few years and then got married and moved to the suburbs of Mantua?
Exactly.
So even if your love story involves somebody dumping you and moving back to Australia, as Shakespeare said you just have to refuse to “admit impediments”, and then they’ll come back to you. Everybody knows that.
And, yes, it’s been more than two months so it’s taking Nick a little bit longer than it probably should, but he must be on his way.
All I have to do is wait.
In the meantime, I’m trying not to think about him. I don’t think about his coffee-coloured skin, or his big black lion curls, or his green smell, or his eyes that slant up at the corners. I don’t think about the tilt of his nose, or the wideness of his smile, or the way he used to rub his thumb across my knuckle when we were holding hands and tap the end of my nose after I sneezed (which was very unhygienic, but for some gross and deeply disturbing reason I liked it).
I don’t think about how he makes me feel like a lightning bug: as if part of me is full of fire, and the other part of me can fly.
I don’t think about how I’d be with him all the time, if I possibly could.
And I absolutely never think about the fact that I’m not really enjoying this bit of my love story, and that I’d have much preferred the boring kind where Nick stayed and everything carried on exactly as it was before.
Even if it broke all the rules of romance straight down the middle.
The driver clears his throat.
“In love, Goldilocks?” He winks at me in the rear-view mirror, waving his hand in my direction. “That explains a lot.”
I look in surprise at the anatomically correct heart I’ve been sketching on the window, and then blush and wipe it away. Subtle, Harriet.
“Nope,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. “I’m just … prepping for next year’s biology module.”
“Course you are.” The driver grins. “Anyway, thought you was in an ’urry? Some kind of exam?” He nods. “You got four minutes left.”
I blink a few times. The car has stopped and we’re sitting directly outside my school. I hadn’t even noticed we’d stopped moving.
“But …” I say as I scrabble in my satchel for my purse, “how is that even physically possible?”
The driver shrugs. “I’m magic, ain’t I,” he states matter-of-factly. “Like that fat dude in ’Arry Potter.”
I glance up. He certainly looks … other-worldly. Ephemeral. Slightly over-blessed with body hair.
“And I went well over the speed limit,” he adds brightly. “That’s eighty quid, love. Magic is pricy these days. Now get a hop on, you got three minutes left.”
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swear on my Oxford English Dictionary, I have never moved so fast in my entire life.
By the time I’ve slid through the closing door of the gym hall, my breathing is so strained I sound like our vacuum cleaner when Annabel’s cleaning the sofa. Sweat is dripping down my neck and the only thing I have to mop it up with is the edge of my school jumper now hanging in three ripped pieces around my neck, like a piece of modern art. Or something Wilbur would wear.
I’m barely two steps into the room when Toby’s fluffy head spins around. I can only assume he spotted me out of the back of it with what he calls his ‘Harrietenna’.
“Toby,” Miss Johnson says in a warning voice, and Toby immediately stops waving and starts blowing me kisses and blinking instead.
I nod hello at him, hurry past and put my little plastic bag of stationery carefully on the right-hand side of my desk. Then I sit down and close my eyes.
Only a minute left to gather my thoughts, summon The Knowledge of the Stickers and Zen my environment. Just a few precious moments to allow the stress hormones to dissipate, to regulate my breathing, stop working out what time it is in Australia and to get my mind back on physics.
Midnight. It’s midnight in Sydney right now.
Somebody snorts.
Focus, Harriet. There are two types of electron: negative and positive. Like charges repel. Opposite charges attract.
Somebody snorts again, and there’s a faint giggle from a few seats away.
When insulating materials are rubbed together, electrons are knocked off one atom and on to the other.
There’s another laugh, and suddenly I’m vaguely aware of eyes burrowing into my forehead.
Not just Toby’s, I know what they feel like.
Cautiously, I open mine and glance around the room. There are a hundred and fifty-two other students in the hall, and every single one of them is staring at me.
I have absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if nobody here has seen sweat before. Or a ripped jumper. Or a single sock and scratched face. That’s how a large chunk of my year end lunch break.
I look at Toby and see he’s inexplicably patting his cheeks. When I search the room for Nat and see her – a long way away – she’s trying to mouth something at me.
“Go,” she’s saying, subtly pointing at me. “Go.”
I love Nat. She’s my favourite person in the entire world (followed by my dad and Annabel). But I’m not going anywhere. I’ve only just got here.
“Go,” she mouths again, and then she rolls her eyes and smacks her head with her hand.
Now that gesture I’m familiar with.
“Everybody face this way,” Miss Johnson shouts furiously, and three hundred and two eyes suddenly snap away from my face. “Toby Pilgrim, that includes you,” Miss Johnson yells, and the final two revert to the front. “You have thirty seconds before your exam begins.”
The only person not focusing on our imminent exam is Alexa, who is sitting diagonally directly behind me. She’s got a standard smug expression on her face and she’s rolling something between her fingers. Before I can work out what’s going on, she subtly leans down and rolls a little paper ball forward so it’s positioned directly under my desk.
“Twenty seconds.”
I stare at the ball in confusion, then in a flash I know: Alexa’s trying to sabotage my exam. She’s trying to plant revision notes on me. Yet another round of her ultimate plan – Ruin Harriet’s Life.
Oh my God. If I pick it up and get caught, I’m going to be thrown out of this exam. If I don’t pick up it up and it gets found under my desk afterwards, I’ll get disqualified for cheating. What do I do?
“Ten seconds.”
Pick it up or don’t pick it up? Don’t pick it up or pick it up?
“Five seconds.”
I bend down swiftly and grab it. If I can destroy the evidence before the exam starts, I’m not cheating. I’m just … disposing of rubbish responsibly.
But, like Pandora, I need to know what’s in the box. I need to know what’s intended to destroy me. So I tuck the note under the desk and quietly open it:
GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.
Oh, I think.
Oh.
“Please turn your papers over,” Miss Johnson announces as I shrink into my seat with my hands over my face. “You may now start.”
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spend the rest of my final exam looking like something actresses hold once a year and cry over. According to a test I did on the internet, I have 143 IQ points. Clearly I have no idea what to do with any of them.
Toby isn’t quite so sure.
“Harriet,” he says happily as I walk out of the hall and head outside to wait for Nat. “I am honoured to stalk you. I honestly cannot think of anyone I’d rather follow obsessively around.”
Somehow, Toby’s gotten even more thin and stretched-out looking: as if he’s a bit of melted cheese somebody’s just pulled off a pizza. His hair is fluffier, he has dark shadows around his eyes, and he’s bobbing along with his hands neatly by his sides, his little nose twitching slightly. He looks even more like a meerkat than he did last time you saw him.
Let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t be even vaguely surprised if a plane flew past and he bolted for cover.
“What are you talking about, Tobes?”
“Gold is traditionally the colour of success, achievement and triumph,” Toby explains in a voice brimming over with admiration. “You’re the perfect colour for the last exam. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before.”
I stare at him, and then burst into an explosion of laughter. Only Toby could possibly think I painted myself gold today on purpose.
Except … In love, Goldilocks? That explains a lot.
I abruptly stop laughing. Oh my God: the taxi driver did too. I clearly just look like the kind of girl who goes insane and colours herself in on a regular basis.
That’s not the impression I’m trying to give to the world at all.
As Toby starts chattering excitedly about exam questions and oscillations of light waves, I glaze over and listen to the sound of his chirpy words going up and down and round and round.
Every time I try to remember what it was like not having him around, I can’t do it. Toby’s like a fact: once you know him, you can’t unknow him. Over the last few months, he’s started spending a little more time where Nat and I don’t have to pretend we can’t see him. And we’ve…
Well, we’ve kind of let him.
He’s not so bad in small doses. As long as he doesn’t irritate Nat too much. She has limited interest in irrelevant facts, and I fill that quota already.
We finally get outside, blink a few times in the bright sunshine, then start wandering, half blind, towards a small patch of shade. Nat’s surname is near the beginning of the alphabet, so she always gets stuck at the back of an exam room: picking at her nail varnish and making impatient huffing sounds, like a pretty, swishy-haired dragon.
By the time we spot Alexa it’s too late.
She’s just outside the school gates with a big group of her friends: all clad in their cunningly edited school uniforms like a fashionable army. Rolled skirts and tucked tops and pink streaks and bra-straps showing. Sprawled menacingly across the grass, as if they own the school.
And how can I put this?
In a very non-literal way, they sort of do.
(#ulink_629acc0c-aa8e-5f40-8d1a-7ae67325ac4b)
o, by the way.
If you think a polite but firm conversation with my bully six months ago totally fixed everything between us, you’ve obviously never met Alexa. Or me.
Or any other teenage girl.
I want to pretend Alexa and her friends aren’t waiting for me, but a quick glance at her face tells me otherwise. She’s practically salivating. That’s the not-so-great thing about the last day of school: no repercussions.
“Hey,” she says sharply, taking a step towards me. “Manners.”
I instinctively look for another exit. But, short of using Toby to hurdle the fence, there’s no other way out of the school. So I duck my head and try my hardest to become completely invisible.
Thanks to not being a member of the Fantastic Four, this doesn’t work.
“HEY,” Alexa says again, blocking my path. She glances briefly at Toby. He scratches at the inside of his ear and then sniffs his finger. “Did you have fun in that exam, geek? Bet you did. I bet it was the best fun you’ve had in ages.”
I flush slightly. She’s absolutely right: it was awesome. When I got to the essay question about the life cycle of a star, I actually got a bit dizzy with excitement. “Maybe,” I say with the most non-committal shrug I can muster.
“Bet you knew all the answers, didn’t you, you total spod.”
I shake my head. “Only about ninety-three per cent of them.”
Everyone snickers – I don’t know why: that’s still a solid A* – and Alexa scowls at me. I try to walk away, but she blocks me again. “So you’ve heard about the massive house party I’m having tonight?”
The answer to this question is obviously: yes. There are Eskimos in Siberia who woke up this morning, fully aware of the house party Alexa is having tonight.
“No.”
“I’ve heard about it,” Toby interrupts eagerly. “You’re having tiny jellies, aren’t you? Alexa, they sound brilliant. I’ve always found normal-sized jellies unhygienic. All those different spoons. It’s much more sanitary to have lots of little ones each, isn’t it?”
Alexa ignores him. “A guy who used to be on TVis coming. So it’s technically a celebrity party.”
Toby nods sagely. “No green jelly then. Just awesome red and purple, right? My mum makes mine in the shape of a rocket with liquorice where the engines would be.”
Years from now, historians will look back at records of these days and wonder how Toby managed to get through them alive.
“That’s nice for you, Alexa,” I say, finally managing to dodge round her and start walking in the opposite direction.
“So, Manners” – and she clears her throat – “Want to come?”
I stop mid-stride. Apparently when people have their heads cut off there are five or six seconds when they can hear and see and blink, but they can’t move because they’ve already been severed in half.
That’s sort of how I feel now.
Slowly, I turn back round. “Pardon me?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nat come out of the school doors, pause and then start legging it towards us.
“Do you want to come to my party?” Alexa says, her face totally blank. “We’ve got a TV star, so you’d be the perfect celebrity addition. A model.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she says slowly, and the smirk appears again. “And if we fancy a dance, we can tie you to the ceiling by your feet and spin you round really fast. You can be our very own human disco ball.”
Then she points at my face and bursts into hysterical laughter, and a few nano-seconds later everyone starts snickering behind her.
It takes thirty minutes for a human body to produce enough heat to boil half a gallon of water. I think from the temperature of my cheeks right now I can probably cut that down to eleven or twelve, maximum.
Why didn’t I just keep walking? What’s wrong with me? Other than a gold face and an entire lack of survival instinct, obviously.
“Bite us, Hockey-legs,” Nat snaps, suddenly appearing next to me. “As if we’d want to go to your wannabe party.”
“As if I’d want you to want to. I’m still scrubbing the loserness off my doorstep from your last visit.” Alexa sneers. “Anyway, why the hell would I want her,” and she points at me like I’m a bit of toenail stuck in a carpet, “in my house, spreading her geekiness around? There’s no level of cool that can cure that. I’d have an epidemic on my hands.”
She spins round and adds, “Nobody wants that, right?” Then starts ceremoniously high-fiving her friends.
As if I’m not still standing there with my cheeks burning.
As if I don’t matter.
As if I never will.
As if nothing has changed at all.
(#ulink_eca653ac-9c5a-536e-893a-70d5a6988e75)
count slowly to ten, and then I take a deep breath, reach into my pocket and pull out a small bit of crumpled-up paper.
I tap my still-triumphing nemesis on the back and hand it to her.
“What the hell is this?”
YOUR
GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.
“You-apostrophe-r-e is a contraction of you are, Alexa,” I say. “If you needed help with grammar, you should’ve asked.”
There’s a stunned silence followed by a couple of desperately suppressed snorts, and I suddenly wonder whether everyone likes Alexa as much as they pretend they do. Or whether some of them are only here for the ‘celebrity’ parties and tiny jellies.
Alexa’s smirk has finally gone. “I know the difference,” she hisses furiously. “It was a typo.”
She scrunches the distinctly handwritten note back up and throws it hard at my face. It hits my left ear with a small pop.
“What do I care, anyway?” she adds. “School’s over. Nobody in real life cares about that kind of rubbish.”
“I do,” I say quietly.
“So do I,” Nat says loudly, putting her arm around my waist and giving me a quick peck on the cheek.
“Me too,” Toby agrees. “Never underestimate the power of a well-placed apostrophe.”
We turn to leave and Alexa suddenly loses it, as if all her anger has just exploded in one bright firework of hatred. “Don’t walk away from me, geeks!” she screams, slamming her hand against a parking bollard. “We’re not done here! You just wait until next year! I’m going to … I’m going to – you – you – you’re …”
“Hey!” Toby says, “I think she’s finally getting it, Harriet!”
“We’ll look forward to hearing the rest of that sentence in sixth form, Alexa,” Nat calls back. “That should give you enough time to work out something really terrifying.”
We grin at each other and keep walking. Alexa’s shouting gets fainter and fainter until all I can hear is a harmless buzzing sound, like a tiny mosquito.
I look upwards.
The sky is bright blue, the trees have parted, and now there’s nothing but summer stretching endlessly in front of us.
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e don’t even wait until we turn the corner to start dancing.
That’s the beauty of the summer holidays. It’s as if life is just a big Etch-A-Sketch, and once a year you get to shake it vigorously up and down and start again. By the time we go back to school, the whole year will be wiped clean.
Sort of.
Enough to ensure nobody remembers Toby breakdancing across the road with his satchel on his head, anyway.
“Did you see Alexa’s face?” Nat shouts, doing a little scissor kick and punching the air. “That was magic.”
I give a happy little hop, even though it does mean I may now have to apply to a different sixth form if I don’t want to spend the rest of my teens lodged down a toilet of Alexa’s choosing. (The Etch-A-Sketch isn’t that thorough.) “Do you think I did something horrendous to Alexa when we were little that I’ve forgotten about, Nat?”
“Who cares if you did?” Nat yells as she does a series of excited little spins, high-fiving me on every turn. “Alexa’s gone! Exams are over. Do you know what that means?! No more physics! No more chemistry! No more history! No more MATHS!”
My A Levels will be in physics, chemistry, history and maths and I fully intend to start studying for them before the week is over, but I high-five my best friend anyway.
Nat giddily grabs a calculator out of her bag and throws it on the floor. “I am never going to use you again,” she yells at it. “Do you understand? Me and you: we’re through!”
Toby bends down and picks it up. “Aren’t you going to study fashion design, Natalie?”
“Yup.” She tosses her shiny black hair and beams at him. “It’s going to be clothes, clothes, clothes for the rest of my life.”
“Then you’re going to need this,” Toby says, handing it back to her. “To calculate fabric measurements, body shapes, profit margins, manufacturing costs and loan repayments, not to mention pattern cutting and size differentiation.”
“What?” Nat’s face collapses. “Oh for the love of …” She looks at me. “I didn’t have to know that for months. Seriously. Does he have to be here? Can’t we send him back to wherever he came from?”
“Hemel Hempstead,” Toby says helpfully. “I can get the 303 bus.”
“We’ve got an entire summer ahead of us,” I remind Nat jubilantly, ignoring him. I feel a bit like Neil Armstrong immediately before he boarded the Apollo in 1969: as if we’ve just been handed all the space in the universe, and we can do whatever we want with it. “In fact, I’ve got it all mapped out.” I start rummaging in my satchel and then pull out a piece of paper with a flourish. “Ta-da!”
Nat takes it off me and frowns. “Nat and Harriet’s Summer of Fun Flow Chart?”
“Exactly!”
I do a little dance and then gesture at the coloured bubbles: yellow for me, purple for Nat, and – thanks to the nature of the colour wheel – an unfortunate poo brown for everything in between. “I’ve got every detail planned out for maximum fun and entertainment value,” I explain, pointing proudly. “Starting with Westminster Abbey, which is where Chaucer, Hardy, Tennyson and Kipling are buried, and then Highgate Cemetery to visit George Eliot, Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. We’re working our way through dead writers chronologically.”
I’ve focused our Summer of Fun Flow Chart on London because all there is locally is a roller-skate rink and a Mill museum, and as much as I love both wheels on my feet and bread we totally exhausted both of those options before we left primary school.
“The Charles Dickens Museum?” Nat reads slowly. “Glass-blowing in Leathermarket? The Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London?”
She’s impressed. I can tell from how quiet she is and the fact that she’s not making eye contact.
“Amazing, right? They’ve just discovered traces of ancient blue paint on the Parthenon statues at the British Museum, scientifically proving that ancient Greece looked like Disneyland. We can go and see the new exhibition!”
Nat nods a couple of times and scratches at her neck. “Uh-huh.”
I suddenly realise how selfish I sound. “Nat,” I say quickly, “there’s loads of stuff for you on here too. There’s an exhibition on ball gowns at the V&A, and the London College of Fashion are doing a graduate show that I’m sure Wilbur can get us tickets to.”
Toby nods knowingly. “Did you know the Victoria and Albert Museum employs a hawk every summer to discourage pigeons from the gardens?”
“And tonight … I thought we could celebrate together with these!” I pull DVDs of The Devil Wears Prada and David Attenborough’s African documentary from my satchel. “And these!” I pull out some sparkly purple nail varnish and toe-dividers and a pack of Game of Thrones playing cards. “And – wait for it – these!” I pull out a pack of no-calorie caramel popcorn and an enormous chocolate muffin.
Then I look at Toby. “I didn’t forget you,” I add fondly. I hand him a Lord of the Rings Lego set.
“Harriet Manners,” he says solemnly. “I shall begin constructing a YouTube stop-frame video sensation immediately.”
“What do you think, Nat?” I squeak, bouncing up and down on my toes. “Are you ready to start the Most Incredible Summer Of All Time
?! I’m calling it MISOAT for short, by the way.”
“Umm,” Nat says, and glances at me then back into the middle distance. All signs of laughter or twirling have completely disappeared. “Toby, can you leave us alone for a second?”
“Girl stuff?” he says wisely. “Natalie, I know all about menstruation. We studied it in biology.”
“Toby.”
“Ah. Not menstruation then.” Toby cocks his head to the side. “Perhaps bras?”
Nat scowls so hard her forehead looks like something out of Star Trek.
“Kittens?”
Just as Nat reaches out a hand to physically throttle him Toby ducks behind a tree.
I guess old stalker habits die hard.
“What’s going on?” I ask nervously. “Have you already seen The Devil Wears Prada?”
Nat’s lips twitch. “Of course I have. It’s not that … I’m so sorry, Harriet. I only found out two days ago. I didn’t want to upset you during exams.”
My stomach tightens into a hard ball. I can already feel our trips to the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum shutting down, like tiny little lights being turned off. “What’s going on?”
“I’m …” and she takes a deep breath. “I’m going to France.”
A couple more bulbs break. “What? For how long?”
“A whole month,” Nat says miserably. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
And – just like that – my entire summer goes completely dark.
(#ulink_bb32e100-f3db-5515-8626-f903318c0a10)
rance? What has France got that my Summer of Fun Flow Chart doesn’t have?
A French Home-stay Programme, apparently.
Nat’s mum is making her go, as punishment for catching Nat in Boots when she should have been doing her French GCSE. Nat quickly explains this as her mum pulls up at the kerb alongside us and makes the universal gesture for Get In This Car Right Now, Young Lady.
Then she waves miserably goodbye at us from the back windscreen.
“Harriet,” Toby says, when he comes out from behind the tree two minutes later. “Do you know what this means?”
“No,” I say curtly, because obviously I do.
Don’t say it, Toby, I will him silently. Please. Just don’t say it.
But as always Toby’s ability to read minds, verbal inflections or really-quite-obvious facial expressions remains non-existent.
“It means,” he says – staring at me with eyes like lava lamps, all liquid and glowing – “you’re going to be spending the whole of summer with me.”
OK, I’m going to bed for the next month.
I’ll just spend the next six weeks under my duvet, learning how to embroider hieroglyphics by torchlight. I’ll get Annabel and Dad to whizz up all my food so I can drink it through a straw from under my duvet, like an old lady’s budgerigar. By the time I start A Levels I’ll be the same shape as a mattress, covered in fungus and shrivelled into an even smaller and even more muscle-less mass than normal.
As Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley” and the same can obviously be said for teenage girls. My plans are aft-agleying all over the shop.
“Harriet?” Annabel shouts downstairs as I slam the front door as hard as I can behind me. “If you’re trying to break all the windows in the house simultaneously, that is an incredibly efficient way to do it.”
“Hey!” I hear my dad say indignantly. “How come Harriet gets complimented for slamming doors when I get in trouble? I demand a retrial.”
“There hasn’t been a trial, Richard,” Annabel laughs, “so we can’t technically ‘re’ anything.”
“Oh, fine, you win again. It’s a good thing you’re about to pop out a mini-me or I wouldn’t be letting you triumph so easily.”
“Thank you, darling. Your gallantry is, as ever, much appreciated.”
I hear a loud cheerful kiss, echoing down the stairs.
“You know,” Dad muses afterwards, “I am pretty gallant. I’m a bit like a modern-day Lancelot. Except with no horse. Why don’t I have a horse, Annabel? How are we expected to be real men these days without horses?”
Yup. If you think that the prospect of creating a new human life has in any way forced my father to grow up even slightly over the last six months you’d be wrong.
There’s a jellyfish called the Turritopsis nutricula, which Marine Biologists say is the only animal in the world that renders itself immortal by reverting back to adolescence every time it starts to age too much. All I’m going to say is: they obviously haven’t met my dad yet.
Let’s just see how long he sticks around.
Throwing my satchel into the corner of the hallway, I start a slow, stompy climb up the stairs. Six months ago they were pretty, white-painted wood; they are now covered in horrible beige, hard-wearing carpet with fiddly stair gates at either end. There used to be a space under the banister where the cat would climb the stairs and headbutt me from eye-level, as a kind of greeting. It’s been blocked up.
There are also fake plug-coverings in all of the plug sockets and padding around the edges of the tables and more gates in doorways, just in case we need to be herded safely from room to room like cattle.
I reach the newly safe and sanitised landing and stare at my parents. “What are you doing?”
“Hello, Harriet.” Annabel is wearing an enormous, elasticated, pin-stripe suit, and is calmly wiping one of my fossils with a cloth. “Sweetheart, why is your face gold? And what on earth happened to your jumper?” She looks down. “I know I’m full of pregnancy hormones, but I’m certain you were wearing two socks this morning.”
“Oh amazeballs!” Dad cries from the study. “You coloured yourself gold! To win an exam! That is creative genius!”
I think my head is about to explode. “I’m serious, what are you doing? You can’t clean fossils, Annabel. You are literally wiping away 230 million years of history!”
“I think this is a coating of dead skin cells and dust mites, actually. When was the last time you dusted these, Harriet?”
I grab the fossil from her. “This is an Asistoharpes! This is 395 million years old! Why don’t you just stick it in the washing machine while you’re at it?”
My stepmother raises her eyebrows in silence.
“I think if it’s survived that long it can handle a bit of wet cloth, don’t you?”
I ignore her and turn to Dad, who is standing on the office chair, trying to get down my collection of books about the Tudors. Every time he reaches for one he swivels slightly and has to hang on to the shelf for balance. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a whole load of stuff here that’s yours, Harriet,” he explains, reaching for a biography of Anne Boleyn and swivelling again. “So we’ve built some more shelves in your bedroom. This is going to be the baby’s room.”
I grab a few of my books off the bed from where they’ve just been thrown, willy-nilly. “This room is called the study, Dad. If this was a room for a baby, it would be called something else!”
“It is, Harriet,” Dad says, laughing. “We just renamed it.”
I can feel every single cell in my body fizzing and bursting like those crackly sweets that pop on your tongue. First Alexa, then Nat, now this. Today isn’t even making an effort to go to planany more.
“There isn’t room in my bedroom for all my stuff!”
“Then throw some of it away,” Annabel suggests with a tiny smile. She’s cleaning another fossil. “Or we can put it in the attic. Or maybe in the garden. I imagine these rocks would probably be very happy there.”
My throat is getting tighter and tighter. “What do you mean throw it away?You can’t just throw preserved evidence of natural evolution in the bin!”
Annabel puts her hand gently on her enormous straining belly. “Harriet, what’s going on, sweetheart? Did your last exam go badly? What’s the matter with you?”
“Me? What’s the matter with both of you? Baby, baby, baby! It’s all baby, baby, baby!”
“Are you about to start singing Justin Bieber?” Dad asks. Annabel snorts with laughter and then puts her hand guiltily over her mouth.
My head pops.
“Oh my GOD!” I yell. “I hate you, I hate this house and THIS IS GOING TO BE THE WORST SUMMER EVER!”
And with one grand gesture, I burst into tears, sweep every single fossil I can into my arms and storm into my bedroom.
Leaving every window in the house rattling behind me.
(#ulink_93832428-d41c-5c58-8b99-368ccaf14194)
Reasons Not to Think About Nick
1 He told me not to.
2 I’ve got much more important things to think about.
OK. So maybe I didn’t tell you everything.
I told you the stuff you might tell a teacher, or a neighbour or the old lady who works at the corner shop and won’t stop asking questions. But I didn’t tell you the real stuff. Not the stuff that counts.
I slide down the back of the door and stare blankly at the jumble of fossils now sitting in my lap. Here are some interesting facts I’ve discovered recently about the animal kingdom:
The cuckoo is built with a small dip in its back so that it can toss out the other eggs as soon as it’s born.
Mother pandas only care for one of their cubs, and allow the other to die.
Shark embryos fight and eat each other in the womb and only the winner is born.
Don’t even get me started on what the spotted hyena does to its relations. Trust me, you really don’t want to know.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m incredibly excited about having a new brother or sister. Of course I am. Babies are cute – in a baldy, screaming kind of way – and a really big part of me can’t wait to meet my new sibling and buy it cute little dinosaur T-shirts and a miniature satchel and (eventually) matching crossword puzzles so that we can do them together over breakfast.
But another part of me is anxious.
Literature, history and nature repeatedly remind us that it’s not always TV deals and record contracts and matching outfits when it comes to siblings. If King Lear and the Tudor dynasty taught us nothing else, it’s that you might want to watch your back. Especially if you’re a half-sibling like me. Because if push comes literally to shove, somebody normally ends up getting kicked out of the nest.
Over the last six months, the baby has started taking over everything:
First breakfast streamlined into one topic: did you know that the baby’s heart starts beating after twenty-two days? Did you know that by seventeen weeks it has fingerprints?
Then random questions: do you think it’ll hate mushrooms, like Annabel, or cinnamon, like Dad?
Then it started demanding olive milkshake and ketchup on ice cream and once – to my absolute horror – a bit of the white chalk from my maths blackboard.
People started visiting and walking straight past me to ‘The Belly’.
Annabel started looking tired all the time. Dad started looking anxious and being extraordinarily loud to make up for it.
And the photograph of my mum on the mantelpiece mysteriously moved to the guest bedroom, as if that would help everyone forget what happened to the last person in this house who tried to have a baby.
Or the fact that the baby was me.
And – bit by bit, gate by gate – the house started changing, and my room started feeling smaller, and my parents stopped talking or thinking about anything else.
Then – without warning – Nick dumped me.
So I threw myself into the thing I’d kind of been neglecting for once: schoolwork. I studied at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I studied in the bath, and on the toilet, and on the bus, and in the shower by sketching maths equations into the steam on the glass. I even studied during modelling shoots, as you already know.
Basically, I stuffed my head with facts and formulas and dates and equations and lists and diagrams so there wouldn’t be room for anything else.
But now exams are finished, and school is over.
Nat is leaving for France.
Lion Boy is still gone.
I’m less important to my parents than someone who isn’t even born yet.
And all I can do is sit in my room, staring at my overcrowded new bookshelves and wondering what to do next.
Because that’s the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we’re not trying to control everything in our lives. We’re trying to block out the things we can’t.
But now there’s nothing left.
Nothing but the baby.
(#ulink_5f4b97e1-6445-5fcd-9716-f8e33a71c02c)
nyway.
By the time I wake up the next morning – owner of the world’s most sparkly pillow – I feel a bit more hopeful. On the bright side, there is no way my life could get any worse.
Last night, everyone else in my year was getting ready to party. Sneaking out of the house in one outfit so they could change into a smaller one. Discussing in excited whispers who was going to kiss who, and who was going to wish they hadn’t. Giggling and laughing and getting ready to celebrate the end of compulsory education in a way they would never, ever forget.
Meanwhile, I was sitting on my bedroom floor on my own, painted gold, crying, with a shredded school jumper pulled over my head. I think that’s pretty much rock bottom, even by my own socially redundant standards.
Things always look better in the morning, though, and by the time I wake up I’m actually quite entertained to discover that I’ve left a trail of damp gold glitter behind me, like an enormous sparkly fairy.
Hugo’s lying patiently at my feet. I give him a quick cuddle to let him know I’m mentally stable again, then hop out of bed to grab my phone and switch it on. It gets so little activity these days, sometimes I actually forget I have one.
Which is why it’s a bit of a shock when it rings immediately.
“Hello?”
“Ferret-face, is that you?”
I never know what to say to questions like that.
“Hi, Wilbur. It’s Harriet.”
“Oh, thank holy dolphin-cakes,” my agent sighs in relief. “I was starting to think you’d spontaneously combusted. I just read about a man that happened to, Kitten-cheeks. One minute he was washing up and the next minute, POOF. Just a few bubbles and a broken plate.”
I blink a few times. Sometimes talking to Wilbur is like falling out of a big tree: you have to just try and catch a few branches to hang on to on the way down. “Is everything OK?”
“Not enormously, Baby-baby Panda. I’ve left nineteen messages on your answer machine, but you’re a naughty little lamp-post and haven’t answered a single bunny-jumping one of them.”
Sugar cookies. I’d totally forgotten about the mess I made of the shoot yesterday. “Is this about Yuka?”
She’s going to hang-draw-and-quarter me like they did in the sixteenth century. Except she’s going to do it with words instead of a sword and it’s probably going to hurt more.
“It most certainly is, Poodle-bottom. Time is, as they say, of the essential oils. Where have you been?”
I swallow with difficulty. “I-I-I-I’m so sorry, Wilbur.”
“It might be too late now, my little Monkey-moo,” Wilbur sighs. “There are forms to fill in, things to sign, governments to inform.”
They’re going to tell the government? That seems a little bit excessive, even for Baylee. “Please, Wilbur. I won’t do it again.”
“Once is enough, Cupcake-teeth. It normally is.”
I close my eyes and sit heavily on my bed.
I don’t believe this. I actually don’t believe it.
It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning yet; I haven’t even opened the curtains. There’s sleep in my eyes and the imprint of Winnie the Pooh’s nose on my cheek. And it looks like I’ve just been fired.
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t was only a matter of time.
I’m like the donkey in the Aesop’s fable who dressed in a lion skin and got away with it until the fox heard him bray. I’ve been waiting for six months for the fashion industry to realise I’m their donkey and chuck me back out again.
I quickly put Wilbur on speakerphone, throw the mobile across my room and climb miserably back into bed. Then I pull a pillow over my head.
You know what? I think I am just going to stay here. I’m almost certain that nobody will notice. I’ll be like Richard III, and in hundreds of years archaeologists will find my skeleton buried under some kind of car park, where future people keep their spaceships.
Or jet packs.
Or magnetically levitating transporters.
Or flying bubbles.
I’m just trying to work out if in 500 years they’ll have finally found a way to replace the wheels in my trainers with rockets when some of Wilbur’s nonsensical words start filtering in through the pillow. “Candle-wick.” “Rabbit-foot.” “Potato-nose.” “Tokyo.”
Tokyo?
I lift the sparkly pillow so I can hear a bit better.
“…so there’s going to be a lot of work to do before you go … and oh my gigglefoot that reminds me you need to pick up some spot cream because we do not want any dermatological disasters like last time you went abroad, do we, my little Baby-baby Unicorn? Eat some more vegetables before you get there and …”
The tiger beetle is proportionately the fastest thing on earth. If it was the size of a human, it could reach 480 mph. I’m on the other side of the room so quickly I reckon I would leave it panting and retching behind me.
“Hello?” I pick the phone up, drop it and then grab it again and start randomly whacking buttons. “Hello? Hello? Wilbur? Hello? Are you there? Hello?”
“Where else would I be, Owl-beak? This is my phone, isn’t it?”
“What did you just say?”
“Love bless you, Plum-pudding. I forget your family has a problem with earwax. I said, try and eat some more vegetables before you land in Tokyo, or Yuka’s going to kick off again and we all know what that means.”
My entire body suddenly feels like it’s been electrocuted. Before I land in Tokyo? “I’m not fired?”
Wilbur shrieks with laughter. “Au contraire, my petit poisson. Yuka has a brand-new job for you in Japan, and if we get moving I should be able to get flights sorted in time.”
I stare at the wall in silence.
I’ve been obsessed with Japan since I was six years old. It’s the Land of the Rising Sun: of sumo and sushi; karaoke and kimonos; mountains and manga. Homeland of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Studio Ghibli; of Hayao Miyazaki and Haruki Murakami. Mecca for geeks and freaks and weirdos. I have dreamt about visiting Japan ever since …
Well. Ever since I realised it existed to visit.
Oh my God: this could fix everything. It will be my New and Infinitely More Glorious Summer Plan 2 (NAIMGS2). I can make a brand-new flow chart. It’s perfect.
And, yes, it might only be a temporary solution, but everybody knows that if you put enough temporary solutions together you’ve got something that lasts a very long time indeed.
“YES!” I shout, picking Hugo up and giving him the biggest, most twinkly kiss of his life, right between his eyebrows. “When do I leave? What’s the plan?”
“You leave on Saturday, my little Panda-pot. And BOOM!” he adds after another stunned silence. “Your fairy godmother strikes again.”
(#ulink_039bb161-6363-57cb-a150-4ec55f2c7419)
ight. Time to initiate the New Plan.
The first and most important step to convincing your parents that you are a responsible nearly-adult, capable of foreign jaunts, is obviously not being painted gold. So I hop in the shower and scrub myself until I no longer look like the death mask of Tutankhamen.
Then I peruse my wardrobe for something that says I am an authoritative and totally trustworthy girl on the cusp of womanhood. Something that says I can be sent very far away without any repercussions.
In a moment of poetic inspiration, I put on the most expensive thing I own and grab the matching accessories. I spend a few minutes fiddling on my laptop, then stride confidently into the kitchen to face my parents.
“Zac?” Annabel’s saying, pouring ketchup into an open tin of pears and mixing it up with the end of an empty biro. “For a boy or a girl?”
“Either. It’s very gender neutral.” Dad pauses and then adds, “Plus it’s the name of a Macaw from San Jose who can slam twenty-two dunks in one minute.”
“Vetoed.”
“What about Zeus?”
“Zeus? As in the lightning-lobbing Greek father of Gods and Men?”
“As in the world’s tallest dog. Great Dane. Nice eyes.”
Annabel laughs. “I don’t care how nice his eyes are, Richard. Vetoed.”
“Archibald, the world’s smallest bull?”
Annabel looks calmly at Dad. “I think it’s time to give Harriet back her Guinness Book of Records.”
Dad shakes his head. “I’m surprised at you, Annabel. Do you have no respect for the majesty of the animal kingdom?”
“I have plenty of respect for it, Richard. I just don’t particularly want it coming out of my uterus.”
“Liz?”
“You’d better be referring to the Queen.”
“Of course I am,” Dad says indignantly. “Two of them, in fact. Both fierce examples of female power, independence and majesty.” He pauses. “And, you know … Hurley.”
I quickly cough from the doorway before there’s only one parent left alive to appeal to. Then I walk regally into the centre of the room.
“Father. Annabel.” I look at Hugo who scampered down here at the first whiff of cheesy-bacon. “Dog. I would like to open this session by apologising profusely for my behaviour yesterday. It was an untimely display of vivaciousness due to the unexpected ruination of my Summer of Fun Flow Chart. I should have found a way to express my entirely valid opinions more reasonably.”
I pause to see if this heartfelt apology has sunk in. They’re both staring at me with wide eyes. Ha. I feel a bit like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m totally going to nail this.
“Secondly,” I say, putting my laptop down on the table and pressing a button so that it shines at the wall. “I have something very important to show you.”
There are a few seconds of impressed, awed silence.
Then my parents burst into laughter so loud that Hugo steps back and starts barking at the ceiling.
“Brilliant,” Dad gasps. “What’s she wearing this time?”
“I think it’s her bridesmaid dress from Margaret’s wedding,” Annabel whispers, wiping her eyes. “You can still see where she sat on a candle during the after-dinner speeches.”
“Oh, thank God. I thought my daughter had turned into an enormous toilet-roll holder.”
I wait patiently for them both to stop giggling. I’m totally going to remember this moment when it comes time to put them in a retirement home.
“This outfit,” I say, nobly deciding to rise above both of them, “may be a bridesmaid dress, but if you use your imagination it represents something much bigger.”
I press a button on my laptop, and an image of a cygnet shines on to the wall. “I was once an ugly duckling—”
Dad puts his hand up. “With feathers all stubby and brown?”
I stick my tongue out at him and press the button again. The picture changes from cygnet to swan. “But in the last six months, I have grown up a lot. I have transformed.” I click quickly through a few photos of tadpoles and frogs, caterpillars and butterflies I copied from Google. “But what happens at the end of a transformation … is that where the story ends?”
I point at the slide that says:
TRANSFORMATION → WHAT NEXT?
“Yes.”
I scowl. “It’s a rhetorical question, Dad. The implied answer is clearly no.”
“Keep going, Harriet,” Annabel says through a mouthful of ketchup pear. “I’m curious to see where this will end up.”
“Does a caterpillar sit on the same leaf when it’s a butterfly? No! It goes for a little fly and sees something of the world. Does the tadpole stay in the same pond once it’s a frog? No! It stretches its legs, goes for a jump, explores other waters.” I gesticulate energetically with my matching fake flower bouquet. “Did Cinderella go back to cleaning hearths once she married the prince?”
“Probably,” Dad says. “They didn’t have women’s rights back then. She had to do the cooking too, and probably a bit of laundry.”
“For the love of sugar cookies, Dad, stop answering rhetorical questions.”
I take a deep breath and compose myself again.
“Transformation means moving forwards. If a butterfly stays on the same leaf and a frog stays in the same pond, then they may as well have stayed a caterpillar or a tadpole. There was no point in metamorphosing.”
“Wrap it up now, Harriet,” Annabel says gently.
I had an entire slide about a dragonfly, but maybe I’ll leave that for the encore. I click to the final slide, and a picture of Mount Fuji shines on to the wall with my face hastily copied and pasted on top of it.
“So, in summary: I assert my right to go to Tokyo for a modelling job. Thank you for listening.” And I plonk myself triumphantly down on a chair.
Excellent. That should do it.
Maybe I won’t be a physicist after all. I’ll be a lawyer, and my poetic and powerful Powerpoint presentations will be made into poignant fridge magnets for years to come.
Dad’s expression reminds me of Hugo when we get takeaway pizza. “Japan? The agency wants Harriet to go to Japan? Annabel, that’s where those little trees that look like big trees but smaller come from. Can I go with her, Annabel? Please?”
“Richard,” Annabel says, “if you had a full-sized koala lodged in your abdomen, would you want me to stay with you?”
Dad looks horrified. “Definitely.”
“Then let’s assume I feel the same way, shall we?” She turns back to me with a softer voice. “We can’t take you to Japan, sweetheart. I wouldn’t be able to get through the doors of the aeroplane, for starters, and I need your dad here because I could go into labour at any moment. You understand, don’t you?”
I nod. Of course I understand that.
Annabel’s eyes widen. “So what you’re actually asking is to go to Tokyo, entirely on your own? At fifteen years old?”
“Yuka will be th—” I start, and Annabel looks at me sharply.
She has a point: Cruella De Vil would make a more reassuring guardian.
I clear my throat and clutch my fake flower bouquet as tight as I can. “Like Cinderella, I believe it is my turn to stop cleaning hearths.”
“Harriet,” Dad points out. “You don’t even make your own bed.”
“I’m talking symbolically.” Dad clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of the English language. “Please?”
Annabel smiles. “Come here,” she says affectionately, and when I perch on the sofa next to her she nudges me with her shoulder and spikes another pear with her biro. “Listen, we know things are hard for you at the moment, Harriet. Don’t think we haven’t noticed.”
I shrug.
“But I’m sorry, you can’t go to the other side of the world on your own. You might be older than your age in some ways, but in quite a few of them you’re also much, much younger.”
What?
“Just because I don’t have any boobs yet doesn’t mean you can stop me going abroad! That’s discrimination!”
Annabel laughs. “That’s not even slightly what I’m talking about, Harriet.”
Then I turn to Dad with my widest, most beseeching eyes. “Tell her I can go, please!”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but for the first time ever I’m with Annabel on this one.” Dad twinkles at me but I block it with my firmest scowl.
“So what am I expected to do all summer? Just sit here and rot in a corner?”
“I don’t know, Harriet,” Annabel sighs. “Draw. Read. Paint. Go for walks. Build nuclear warheads. Take your dad to the zoo. Whatever you want as long as you remain within a 500-mile radius of this house.”
“So what you’re telling me,” I shout furiously, “is I can’t go to Japan because of that?” and I point at Annabel’s belly.
Annabel suddenly looks incredibly tired. “No, Harriet.” She puts the pear tin down. “I am saying that you can’t go to Japan because of that.”
And she points directly at me.
(#ulink_fe95bce5-e322-5e8e-8298-1aeaf3cfac02)
bviously the most important thing at a time like this is to remember to maintain the moral high ground. To react with dignity and self-control: noble in defeat, gallant in loss.
Which is why it’s a massive disappointment when I throw the fake flower bouquet across the kitchen and yell, “Stop trying to ruin my life! This is so unfair! I wish I’d never been BOOORRRN!”
And charge over to the front door, pull it open and stomp out with as much vigour as I can muster. Leaving it hanging wide open behind me.
Before I actually run away, I’d just like to point out how incredibly unreasonable my parents are being.
I’m nearly sixteen. By this age, Isaac Asimov was at university, Eddie Murphy was doing stand-up comedy shows in New York, Louis Braille had invented raised writing, chess champion Bobby Fischer was an international grandmaster and Harry Potter was well on his way to saving the entire world of magic.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate having people in my life who want to be with me, every step of the way. But still.
I bet Isaac Asimov didn’t get this kind of disrespect from his parents.
My plan is to stomp all the way to Nat’s house and then stay there a) forever or b) until my parents are so prostrate with grief at my absence that they’ll let me do whatever I want as long as I come home again.
Unfortunately the huge silk skirt of my bridesmaid dress gets caught on a bush at the bottom of the road, and by the time I’ve managed to rip myself free I don’t really have any stomping energy left. I just feel like a bit of an idiot.
Nat’s door swings open before I’ve even knocked, and – not for the first time – my brain spins slightly. When Nat’s mum isn’t covered in colourful miracle paste and wearing a dressing gown, she looks so much like Nat it’s like having a worm-hole into the future.
“Harriet, darling!” she says, beaming at me. “What a pretty dress!” She leans forward to give me a kiss. “And I adore the tiara.”
“Hello, Ms Grey,” I say politely. “I’ve run away and I’m living here now.”
“Are you, sweetie? How terribly exciting.”
“Is Nat in, please?”
“She’s upstairs, packing for her trip.” Nat’s mum pauses and sniffs. “And by the smell of it she’s taking my Chanel perfume with her.”
“IT’S NOT THE CHANEL ACTUALLY, MUM,” Nat yells downstairs. “IT’S THE PRADA. SHOWS HOW MUCH YOU KNOW.”
Nat’s mum leans up the stairs. “You’re being punished, Natalie. You’re not taking any perfume, mine or otherwise. And no high heels, make-up or jewellery either. I will be checking.”
Nat appears at the top of the stairs in about half a second, like a magic genie. “Mum. I can’t leave the house without make-up. I’m not a savage.”
“Maybe the next time you decide to skip an exam because you feel like testing out lipsticks, you’ll think twice.”
“Or maybe I’ll just check first that my mum isn’t testing out eyeshadow in the aisle behind me.”
Nat’s mum laughs. “Touché, Natalie. Unfortunately only one of us is Mum and it’s not you.”
Nat looks furious. “Fine. Whatever. Have it your way, as always.”
She looks at me and makes her Can You Believe This? face.
Then she looks at me again with her What The Hell Are You Wearing? face.
“Harriet, why do you look like something that just got kicked off theDisney Channel?”
I hold out my skirts. “Parental manipulation.”
“Did it work?”
“Nope. Not even a little bit.”
“I honestly don’t know why we bother making an effort in the first place.” Nat glares at her mum again, then beckons to me. “Anyway, come on up, Harriet. I think I might need your help.”
(#ulink_1e2a0264-dce0-551d-8b16-775e25ccf0a4)
at needs somebody’s help, that’s for sure.
I can barely open the door to her room, and – when I finally do – I realise it’s because every single piece of clothing she owns is on the floor. It looks like our garden after a mole has been through it, except that instead of mounds of soil there are about fifteen hills of shoes and dresses and jumpers and handbags and scarves and vest tops and leggings, erupting from the carpet.
Nat’s already crouched in the middle of her bed, holding a box of tampons.
“Hop up here,” she says as I squeeze my way in, pointing at a spot on the bed with her foot.
I carefully clamber over a pile of skirts. “What on earth are you doing?”
Nat holds up a tampon with a grim face. “This.” She pulls the cotton wool out of the applicator and rams a pink lipstick in. “I reckon I should be able to get five in a box, and quite a few eyeliners and lipglosses as long as they’re short ones.” Then she holds up a small conditioner bottle. “This is foundation.” She pulls out a tiny tub of moisturiser. “This is cream blush.” Finally, she pulls out a ridiculously thick copy of Harper’s Bazaar. “I need you to cut a hole in the middle of all the pages so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyeshadows and mascara.”
I stare at her in awe and then take the magazine off her.
“You could put a pair of strappy high heels inside a tissue box, with tissues on top? And maybe little sachets of perfume inside sanitary towels?”
Nat grins at me and holds up her hand. “Harriet Manners, what would I do without you?”
I high-five her. “Be slightly shorter and less fragrant, I’d imagine.” Then I pick up the scissors and start neatly cutting through a few pages of a beautiful model with blonde waves down to her waist.
After several hours of industrious productivity, during which I tell Nat all about the awesome trip to Japan that I won’t be going on, I say, “Seriously, Nat, what am I going to do without you? At least you’ll be in France. I’m going to be stuck here on my own.”
“And Toby. Don’t forget Toby.” Nat wrinkles her nose at me so I hit her with the magazine. I said small doses. “I’ve got it worse. I’m staying on a farm. An actual working farm with animals in it and stuff. What’s the prison on that island called?”
“Alcatraz?”
“Yeah. I’d rather have been sent there. At least I could have jumped out and swum to the shops in San Francisco. I’m going down in style though.” She holds up a lipstick. “I’m going to look like one of the women who works behind a beauty counter in John Lewis by the time I’m finished.”
“Are you going to milk cows and make butter and collect eggs?”
“I most certainly am not.” Nat shudders. “You realise eggs come out of chicken’s butts, right?”
“They don’t, Nat,” I laugh, cutting through another piece of paper. “They’re actually called cloacas, and all birds and amphibians and reptiles have them. For joint reproductive and digestive purposes.”
“Ew. That’s actually more gross.” Nat sits on the bed next to me, looking miserable. “Oh, God, Harriet. This summer is a total disaster. I bet there’s going to be some disgusting boy on the farm with a little wispy moustache and a habit of accidentally walking into my bedroom while I’m getting changed.”
I giggle. “And every time you take a shower he’ll lurk outside so when you come out in a towel he’s right there.”
“Yeah,” Nat says, starting to laugh. “And he’ll ask for the salt at the dinner table with, like, meaning.”
“And every ten minutes he’ll offer to give you a massage with olive oil he stole from the kitchen.”
“I bet he wears shiny green lycra cycling shorts around the house and his T-shirts are too short.” We’re both giggling uncontrollably now, and rolling around on the bed making vomiting sounds.
“I’m going to have to run away,” Nat says decisively. “I’m going to steal a pig and ride it into Paris.”
My phone beeps and I grab it out of my pocket. “Pigs can trot at up to eleven miles per hour at top speed,” I say, clicking on a message from an unknown number. “It’s definitely faster than walking.”
“Or a tractor. I can’t drive but I reckon if you’re in a tractor everything else gets out of the way for you. Do you think a tractor has gears, like a car …”
Nat continues chattering but I can’t really hear her any more.
The human brain consists of eighty per cent water, and for the first time in my life that’s exactly what mine feels like: as if it’s swishing and swirling around inside my head. My ears fill with the roaring sound you get when you sit at the bottom of a swimming pool.
Because I’ve just received this:
Hope you smashed your final exam. Would love to talk. Thinking of you. Nick x
(#ulink_3d17afa3-7843-57a5-9f66-94057ff75ad7)
Reasons Not to Think About Nick
1 He told me not to.
2 I have much more life-changing things to think about.
3 It’s all I do.
January 22nd (156 daysago)
“A seagull,” Nick said, leaning his head against the rope of my tyre-swing.
We were both wrapped up in big coats and scarves; I was wearing the big furry hat I got from Russia with the flaps in the sides. I leant back and looked at him, pointing at the faint scar just above his eyebrow. “A seagull gave you that?”
“Yeah. So I wrestled it to the ground with my bare hands. Then another seagull joined in so I fought that too. By the end there were, like, fifteen seagulls, all totally defeated. They called me Seagull Dundee after that.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How old were you?”
“Four. I was a very strong little boy.”
I laughed. “Now tell me the truth.”
Nick’s mouth curved up at the corner. “I cannot believe you don’t trust that I wrestled fifteen seagulls with my bare hands before I was out of kindergarten. What kind of rubbish girlfriend are you?”
“The kind with quite detailed knowledge of seagulls, unfortunately for you. No knowledge of boys but it balances out.”
He shouted with laughter. “I knew I should have gone for the girl on the Dolce & Gabbana shoot.” Then he pushed my swing a few times while I stuck my tongue out at him. “OK. What actually happened is I ran away from my parents when we were collecting rocks at the beach. I was pretty tiny so I didn’t get very far, but a massive seagull freaked me out and I fell over and smacked my head on a rock. When I woke up a few minutes later, it was standing on my chest.”
“Were you scared?”
“No. Heroes don’t get scared.” Nick thought about it. “One of us definitely pooped, though. I’m pretty sure it was the seagull.”
I laughed again. “I hate seagulls. Did you know that they’re so smart that they hang around bridges so they can steal the heat coming off the roads, and that they tap on the ground with their feet and pretend to be rain so earthworms come out?”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all. They’re so sneaky.”
“How big was this one?”
“The size of a tiger. Comparatively, anyway.”
I tried to imagine Nick small and frightened, but I couldn’t quite do it. “So what gave you the scar? The rock or the seagull?”
“The rock. Although the seagull got really close to my face too. Really, really close. Like, this close.” Nick suddenly stopped the swing and put his face near mine.
I held my breath. I could see the different shades of black and brown in his eyes, and the tangle of black lashes underneath them. I could see my hat reflected in his pupils. I could see the little mole on his cheek and smell the greenness which – I had finally managed to establish – was the result of a fondness for lime shower gel combined with a tendency to constantly sit on wet grass in his jeans.
“That’s pretty close,” I just about managed to say as he put his hand gently on my cheek and brushed away a bit of hat fluff.
“Yup,” Nick said with a smile that went up in one corner and seemed to stretch out forever. His hand stayed where the fluff had been. “But not quite close enough to hurt me.”
And he leant in and kissed me.
(#ulink_e213d29c-7647-58fe-8243-e59242fea30e)
cientists say that music can literally change the speed of a heartbeat. They failed to add:
So can a text message.
It’s as if Nick is suddenly in the room with me.
I drop the phone.
“Harriet? What’s going on?”
Humans are supposed to have 70,000 thoughts a day; I’m about to hit my limit in four and a half seconds.
“It’s Nick,” I summarise.
“Seriously?” Nat grabs the phone off me and reads the message. Then she chucks it back to me, jumps off the bed and starts folding a jumper messily.
I’m breathing too fast and my heart is starting to skitter around like Bambi on a frozen lake. My entire body is suddenly full of a triumphant, almost painful buzzing sensation. What did I tell you? It wasn’t a matter of if he was going to change his mind. It was just a matter of when.
Although I’m going to be honest: he really took his time. We’re not Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, for goodness’ sake. I could have set up an entire school since we last spoke.
I jump off the bed, spin around the room and start hugging my phone to my chest. “Should I ring him now, Nat?” I say breathlessly, breaking off just long enough to kiss my phone and start hugging it again. “Or should I text? What do you think he wants me to do? Do you think he’s coming straight here from Australia?” My eyes widen and I fly to the window. “Oh my God, Nat. What if he’s already here?”
I push the window open and then remember that I’m at Nat’s house. He’s very unlikely to come here first. I need to go home and get ready right now. I need to wash my hair. I need to clear away my chemistry kit.
I start putting my shoes on.
“How long should I wait until I reply to look cool?” I continue breathlessly. “Five minutes? Ten minutes? An hour?”
I’m so excited I can’t get my shoelaces to tie up properly. “Or should I just ring now? I don’t want him to get the wrong impression.”
I look at the text again. The answer to these questions must be in here somewhere. Maybe it’s in code. Maybe it’s a haiku. Allegory? For goodness’ sake, I’ve studied English literature for five whole years. I can analyse the imagery in Macbeth and the symbolism in Hamlet. I should be able to work this out.
“You know what?” I decide. “I think I’ll just ring him straight away. I can’t wait any longer.”
My phone abruptly disappears.
“Like hell you will,” Nat snaps, and before I know it she’s standing on her bed, violently waving my mobile in the air like some kind of rectangular hand grenade. “You’ll have to kill me first.”
I stare at my best friend. It’s only now that I notice her cheeks are bright pink, and her hands are shaking. Her angry rash is starting to climb up her chest. And it’s only now that I notice she’s folded and unfolded the same jumper five times. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You’re not contacting Nick,” she says loudly. “I’ll eat this phone if I have to. And the charger.”
I’m not sure that’s even physically possible. “What? Why?”
“Because you need to wake up, Harriet.”
I blink and then look down at myself. “I’m pretty sure I’m awake, Nat.”
“This isn’t an epic romance. It’s just a boy who used you. A boy who made you forget about everything that was important to you before he came along. You’ve read so many books you can’t even tell the difference between fiction and reality any more.”
I flinch. Just because I sometimes use the words ‘thou’ and ‘mayst’ for fun does not mean I think I’m in an Austen novel. Not all the time, anyway.
“I can,” I say indignantly. “I am well aware of the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.” I’d be prettier in a book, for starters. “Give me my phone right now.”
I jump for her, like some kind of killer whale trying to get a particularly nice seal.
“Harriet,” Nat says urgently, moving a little further away. “Nick hasn’t contacted you for two months. He dumped you weeks before the most important exams of your life and ran away. That’s not what somebody who cares about you does. You have to believe me. I understand boys better than you do.”
I flinch again and something in me pinches slightly. “You might know boys in general,” I say defiantly. “But you don’t know Nick. He cares about me. I know he does.”
I jump for her again and miss.
“He doesn’t,” Nat says, moving until she’s pressed against the wall and holding me back with a foot. “He’s an idiot and I’m not letting him suck you back in with his pointy cheekbones and his pointy hipbones and his stupid pointy hair. No.”
Fury suddenly surges through me. My best friend is acting like some kind of crazy, masterminding puppeteer. She’s calling my Lion Boy an idiot.She’s just reminded me about his lovely hipbones.
And – most of all – I’m furious that a very tiny part of me suspects she might be right.
“Natalie!” I yell. “Nat! Give me my phone NOW!”
“Don’t make me do this,” Nat shouts, and her cheeks get even pinker. “For once in your life just listen to me, Harriet.”
“Give me my phone!” I shout again, and – with a lurch of my stomach – I suddenly know what Nat’s going to do.
If she gets rid of that text, I will have no way of contacting him. I deleted Nick’s number so I wouldn’t be tempted to text him after he left. He doesn’t ‘do’ social media. And I can’t remember his email address.
He’ll give up on me.
And if that happens, I’m not sure our ten-year friendship will survive. More importantly, I’m not sure Nat will. There’s a really good chance I’ll just kill my best friend on the spot.
There’s a red dot in the centre of each of Nat’s cheeks. “I’m doing this for you,” she announces, tapping the screen. “I honestly am.”
“No!” I yell, and bundle myself at her legs in an attempt to desperately wrestle my phone out of her hands. Nat scrabbles away while I hold on to her feet, and the next thing I know she’s only wearing one sock and there’s yet another rip in my bridesmaid’s dress.
By the time I’ve finally managed to claw my phone back, we’re huffing and puffing and scratched and bright red all over and it’s too late.
The message has gone.
My last chance with Nick has gone with it.
You really don’t want to know what I say next.
Let’s just put it this way: in no way do I leave my feelings about the situation open to interpretation. I am very clear about every single one of them.
I end the conversation by telling Nat I hope she doesn’t get eaten by French chickens in a way that very much intimates the opposite, and then storm out of the house.
“Harriet?” Nat yells out of the window as I stomp down the road, silk dress rippling after me. “I’m sorry. I lost my temper! I shouldn’t have done that!”
“No,” I yell back, without turning round, “you shouldn’t!”
Then I keep stomping. What kind of friend does that?
Who the sugar cookies does Nat think she is?
(#ulink_15bb0857-642f-58bd-84f4-b3f1c7b696d8)
or the next couple of days, I simply refuse to leave my room.
There’s no point. The alternative is to watch my parents take all my impeccably arranged books out of the study and pile them in a not-even-vaguely alphabetical order outside my door.
By the time it gets to Friday afternoon, I’m so sick of hearing Dad say “another book of random quotations? Seriously?” I decide to go for a long, cathartic walk. My ex-best friend will be in France by now, getting chased about by Mr Green Lycra Cycling Shorts.
Good. Serves her right.
I hope he doesn’t even use proper virgin olive oil, and opts for low-grade cooking oil instead.
Unfortunately my stress-reducing exercise efforts are ruined within two minutes by a small, fluffy-headed figure creeping from tree to tree in front of me. I have to keep looking in the opposite direction so I don’t hurt his feelings.
“Toby,” I finally say as I turn back on to my road. He flattens himself behind a lamp-post considerably thinner than he is. “I can see you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yes.”
“Oh dear,” he says sadly. “My homemade camouflage stalker kit may need some more work.” He points at his grey T-shirt and grey trousers. They have faint black lines drawn on them in criss-crosses.
I stare at him, and then totally give up. “What on earth are you camouflaged as?”
“Pavement.” Toby lies down on the floor and holds himself very rigid and still. “See? It’s only for urban settings, obviously. It wouldn’t work in the countryside.”
I laugh and carefully step over him.
“Harriet,” he says, jumping up and running after me. “Are you and Natalie OK? I couldn’t help overhearing a small amount of very loud fighting the other day when I was sitting in the rhododendron outside her house waiting for you to come out.”
Clearly Toby hasn’t moved on quite as much as I thought he had. “I’ve had an unexpected best-friend position open up,” I say tensely. “Would you like it?”
“Would I?” Toby shouts, jumping up and down. “I mean, I would. Just to make that clear.”
“Great,” I say sharply. “We’re now Best Friends. We can go and get some badges made up or something.”
Toby bounces along next to me in contented silence, and then sighs. “I’m afraid I don’t think I can take the job, Harriet,” he says sadly. “You and Natalie are soulmates, except you don’t kiss. It would be wrong to try to ever separate you.”
I make an ambiguous snorting noise. Soulmates are usually happy for each other when supermodel ex-boyfriends text them. “Either way, now I’m not going to Tokyo, it’s just you and me this summer.”
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