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Geek Girl and Model Misfit
Holly Smale
“My name is Harriet Manners, and I am a geek.”The first two hilarious novels in the award-winning GEEK GIRL series – now available as a 2-book collection.Geek Girl:Harriet Manners knows that a cat has 32 muscles in each ear, a “jiffy” lasts 1/100th of a second, and the average person laughs 15 times per day. She knows that bats always turn left when exiting a cave and that peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.But she doesn’t know why nobody at school seems to like her.So when Harriet is spotted by a top model agent, she grabs the chance to reinvent herself…Model Misfit:Harriet Manners knows that humans have 70,000 thoughts per day.She also 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…Will geek girl find her place on the other side of the world?The award-winning debut GEEK GIRL and sequel MODEL MISFIT by bestselling author Holly Smale.




Contents
Geek Girl (#u3dd848a5-42b7-5423-bba3-ff163cc23a4c)
Model Misfit (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


For my grandad. My favourite geek.
Contents
Dedication (#u90bef74a-bd41-5707-b2e2-7cb74d380125)

Chapter 1 (#ulink_0bdd645d-f623-51b3-b137-a90150b8258a)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_6459fa0c-6455-5501-9f9e-7b5b93f9767f)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_804a6b8f-1692-5eba-bd73-b8dfc3c93f85)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_bdfdbd8a-5acd-558f-a9d6-b7ce749d8589)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_d8c5e282-c6ed-511e-87fb-9c2333dfa5bd)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_5e6984b3-69ac-54e7-b8cc-b4b768eddb62)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_4dde159a-7272-5eb7-a4f4-ddb4b292446c)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_ca93ed47-0956-5799-bb7e-10e225838f30)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_92d5edcc-8457-5752-a37e-3a7753d7196f)
Chapter 10 (#ulink_8f1a6e8d-6c0c-57d6-a533-8355c7c328fe)
Chapter 11 (#ulink_c94c5700-664b-5e41-b441-f2e8924470f1)
Chapter 12 (#ulink_a63d2bcb-2f0e-5e89-8c97-ad3150833a59)
Chapter 13 (#ulink_68575002-0ea3-5e9c-9b05-5d0bd9418e11)
Chapter 14 (#ulink_e826e5c4-d1c8-54c6-8860-f635e6e138ef)
Chapter 15 (#ulink_00cbc83d-daec-52c3-8e0c-86f06a9e854c)
Chapter 16 (#ulink_824ad13c-b1ce-579f-9f27-1b09b7a93061)
Chapter 17 (#ulink_df114698-d969-5494-be52-51b2aa93d3f9)
Chapter 18 (#ulink_f9b8d7f1-eda6-5f86-beef-5e87481fc681)
Chapter 19 (#ulink_c1bd2f0f-c703-5ce6-81f4-b72f5af314e0)
Chapter 20 (#ulink_5993c8d7-8792-548f-8992-11aaafae76ac)
Chapter 21 (#ulink_366d978a-5bb9-5ebe-b7f3-c8528dd5b95b)
Chapter 22 (#ulink_15982279-3642-5411-b133-9ea75b540410)
Chapter 23 (#ulink_b7db0976-4cc3-5b16-8289-844fd768740c)
Chapter 24 (#ulink_b68c1799-81f9-5812-b7de-c78e61213341)
Chapter 25 (#ulink_f18f10f8-88f7-5b1c-879b-59f692a61165)
Chapter 26 (#ulink_cfba0413-c507-5c83-bf66-8241e11c27cd)
Chapter 27 (#ulink_dcb16123-1c31-5058-a010-530bb02af64b)
Chapter 28 (#ulink_d5fc5606-3633-5d29-881e-ef054802fa5f)
Chapter 29 (#ulink_82f7c992-0553-51f0-916f-7c258da38993)
Chapter 30 (#ulink_f969db64-a6c3-5e6a-9af6-f52b31ce8498)
Chapter 31 (#ulink_645aad00-5e2f-5281-8121-d3bb15e39149)
Chapter 32 (#ulink_db4c61f8-fcb8-5f6d-9fe6-fb11b38bf70c)
Chapter 33 (#ulink_5487399d-3a9a-5164-a51b-7468ae3455dd)
Chapter 34 (#ulink_31569f51-22d3-5e00-822a-0c6ea0031c73)
Chapter 35 (#ulink_7817a728-4f51-584b-8c49-006e03994807)
Chapter 36 (#ulink_52b99175-f711-5eb8-b1e3-9ce029c55ba0)
Chapter 37 (#ulink_878f262d-ca7b-5d09-96ec-85372add4b0f)
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)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
geek/gi:k/h noun informal, chiefly N. Amer.
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
2 an obsessive enthusiast.
3 a person who feels the need to look up the word ‘geek’ in the dictionary.
DERIVATIVES geeky adjective.
ORIGIN from the related English dialect word geck ‘fool’.

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y name is Harriet Manners, and I am a geek.
I know I’m a geek because I’ve just looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. I drew a little tick next to all the symptoms I recognise, and I appear to have them all. Which – and I should be perfectly honest here – hasn’t come as an enormous surprise. The fact that I have an Oxford English Dictionary on my bedside table anyway should have been one clue. That I keep a Natural History Museum pencil and ruler next to it so that I can neatly underline interesting entries should have been another.
Oh, and then there’s the word GEEK, drawn in red marker pen on the outside pocket of my school satchel. That was done yesterday.
I didn’t do it, obviously. If I did decide to deface my own property, I’d choose a poignant line from a really good book, or an interesting fact not many people know. And I definitely wouldn’t do it in red. I’d do it in black, or blue, or perhaps green. I’m not a big fan of the colour red, even if it is the longest wavelength of light discernible by the human eye.
To be absolutely candid with you, I don’t actually know who decided to write on my bag – although I have my suspicions – but I can tell you that their writing is almost illegible. They clearly weren’t listening during our English lesson last week when we were told that handwriting is a very important Expression of the Self. Which is quite lucky because if I can just find a similar shade of pen, I might be able to slip in the letter R in between G and E. I can pretend that it’s a reference to my interest in ancient history and feta cheese.
I prefer Cheddar, but nobody has to know that.
Anyway, the point is: as my satchel, the anonymous vandal and the Oxford English Dictionary appear to agree with each other, I can only conclude that I am, in fact, a geek.
Did you know that in the old days the word ‘geek’ was used to describe a carnival performer who bit the head off a live chicken or snake or bat as part of their stage act?
Exactly. Only a geek would know a thing like that.
I think it’s what they call ironic.

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ow that you know who I am, you’re going to want to know where I am and what I’m doing, right? Character, action and location: that’s what makes a story. I read it in a book called What Makes a Story, written by a man who hasn’t got any stories at the moment, but knows exactly how he’ll tell them when he eventually does.
So.
It’s currently December, I’m in bed – tucked under about fourteen covers – and I’m not doing anything at all apart from getting warmer by the second. In fact, I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but I think I might be really sick. My hands are clammy, my stomach’s churning and I’m significantly paler than I was ten minutes ago. Plus, there’s what can only be described as a sort of… rash on my face. Little red spots scattered at totally random and not at all symmetrical points on my cheeks and forehead. With a big one on my chin. And one just next to my left ear.
I take another look in the little hand-held mirror on my bedside table, and then sigh as loudly as I can. There’s no doubt about it: I’m clearly very ill. It would be wrong to risk spreading this dangerous infection to other, possibly less hardy, immune systems. I shall just have to battle through this illness alone.
All day. Without going anywhere at all.
Sniffling, I shuffle under my duvets a little further and look at my clock on the opposite wall (it’s very clever: all the numbers are painted at the bottom as if they’ve just fallen down, although this does mean that when I’m in a hurry, I have to sort of guess what the time is). Then I close my eyes and mentally count:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2…
At which point, absolutely on cue as always, the door opens and the room explodes: hair and handbag and coat and arms everywhere. Like a sort of girl bomb. And there, as if by very punctual magic, is Nat.
Nat – for the record – is my Best Friend, and we are so utterly in tune that it’s like we have one brain, divided into two pieces at birth. Or (more likely) two brains, entwined shortly afterwards. Although we didn’t meet until we were five years old, so obviously I’m speaking metaphorically or we’d both be dead.
What I’m trying to say is: we’re close. We’re harmonised. We’re one and the same. We’re like a perfect stream of consciousness, with never a cross word between us. We work with perfect, unquestioning synergy. Like two dolphins that jump at exactly the same time and pass the ball to each other at Sea World.

Anyway. Nat takes one step into the room, looks at me, and then stops and puts her hands on her hips.
“Good morning,” I croak from under the covers, and then I start coughing violently. Human coughs release air at roughly 60mph, and without being vain, I’d like to think that mine reaches 65mph or 70mph minimum.
“Don’t even think about it,” Nat snaps.
I stop coughing and look at her with my roundest, most confused eyes. “Hmmm?” I say innocently. And then I start coughing again.
“I mean it. Don’t even think about thinking about it.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. The fever must be making my brain swell.
“Nat,” I say feebly, closing my eyes and pressing my hand against my head. I’m a shell of the person I used to be. A husk. “I have bad news.” I open one eye and take a peek round the room. Nat still has her hands on her hips.
“Let me guess,” she says in a dry voice. “You’re sick.”
I give a weak but courageous smile: the sort Jane gives Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice when she’s bedridden with a really bad cold, but is being very brave about it. “You know me so well,” I say affectionately. “It’s like we have one mind, Nat.”
“And you’re out of it if you think I’m not about to drag you out of bed by your feet.” Nat takes a few steps towards me. “Also, I want my lipstick back,” she adds.
I clear my throat. “Lipstick?”
“The one you’ve dotted all over your face.”
I open my mouth and then shut it again. “It’s not lipstick,” I say in a small voice. “It’s a dangerous infection.”
“Then your dangerous infection is glittery, Harriet, and just so happens to match my new shoes perfectly.”
I shift a little bit further down the bed so that only my eyes are visible. “Infections are very advanced these days,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster. “They are sometimes extremely light-reflective.”
“Featuring small flecks of gold?”
I raise my chin defiantly. “Sometimes.”
Nat’s nose twitches and she rolls her eyes. “Right. And your face is producing white talcum powder, is it?”
I sniff quickly. Oh, sugar cookies. “It’s important to keep sick people dry,” I say as airily as I can. “Dampness can allow bacteria to develop.”
Nat sighs again. “Get out of bed, Harriet.”
“But—”
“Get out of bed.”
“Nat, I…”
“Out. Now.”
I look down at the duvets in a panic. “But I’m not ready! I’m in my pyjamas!” I’m going to give it one last desperate shot. “Nat,” I say, changing tack and using my most serious, profound voice. “You don’t understand. How will you feel if you’re wrong? How will you live with yourself? I might be dying.”
“Actually, you’re right,” Nat agrees, taking another two steps towards me. “You are. I’m literally seconds away from killing you, Harriet Manners. And if that happens, I’ll live with myself just fine. Now get out of bed, you little faker.”
And, before I can protect myself, Nat lunges suddenly towards me and tugs the covers away.
There’s a long silence.
“Oh, Harriet,” Nat eventually says in a sad and simultaneously triumphant voice.
Because I’m lying in bed, fully dressed, with my shoes on. And in one hand is a box of talcum powder; in the other is a bright red lipstick.

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K, so I lied a little bit.
Twice, actually.
Nat and I are not in perfect harmony at all. We’re definitely close, and we definitely spend all of our time together, and we definitely adore each other very much, but there are moments now we’ve almost grown up where our interests and passions divide a teensy bit.
Or – you know – a lot.
It doesn’t stop us being inseparable, obviously. We’re Best Friends because we frequently make each other laugh, so much so that I once made orange juice come out of her nose (on to her mum’s white rug – we stopped laughing pretty shortly afterwards). And also because I remember when she peed on the ballet-room floor, aged six, and she is the only person in the entire world who knows I still have a dinosaur poster taped to the inside of my wardrobe.
But over the last few years, there have definitely been minuscule points where our desires and needs have… conflicted a little bit. Which is why I may have said I was a little bit sicker than I actually felt this morning, which was: not much.
Or at all, actually. I feel great.
And why Nat is a bit snappy with me as we run towards the school coach as fast as my legs will carry me.
“You know,” Nat sighs as she waits for me to catch up for the twelfth time. “I watched that stupid documentary on the Russian Revolution for you last week, and it was about four hundred hours long. The least you can do is participate in an Educational Opportunity to See Textiles from an Intimate and Consumer Perspective with me.”
“Shopping,” I puff, holding my sides together so they don’t fall apart. “It’s called shopping.”
“That’s not what’s written on the leaflet. It’s a school trip: there has to be something educational about it.”
“No,” I huff. “There isn’t.” Nat pauses again so that I can try and catch up. “It’s just shopping.”
To be fair, I think I have a point. We’re going to The Clothes Show Live, in Birmingham. So-called – presumably – because they show clothes to you. Live. In Birmingham. And let you buy them. And take them home with you afterwards.
Which is otherwise known as shopping.
“It’ll be fun,” Nat says from a few metres ahead of me. “They’ve got everything there, Harriet. Everything anyone could possibly ever want.”
“Really?” I say in the most sarcastic voice I can find, considering that I’m now running so fast that my breath is starting to squeak. “Do they have a triceratops skull?”
“…No.”
“Do they have a life-size model of the first airborne plane?”
“…Probably not.”
“And do they have a John Donne manuscript, with little white gloves so that you can actually touch it?”
Nat thinks about it. “I think it’s unlikely they have that,” she admits.
“Then they don’t have everything I want, do they?”
We reach the coach steps and I can barely breathe. I don’t understand it: we’ve both run the same distance, and we’ve both expended the same energy. I’m an entire centimetre shorter than Nat so I have less mass to move, at the same speed (on average). We both have exactly the same amount of PE lessons. And yet – despite the laws of physics – I’m huffing and purple, and Nat’s only slightly glowing and still capable of breathing out of her nose.
Sometimes science makes no sense at all.
Nat starts rapping in a panic on the bus door. We’re late – thanks to my excellent acting skills – and it looks like the class might be about to leave without us. “Harriet,” Nat snaps, turning to look at me as the doors start making sucking noises, as if they’re kissing. “Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by Lenin in 1917.”
I blink in surprise. “Yes,” I say. “He was.”
“And do you think I want to know that? It’s not even on our exam syllabus. I never had to know that. So now it’s your turn to pick up a few pairs of shoes and make ooh and aah sounds for me because Jo ate prawns and she’s allergic to prawns and she got sick and couldn’t come and I’m not sitting on a bus on my own for five hours. OK?”
Nat takes a deep breath and I look at my hands in shame. I am a selfish, selfish person. I am also a very sparkly person: my hands are covered in gold glitter.
“OK,” I say in a small voice. “I’m sorry, Nat.”
“You’re forgiven.” The coach doors finally slide open. “Now get on this bus and pretend for one little day that you have the teeniest, tiniest smidgen of interest in fashion.”
“All right,” I say, my voice getting even smaller.
Because – in case you haven’t worked this out by now – here’s the key thing that really divides Nat and me:
I don’t.

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o, before we get on the bus, you might want to know a little more about me.
You might not, obviously. You might be thinking, Just get on with it, Harriet, because I haven’t got all day, which is what Annabel says all the time. Adults rarely have all day, from what I can tell. However, if – like me – you read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and shampoo bottles in the bath and bus timetables when you already know what bus you’re getting, here’s a little more information:

1 My mother is dead. That’s usually the bit where people look awkward and start talking about how rainy the sky looks, but she died when I was three days old so missing her is a bit like loving a character from a book. The only stories I have of her belong to other people.
2 I have a stepmother, Annabel. She married Dad when I was seven, she’s alive and she works as a lawyer. (You would not believe the amount of arguments my parents have over those two facts. “I am living,” Annabel will scream. “You’re a lawyer,” Dad will shout back. “Who are you kidding?”)
3 Dad’s In Advertising. (“Not in adverts,” Annabel always points out when they have dinner parties. “I write them,” Dad replies in frustration. “I’m as In Advertising as you can get.”“Apart from actors,” Annabel says under her breath, at which point Dad stomps off to the kitchen to get another bottle of beer.)
4 I’m an only child. Thanks to my parents, I am destined to a life of never having anyone to squabble with in the back seat of the car.
5 Nat isn’t just my Best Friend. She gave herself this title, even though I told her it was a bit unnecessary: she’s also my Only Friend. This might be because I have a tendency to correct people’s grammar and tell them facts they’re not interested in.
6 And put things in lists. Like this one.
7 Nat and I met ten years ago when we were five, which makes us fifteen. I know you could have worked that out by yourself, but I can’t assume people like doing equations in their heads just because I do.
8 Nat is beautiful. When we were young, adults would put a hand under her chin and say, “She’s going to break hearts, this one,” as if she couldn’t hear them and wasn’t deciding when would be the best time to start.
9 I am not. My impact on hearts is like an earthquake happening on the other side of the world: if I’m lucky, I can hope for a teacup tinkling in its saucer. And even then it’s a bit of a surprise and everybody talks about it for days afterwards.
Other things will probably filter through in stages – like the fact that I only eat toast in triangles because it means there are no soggy edges, and my favourite book is the first half of Great Expectations and the last half of Wuthering Heights – but you don’t need to know them right now. In fact, arguably, you never need to know them. The last book Dad bought me had a gun on the front cover.
Anyway, the final defining fact that I may already have mentioned in passing is:

10. I don’t like fashion.

I never really have, and I can’t imagine I ever will.
I got away with it until I was about ten. Under that age, non-uniform didn’t really exist: we were either in our school uniform, or our pyjamas, or our swimming costumes, or dressed like angels or sheep for the school nativity. We had to go and get an outfit especially for non-uniform days.
Then teenagehood hit like a big pink glittery sledgehammer. Suddenly there were rules and breaking them mattered. Skirt lengths and trouser shapes and eye-shadow shades and heel heights and knowing how long you could go without wearing mascara before people accused you of being a lesbian.
Suddenly the world was divided into the right and the horribly, horribly wrong. And the people stuck between, who for the life of them couldn’t tell the difference. People who wore white socks and black shoes; who liked having hair on their legs because it was fluffy at night-time. People who really missed the sheep outfit, and secretly wanted to wear it to school even when it wasn’t Christmas.
People like me.
If there had been consistent rules, I’d have done my best to keep up. Made some sort of pie chart or line graph and then resentfully applied the basics. But fashion’s not like that: it’s a slippery old fish. You try to grab it round the neck and it slides out of your grip and shoots off in another direction, and every desperate grab towards it makes you look even more stupid. Until you’re sliding around on the floor, everybody is laughing at you and the fish has shot under the table.
So – to put it simply – I gave up. Brains have only got so much they can absorb, so I decided I didn’t have space. I’d rather know that hummingbirds can’t walk, or that one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs billions of tonnes, or that bluebirds can’t see the colour blue.
Nat, however, went the other way. And suddenly the sheep and the angel – who hung out quite happily in the fields of Bethlehem together – didn’t have as much in common any more.
We’re still Best Friends. She’s still the girl who lost her first baby tooth in my apple, and I’m still the girl who stuck one of her sunflower seeds up my nose in primary school and couldn’t get it out again. But sometimes, every now and then, the gap between us gets so big it feels like one of us is going to slip through.
Something tells me that today that person is going to be me.

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nyway.
What all this means is: I’m not thrilled to be here. I’ve stopped whining, but let’s just say I’m not spinning round and round in circles, farting at intervals, like my dog Hugo does when he’s excited. In fact, I did two years of doing woodwork specifically so I didn’t have to come on this textiles trip. Two years of accidentally sanding down my thumbs and cringing to the sound of metal on metal, purely to get out of today. And then Jo eats prawns and does a little vomiting and BAM: here I am.
The first step on to the coach is uneventful, just one step, directly behind Nat’s. The second step is slightly less successful. The coach starts before we’ve sat down and I’m thrown sideways, in the process kicking a nice fluffy green bag the way I’ve never, ever managed to kick a football in my entire life.
“Moron,” Chloe hisses as she retrieves it.
“I’m n-n-not,” I stutter, cheeks lighting up. “A moron only has an IQ of between 50 and 69. I think mine’s a little higher than that.”
And then it all goes wrong. On the third step, the driver sees a family of ducks on the road, hits the brakes and sends me flying towards the end of the bus. I instinctively grab whatever will protect me from slamming my face on the floor. A headrest, a shoulder, an armrest, a seat.
Somebody’s knee.
“Ugh,” a voice shouts in total disgust, “she’s touching me.”
And there – staring at me as if she just sicked me up – is Alexa.

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lexa. My nemesis, my adversary, my opponent, my arch-enemy. Whatever you want to call somebody who hates your guts.
I’ve known her three days longer than I’ve known Nat and I’ve yet to work out what her problem is. I can only conclude that her feelings towards me are very similar to what I’ve read about love: passionate, random, inexplicable and totally uncontrollable. She can’t help hating me any more than Heathcliff could help loving Cathy. It’s simply written in the stars. Which would be quite sweet if she wasn’t such a cow all of the time.
And I wasn’t totally terrified of her.
I stare at Alexa in total shock. I’m still clinging to her tight-covered leg like a frightened baby monkey clinging on to a tree. “Let go,” she snaps. “Oh my God.”
I scrabble away, trying desperately to stand up. There are approximately 13,914,291,404 legs in the world – over half of them in trousers – and I had to grab this one?
“Ugh,” she says loudly to anybody who will listen. “Do you think I might have caught something? Oh, God, I can already feel it starting…” She cowers in her seat. “No…The light… It hurts… I can feel myself changing… Suddenly I want to do my homework… It’s too late!” She puts her hands over her face and then pulls them away, crosses her eyes, protrudes her teeth and pulls the ugliest expression I’ve ever seen on public transport. “Nooooooo! I’ve caught it! I’m… I’m… I’m a geeeeeeeeeeeeek!”
People start sniggering and from somewhere on the left I can hear a little ripple of applause. Alexa bows a couple of times, pulls a face at me and then goes back to reading her magazine.

My cheeks are flushed, my hands are shaking. My eyes are starting to prickle. All the normal responses to ritual humiliation. The thing I want to make really clear right now is that I don’t mind being a geek. Being a geek is fine. It’s unimpressive, sure, but it’s pretty unobtrusive. I could be a geek all day long, as long as people left me alone.
The thing is: they don’t.
“Seriously,” Nat snaps in a loud voice from a few metres in front of me. “Did you sniff wet paint as a child or something, Alexa?”
Alexa rolls her eyes. “Barbie talks. Run away and play with your shoes, Natalie. This has nothing to do with you.”
I’m trying desperately to think of something clever to say. Something biting, poignant, incisive, deeply wounding. Something that will give Alexa just an ounce of the hurt she gives me on an almost daily basis.
“You suck,” I say in the tiniest voice I’ve ever heard.
Yeah, I think. That should do it. And then I hold my chin up as high as I can get it, walk the rest of the way down the aisle and sink into the seat next to Nat before my knees give way.
I’m in my seat for about three seconds when the morning promptly decides to get worse. I barely have time to open my crossword book first.
“Harriet!” a delighted voice says, and a little pale face pops over the back of the seat in front of me. “You’re here! You’re really, actually, actually here!” As if I’m Father Christmas and he’s a six-year-old whose chimney I’ve just climbed down.
“Yes, Toby,” I say reluctantly. “I’m here.” And then I turn to scowl at Nat.
It’s Toby Pilgrim.
Toby “my knees buckle when I run” Pilgrim. Toby “I bring my own Bunsen burner to school” Pilgrim. Toby “I wear bicycle clips on my trousers and I don’t even have a bike” Pilgrim. Nat should have told me he’d be here.
I’m now following my own stalker to Birmingham.

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magine you’re a polar bear and you find yourself in the middle of a rainforest. There are flying squirrels, and monkeys, and bright green frogs, and you have no idea how you got there or what you’re supposed to do next. You’re lonely, you’re lost, you’re frightened and all you know – for absolute certain – is that you shouldn’t be there.
Now imagine you find another polar bear. You’re so happy to see another polar bear – any polar bear – that it doesn’t matter what kind it is. You follow that polar bear around, just because it’s not a monkey. Or a flying squirrel. Because it’s the only thing that makes it OK to be a polar bear in the middle of a rainforest.
Well, that’s how it is with Toby. One geek, incoherently happy to find another geek in the middle of a world full of normal people. Thrilled to discover that there is someone else like him. It’s not me he wants. It’s my social standing. Or lack thereof.
And let me get something straight: I’m not going to have a romance with someone just because they’re made out of the same stuff as me. No. I’d rather be on my own. Or – you know – in unrequited love with a parrot. Or one of those little lemurs with the stripy tails.
“Harriet!” Toby says again and a little bit of bogey starts dripping from his nose. He promptly wipes it on his jumper sleeve and beams at me. “I can’t believe you came!”
I glare at Nat and she grins, winks and goes back to reading her magazine. I am not feeling very harmonised with her at the moment, if I’m being totally honest. In fact, I sort of feel like hitting her over the head with my crossword puzzle.
“Yes,” I say, trying to edge away. “Apparently I had to.”
“But isn’t this just wonderful?” he gasps, clambering up on to his knees in his unbridled enthusiasm. I notice that his T-shirt says THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1. “Of all the buses in all the towns in all the world, you walk on to mine. Can you see what I did there? It’s a quote from Casablanca, except that I replaced the words gin joints with bus and the word into with on to.”
“You did, yes.”
Nat makes a snuffle of amusement and I subtly pinch her leg.
“Do you know what I learnt this morning, Harriet? I learnt that the phrase rule of thumb came from a time when a man was only legally allowed to beat his wife with something the width of his own thumb. I can lend you the book, although there’s a pizza stain on page 143 which you might have to read round.”
“Erm. Right. Thanks.” I nod knowingly and then lift my book so that Toby realises the conversation is over.
He doesn’t.
“And,” he continues, holding it down so he can see me properly. “You know the most unbelievable thing?”
It’s funny, when Toby behaves like this, I can suddenly see why I’m so annoying.
“Well, did you know that…” The coach swerves slightly into the middle lane. Toby swallows. “That…” he continues and licks his lips. The coach swerves back into the slow lane. “That—” Toby’s face goes abruptly green and he clears his throat. “I don’t want you to think I’m easily distracted, Harriet,” he finally continues in a little voice, “but I’m suddenly not feeling so well. I don’t take too kindly to vehicles, particularly the ones that move. Do you remember the ride-on lawnmower in Year One?”
I look at him in horror and Nat immediately stops smirking. “Oh, no,” she says in a dark voice. “No, no.” Nat obviously remembers it too.
“Harriet,” Toby continues, licking his lips again and going an even stranger colour. “I think we might need to stop the bus.”
“Toby,” Nat snaps in a low, warning voice. “Breathe in through your nose and out through your—”
But it’s too late. The coach makes one more sudden movement and – as if in slow motion – Toby gives me one look of pure apology.
And vomits all over my lap.

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n case you were wondering, that’s what Toby did on the ride-on lawnmower in Year One too. Except this time he manages to broaden his horizons in the most literal sense and hit Nat too.
She’s not happy about it. I mean, I’m not happy about it either. I don’t relish being hit by the contents of other people’s digestive tracts. But Nat’s really not happy about it.
She’s so unhappy about it that when the coach finally pulls up to The Clothes Show at the NEC, Birmingham – two and a half hours later – she’s still shouting at him. And Toby’s telling both of us how much better he feels now because, “Isn’t it funny how it feels OK when all the vomit’s gone?”
“I don’t believe this,” Nat is still snapping, stomping across the carpark. We’re both now wearing PE kit: luckily two of the boys had football practice straight after the trip, so – after a lot of whining – Miss Fletcher managed to convince them to lend us their kit. We’re wearing orange football shirts, green football shorts and white knee socks.
I quite like it. It’s making me feel quite sporty. Nat, on the other hand, isn’t so keen. We were forced to keep our shoes on, and – while my trainers look quite normal – Nat’s red high heels… don’t.
“Do you know how long it took me to choose my outfit this morning?” she’s yelling at Toby as we approach the front doors.
Toby contemplates this like it’s not a rhetorical question. “Twenty minutes?” he offers. Nat’s face goes slightly puce. “Thirty?” Nat’s jawline starts flexing. “An hour and a half?”
“A really long time!” she shouts. “A really, really long time!” Nat looks down at herself. “I had a brand-new dress and leggings from American Apparel, Toby. Do you know how much they cost? I was wearing Prada perfume.” She picks up a piece of green nylon between her fingers. “And now I’m wearing a boy’s football kit and I smell of sick!”
I pat her arm as comfortingly as I can.
“At least my vomit was sort of chocolatey,” Toby says cheerfully. “I had Coco Pops for breakfast.”
Nat grits her teeth.
“Anyway,” Toby continues blithely, “I think you look awesome. You both match. It’s super trendy.”
Nat scrunches her mouth up, clenches her fists and furrows her brow right in the centre. It’s like watching somebody shake a bottle of fizzy drink without taking the lid off. “Toby,” she says in a low hiss. “Go. Now.”
“OK,” Toby agrees. “Anywhere in particular?”
“Anywhere. Just go. NOW.”
“Toby,” I say in a low voice, taking him by the arm. I’m really, genuinely scared for his safety. “I think maybe you should go inside.” I look at Nat. “As quickly as possible,” I add.
“Ah.” Toby contemplates this for a few seconds and then nods. “Ah. I see. Then I shall see you both anon.”
And – giving me what looks disturbingly like an attempt at a wink over his shoulder – he skips off through the swing doors.

When he’s gone and I know that Nat can’t rip his head off and feed it to a large flock of pigeons, I turn to her.
“Nat,” I say, chewing on a fingernail anxiously. “It’s not that bad. Honestly. We smell fine. And if you put my coat on over the top, nobody will see what you’re wearing. It’s longer than yours.”
“You don’t get it,” Nat says and suddenly the anger pops: she just sounds miserable. “You just don’t get it.”
I think Nat underestimates my powers of empathy. Which is a shame because I am a very empathetic person. Empathetic. Not pathetic.
“Sure I do,” I say in a reassuring voice. “You don’t like football. I get that.”
“It’s not that. Today was really important, Harriet. I really needed to look good.”
I stare at her blankly. After a few seconds, Nat rolls her eyes and hits herself on the forehead in frustration. “They’re in there.”
I stare at the revolving doors. “Who’s in there?” I whisper in terror. I think about it for a few seconds. “Vampires?”
“Vampires.” Nat looks at me in consternation. “You have got to start reading proper books.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. Just because I own a lot of books about things that don’t actually exist in real life in no way indicates that I’m not connected to the real world. I totally am.
Nat takes a deep breath. “I put the prawns in Jo’s dinner,” she says, avoiding my eyes.
I stare at her. “Nat! Why would you do that?”
“Because I need you today,” she says in a tiny voice. “I need you for support. They’re in there.” And she looks again at the doors and swallows.
“Who?”
“Model agents, Harriet,” Nat says as if I’m an idiot. “Lots and lots of model agents.”
“Oh,” I say stupidly, and then think about it. “Ohhhhhhhh.”
And I finally understand what I’m doing here.

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e were seven when Nat decided that she wanted to be a model.
“Gosh,” somebody’s mum said at a school disco. “Natalie. You’re getting gorgeous. Maybe you could be a model when you grow up.”
I paused from filling my party dress pockets with chocolate cake and jelly sweets. “A model of what?” I asked curiously. And then my greedy little hand went out to grab a mini jam roll. “I have a model airplane,” I added proudly.
The mum gave me the look that I was already used to by then.
“A model,” she explained, looking at Nat, “is a girl or a boy who gets paid ridiculous quantities of money to wear clothes they don’t own and have their photo taken.” I looked at Nat and already I could see her eyes starting to glow: the seed of the dream being planted. “Just hope you grow tall and thin,” the mum added bitterly, “because if you ask me, they all look like aliens.”
At which point Nat put her chocolate cake down and spent the rest of the night sitting on the floor, with me pulling on her feet to make her legs longer.
And I spent the rest of the night talking about space travel.
It’s finally here.
Eight years of buying Vogue and not eating pudding (Nat, not me: I eat hers) and we’ve finally made it to the very edge of Nat’s destiny. I feel a bit like Sam in The Lord of the Rings, just before Frodo throws the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Except in a more positive, magical way. With slightly less hairy feet.
Nat doesn’t look as excited as I thought she would. She looks terrified and as stiff as a board standing, totally still, in the middle of the NEC entrance. She’s staring at the crowd as if it’s a pond full of fish and she’s a really hungry cat, and – honestly – I’m not even sure she’s breathing. I’m tempted to put my head on her chest just to check.
The thing is: she’s doing it all wrong.
I know a lot about stories and magic – thanks to reading loads of books and also belonging to a forum on the internet – and the most basic rule is that it has to come as a surprise. Nobody hopped into a wardrobe to find Narnia; they hopped in, thinking it was just a wardrobe. They didn’t climb up the Faraway Tree, knowing it was a Faraway Tree; they thought it was just a really big tree. Harry Potter thought he was a normal boy; Mary Poppins was supposed to be a regular nanny.
It’s the first and only rule. Magic comes when you’re not looking for it.
But Nat’s looking for it, and the harder she looks, the less likely it is to turn up. She’s scaring the fashion magic off with her knowing, waiting vibes.
“Come on,” I say, trying to distract her by pulling at her (or technically my) coat sleeve. I need to get her to think about something else so that the magic can do its thing. “Let’s just go and shop, OK?”
“Mmm.”
I don’t think she can even hear me any more. “Look!” I say enthusiastically, pulling her to the nearest stall. “Nat, look! Handbags! Shoes! Hair bobbles!”
Nat gives me a distracted glance. “You’re dragging my coat on the floor.”
“Oh.” I bundle it back under my arm and start tugging Nat towards the next stall.
“What do you think?” I say, picking up a small blue sequined hat and plopping it on my head. When we were little, we’d spend hours and hours in department stores, trying on different hats and pretending we were going to a royal wedding.
“Uh-huh.” Nat gets a little bit more tense and looks over her shoulder.
“Come on, what about this one?” I pick up a large floppy hat covered in big pink flowers and put it on. “Look.” I wiggle my bottom at her.
Nat abruptly whips round. “Oh my God,” she whispers and it takes me a few seconds to realise that it has nothing at all to do with my bottom.
“Have you seen one?”
“I think so!” She looks again. “Yes, I think I can definitely see an agent!”
I peer into the crowd, but I can’t see anything. They must be like fairies: you can only see them when they want you to.

“Stay right here, Harriet,” Nat whispers urgently. She starts moving into the crowds. “Don’t move a muscle. I’ll be back in a second.”
Now I’m confused. “But…” This makes no sense. “Don’t you need me with you?” I call after her. “Isn’t that why I’m here? For support?”
“In spirit will do just fine, Harriet,” Nat shouts back. “Love you!”
And then she disappears completely.

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s she kidding me? In spirit?
I could have done in spirit quite happily from my bedroom, thank you very much. I could have texted Nat support from my own fake deathbed. I pick up another hat crossly. Next time Nat wants me to go shopping, I am so throwing myself down the stairs.
“Excuse me?” a voice interrupts, and when I turn around, there’s a lady staring at me with a deep crease between her eyebrows. “Can you read?”
“Umm,” I reply in surprise. “Yes. Very well, actually. My reading age is over twenty. But thank you for asking.”
“Really? Can you read that sign there? Read it out loud.”
Poor lady. Maybe she didn’t go to all of her English lessons at school. “Of course,” I say in a friendly and – I hope – not patronising tone. Not everyone benefits equally from a full education system. “It says, Don’t Touch The Hats.”
There’s a pause and then I realise that she probably doesn’t have a literacy problem after all. “Oh,” I add as her meaning sinks in.
“That’s a hat,” she says pointing to the one in my hand. “And that’s a hat.” She points to the one on my head. “And you’re touching them all over.”
I quickly put the one in my hand back on the stall and grab the one on my head. “Sorry. It’s, erm, very…” What? How would you describe a hat? “Hatty,” I improvise, and then I pat it and put it back on the stall. At which point my chewed nail snags on a flower.
We both watch as the flower separates itself from the hat and throws itself on the floor, like a little child having a hissy fit. And then – as if in slow motion – what was clearly just one piece of thread breaks and, one by one, every other flower on the ribbon follows it.
Oh, sugar cookies.
“That’s a very interesting design concept,” I say after clearing my throat awkwardly a couple of times and starting to back away. “Self-detaching flowers? It’s very modern.”
“They’re not self-detaching,” Hat Lady says in a low, angry voice, staring at the pile on the floor. “You detached them.” And then she points at a felt-tip sign that says You Break It You Buy It, followed by the most inappropriately placed smiley face I have ever seen in my entire life. “And now you’re going to have to pay for it.”
God. She sounds a little bit like someone from the Italian Mafia. Maybe the Italian Mafia has a hat section.
“You know,” I say, backing away a little bit faster. “You are very lucky that hat didn’t kill me. I could have choked on one of those flowers and died. The playwright Tennessee Williams died from choking on a bottle cap. Then how would you have felt?”
“I’ll take a cheque or debit card details.”
I take a few more steps backwards and she follows. “Tell you what,” I say in the most lawyer-y, Annabel-like voice I can find. “How about I forget that you tried to kill me if you forget that I broke your hat? How does that sound?”
“Pay for the hat,” she says, taking another step towards me.
“No.”
“Pay for the hat.”
“I can’t.”
“Pay for the h—”
At which point fate or karma or the universe or a God who doesn’t like me very much steps in. And sends me flying bottom-first into the rest of her stall.

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try to blame Nat’s coat dangling on the floor, but Hat Lady is having none of it. There is a lot of squeaking: mine, mostly, followed by hers. And then the crowd gets suddenly bigger.
Apparently I haven’t just knocked over the hat table. Her stall has dominoed into the stall next to it, which has dominoed into the stall next to that, and before I know what’s happening there are six stalls, strewn creatively over the floor, with me lying in a heap in the middle. It’s the fault of those silly fake partitions, in my opinion. They just aren’t stable enough.
Clearly, neither am I.
“This is why I didn’t want you to touch the hats,” Hat Lady is screaming at me as I struggle to get up. Every time I put my hand down, something crunches. And not in a good-crunch kind of way. In a hand-through-hat kind of way. “You’ve ruined everything!”
From my position on the floor I can see that the tables have crushed at least seven hats, and another three have been hit by the jug of water on one of the now tipped-over chairs. Along with the sign. Another four hats have shoe-shaped dents in them and footprints on the brim. I’m sitting on at least three.
OK, she has a point.
“I’m sorry,” I’m saying over and over again (crunch, crunch, crunch). Everywhere I look are the faces of people who don’t seem to like me very much. “I’m really sorry. I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay for all of it.”
I have no idea how, but I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of car washing and about six hundred years’ worth of groundings.
“It’s not enough,” the woman yells. “This is my biggest sale day of the year! I need to attract a client base!”
I look around briefly. From the size of the crowd, she’s definitely attracted something.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, with my face flaming – because I really, truly, honestly am – and I’m just about to burst into guilty tears when a man wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket and a jaunty black hat leans forward and grabs hold of my hand.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me,” he says firmly. Then he looks at Hat Lady. “Don’t worry, Sugar,” he adds. “She’s going to pay for the hats. I’ll make sure of it personally.” And he starts leading me away from the carnage.
I gape at him, totally speechless.
So far today, I have nearly died of my own fake illness, fallen over – three times – been shouted at, humiliated, vomited on, abandoned and I’ve managed to trash an entire section of an indoor market. And now, just at the point where I thought it was impossible for things to get worse…
I’ve just been arrested.

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his is what happens when I’m forced to go out in public.
“I didn’t do it!” I gasp as the man pulls me through the crowds. He’s holding my hand and – I have to be honest with you – I’m not sure he’s allowed. I think it might be against the law or something. “I mean,” I clarify, “I did do it. But I didn’t mean to. I’m just…” How can I put it? “Socially disadvantaged.”
And – just so you know – that’s what I’m going to plead in court as well.
“Cherub-cheeks, that sounds so fun,” the man says over his shoulder in a high voice that doesn’t seem to fit him properly. “Society is tedious, don’t you think? Sooo much better to be pushed out of it.”
What did he just call me?
“I haven’t been pushed out of it,” I tell him indignantly. “I just don’t seem to be able to get in it in the first place. Anyway,” I add as firmly as I can, “you should know I’m only fifteen.” Too young to go to jail, I want to add, but I don’t want to give him any ideas.
“Fifteen? Perfectomondo, my little Sugar-kitten. So much potential for free publicity.”
The blood drains from my cheeks. Free publicity? Oh, God, he’s going to use me as a warning to other underage wannabe hat vandals.
“Before you take me anywhere,” I say quickly, “I need to find my best friend. She’s not going to know where I’ve gone.”
He stops walking and swivels round with his spare hand on his hip.
“Mini-treetop, once I have a photo of you, you can go wherever the tiddlywinks you like.” And then he tinkles with laughter.
I freeze. “A photo?”
“Well, yes, my little Peach-melba. I could draw a picture, but Head Office thought that was ever so unfunny last time.” He giggles and pushes me away with a limp wrist. “Oh,” he adds casually. “I’m Wilbur, by the way. That’s bur not iam. From Infinity Models.”
My knees abruptly buckle, but Wilbur-not-iam keeps tugging as if I’m on wheels. Suddenly I know how Toby feels when he tries to do the high jump.
Infinity Models?
No.
No, no, no, no.
No no no no no no NONONONONO.
“Oh, it has just been a mare this morning,” Wilbur continues as if he’s not dragging me bodily across the floor.
“But w-w-why?” I finally managed to stutter.
“Oh, you know, total chaos. The Birmingham Clothes Show: highlight of the fashion year etcetera etcetera. Well, apart from London Fashion Week, obviously. And Milan. And New York. And Paris. Actually, it’s quite far down the list, but hey, it’s still a blast.”
I can’t really feel my mouth. “N-n-not why is it busy. Why would you want my photo?”
“Oh, Baby-baby Panda,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re, like, so tomorrow you’re next Wednesday. No, you’re the Thursday after. Do you know what I mean?”
I stare at him with my mouth slightly open. I think it’s safe to say that the answer to that question is no. “But—”
“And I am loving this look,” he interrupts, pointing at the football kit. “So new. So fresh. So unusual. Inspired.”
“My jeans had sick on them,” I blurt out in disbelief.
“My Jeans Had Sick On Them. I love it. Such an imagination! Darling-foot—” and here Wilbur pauses so that he can pull me through a particularly dense crowd of really angry-looking girls – “I think you might be about to make my career, my little Pot of Tigers.”
One of the girls behind me mutters in confusion: “Hey, she’s ginger.”
(She’s wrong, by the way: I’m not. I am strawberry blonde.)
“I don’t underst—”
“All will become clear shortly,” Wilbur reassures me. “Maybe. Maybe not, actually, but hey, clarity is so overrated.” He pushes me against the wall. “Now stand there and look gorgeous.”
What? I don’t even know how to start attempting that.
“But—” I say again.
Wilbur takes a Polaroid picture, shakes it and puts it on the table. “Now turn to the side?”
I stare at him, still frozen in shock. None of this is making sense. He tuts and gently pushes my shoulders round so I’m facing the other wall, and then takes another photo.
“Wilbur—” I turn to frantically search the crowd for Nat’s dark head, but I can’t see anything.
“Baby-pudding,” Wilbur interrupts, “you know you look just like a treefrog? Darling, you could climb up a tree with no help at all and I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest.”
I pause and stare at him with my mouth open. Did he just say I look like something with suckers on its feet? Then my mind clears. Focus, Harriet. For God’s sake, focus.
“I have to go,” I explain urgently as Wilbur twists me round and takes a final photo. “I have to get out of here. I have to—”
But I can see Nat heading straight towards us. And I know two things for certain:




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iding under the table probably isn’t the best impromptu decision I’ve ever made, but it’s the only one I can think of. Which is a problem.
First of all, because Wilbur knows I’m here. He just saw me drop to my knees and crawl away. Second, because the table cloth doesn’t quite reach the floor. And third, because there’s already somebody else under here.
“Hi,” the person under the table says, and then he offers me a piece of chewing gum.
There are times in my life when the synapses in my brain move quite fast. For example, during English exams I’ve normally completed the essay with plenty of time to doodle little relevant pictures in the margin in the hope that it gets me extra points. However, there are other times when those synapses don’t do anything at all. They just sit there in confused silence, shrugging at me.
This is one of them.
I stare at the chewing gum in shock and then blink at the boy who’s holding it. He’s so good-looking, it feels like my brain has collapsed and my skull is about to fold in on itself. Which is actually not as unpleasant a sensation as you might think.
“Well?” the boy says, leaning back against the wall and looking at me with his eyelids lowered. “Do you want the gum or not?”
He’s about my age and he looks like a dark lion. He has large black curls that point in every direction and slanted eyes and a wide mouth that curves up at the edges. He’s so beautiful that all I can hear in my head is a high-pitched white noise like a recently switched-off television.
It takes an interaction of seventy-two different muscles to produce human speech, and right now not a single one of them is working. I open and shut my mouth a few times, like a goldfish.
“I can see,” he continues in a lazy accent that doesn’t seem to be English, “that it’s an extremely important decision and you need to think about it carefully. So I’ll give you a few more seconds to weigh up the pros and cons.”
He has really sharp canine teeth, and when he says Fs, they catch on his bottom lip. There’s a mole under his left eye and he smells sort of green, like… grass. Or vegetables. Or maybe lime sweets.
One of his curls is sticking up at the back, like a little duck tail. And I’ve just realised that I’m still staring at him, and he’s still looking at me, and he’s still waiting for me to answer him. I quickly trawl my mind for an appropriate response.
“Chewing gum is banned in Singapore,” I whisper. “Completely banned.” And then I blink twice. It’s probably not the best introductory statement I’ve ever opened with.
His eyes shoot wide open. “Are we in Singapore? How long have I been asleep? How fast does this table move?”
Nice one, Harriet.
“No,” I whisper back, my cheeks already hot,“we’re still in Birmingham. I’m just making the point that if we were in Singapore, we could be arrested for even having chewing gum in our possession.”
Stop talking, Harriet.
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” I gulp. “Luckily we’re not in Singapore, so you’re safe.”
“Well, thank God for UK legislation,” he says, leaning his head against the wall again. His mouth twitches. And then there’s a long silence while he closes his eyes and I go red all over and try to work out whether it’s possible to make a worse first impression.
It’s not.
“I’m Harriet Manners,”I admit finally and then I put my hand out to shake his, realise it’s sweaty with nerves, swoop it back in and pretend I’m scratching my knee instead.
“Hello, Harriet Manners,” Lion Boy says and all I can think is: I know there’s something outside the table that I’m supposed to be running away from, but I can’t quite remember what it is.
“Erm…”Think, Harriet. Think of something normal to say. “Have you been here long?”
“About half an hour.”
“Why?”
“I’m hiding from Wilbur. He’s using me as bait. He keeps chucking me into the crowd to see how many pretty girls I can come back with.”
“Like a maggot?”
He laughs. “Yes. Pretty much exactly like a maggot.”
“And have you… caught anything?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he says, opening one eye and looking straight at me. “It’s too early to say.”
“Oh.” I glance briefly at my watch. “It’s not that early,” I inform him. “Actually, it’s nearly lunchtime.”
The boy looks at my watch – which has a knife, fork and spoon instead of hands – raises an eyebrow and stares at me hard for a few seconds. His nose wiggles a little bit. And then – clearly fascinated by the mesmerising first impression I’ve made – he closes his eyes again.
With Lion Boy apparently unconscious, I suddenly feel a great need to ask him all sorts of questions. I want to know everything. For instance, what is his accent and where is he from? If I get a world map out of my bag, can he point to it for me? Does it have strange animals and really big insects? Is he an only child too? Were the holes in his jeans there when he bought them, like Dad’s, and if not, how did he get them?
But nothing is coming out. Which is lucky, because people don’t tend to like it very much when I interrogate them relentlessly while they’re trying to sleep.
“Do you often hide under furniture?” I manage eventually. He grins at me and his smile is so wide that it breaks his face into little pieces and my stomach immediately feels like a washing machine on spin-dry mode.
“I don’t make a habit of it. You?”
“All of the time,” I admit reluctantly. “All of the time.”
Whenever I panic, actually. Which means, because I panic a lot, that I’ve been under many types of things. Dining tables, desks, side tables, kitchen counters… Any kind of furniture that allows me to disappear. Which is, actually, how I met Nat.
And I’ve just remembered what I’m doing here.

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n case you’re wondering, I met Nat under a piano.
It was the second day of school and I’d had enough. Alexa had already taken a shine to me – or whatever the opposite of that is – and I had become the butt of all of her most intricate five-year-old jokes. Who smells the most? Harriet. Who has hair like a carrot? Harriet. Who spilt their milk on their lap, but actually, it’s pee? Harriet.
So I’d waited until everyone else had gone outside and then I’d crawled under the piano. Where I’d found a heartbroken Nat, crying because her dad had just run off with the check-out girl at Waitrose. We bonded straight away, probably because we both only had half of a parenting team left: a bit like discovering the missing bit of a friendship necklace. I’d offered her a part-time share in my dad, she’d offered me a bit of her mum and – just like that –we’d become Best Friends. And we have been ever since.
At least, from that moment until… this one.

*

“Harriet,” a voice says from somewhere outside the table cloth. Two red shoes can be seen underneath it. “I don’t know whether you’re under some kind of impression that you’ve become invisible in the last thirteen minutes, but you’re not. I can still see you.”
My stomach swoops again and this time it has nothing to do with the boy sitting next to me. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” Nat agrees. “So you may as well come out now.”
I look back at the Lion Boy, who still has his eyes shut, whisper, “Thanks for sharing the table,” and struggle back out of my terrible, terrible hiding place.
Nat looks furious. Even more so than when I accidentally knocked her new bottle of Gucci perfume out of the window as a result of an impromptu dance routine that she didn’t want to see in the first place.
“What,” she whispers to me, glancing in confusion at Wilbur, “are you doing, Harriet?”
“I…” I start, already panicking. “It’s not what it—”
“I can’t believe this,” Nat interrupts. Her cheeks are getting redder and redder and her eyes keep flicking to Wilbur. “I know you don’t like shopping, Harriet, and I know you didn’t want to come today, but hiding under this table… I mean, of all the tables…” She looks at Wilbur again in total embarrassment.
I frown. What is she talking about? Then I realise, in a horrible rush. Nat doesn’t know I’ve just been spotted. She didn’t see me having my photo taken. She just saw me here and assumed I’d followed her and then crawled under a table because being a total plonker is the only thing I really excel at. And – at exactly the same moment – I glance at Wilbur and a jolt of shock hits my stomach. His expression is totally blank. He’s not interested in Nat. She hasn’t been spotted. Which means – and my stomach suddenly feels like it’s been electrocuted – that I haven’t just accidentally hitched a ride on the back of Nat’s lifelong dream.
I’ve stolen it.
I look at Nat in alarm. “Well?” she says and her voice starts to wobble. “What’s going on, Harriet?”
I can save this, I think in a rush, it’s not too late.
I don’t have to break Nat’s heart and crush her dream, and I don’t have to do it in the most humiliating way possible: in the very place she thought it would come true, in front of the very person who could have given her what she wanted.
“I was looking for unusual table joints,” I say as quickly as I can. “For woodwork homework.”
A beat and then,“Huh?”
“Woodwork homework,” I repeat, trying hard to look into Nat’s eyes. “They said local craft can be very interesting and we had to look in other parts of the country. Like… Birmingham.”
Nat opens her mouth and then closes it again. “What?”
“So,” I say, my voice getting fainter, “I thought from a distance that this particular table looked very… solid. In terms of construction. And I thought I’d have a closer look. You know. From… underneath.”
“And?”
“And?” I repeat blankly. “And what?”
“What were they?” Nat asks, her eyes narrowing even more. “What kind of table joints? I mean, you were under there quite a long time. You must have been able to tell.”
She’s testing me. She’s checking to see if I’m telling the truth and I can’t really blame her. After all, I started the day by covering my face in talcum powder and red lipstick.
“I think that…” I start, but I have absolutely no idea. And there’s a really good chance that Nat’s about to kneel on the floor and check.“They’re…” I say again and the sentence trails to an end.
“They’re dovetail,” a voice says and Lion Boy climbs out from under the table.
“Nick!” Wilbur cries, looking delighted. “There you are!” And then he looks at the table in astonishment, as if it’s some kind of door to an alternative universe. “How many more of you are there under there?”
Nat stares at Lion Boy and then at me. And then at him again. The creases in her forehead are getting deeper. “Dovetail?”
“Yep, dovetail,” Nick confirms, flashing her a lopsided smile.
Nat looks at me and blinks three or four times. I can see her trying to process the situation, which is obviously totally unprocessable.
“Mmm,” I say in a faint voice. “That’s what I thought too.”
There’s a silence. A long silence. The kind of silence you could take a bite from, should you be interested in eating silences. And then – just as I think I might have got away with it and everything is going to be OK – Nat glances at Wilbur’s hand. There, in his grip, are the three damning Polaroids of me. Developed purely to show Nat the truth of my evil lies, like three miniature pictures of Dorian Gray.
The silence breaks. Nat makes a sort of sobbing noise at the base of her throat, and I automatically step forward to try and stop it. “Oh, no, Nat, I didn’t…”
Nat steps away from me with her face crumpled. She knows, and she found out in the worst way possible. In public, smack bang in the middle of me lying to her.
I should have stayed in bed this morning.
Or at least under the table.
“No,” Nat whispers.
And with that final word – the one neither of us can take back – she jumps off the stage and runs away.

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ack-stabber. Betrayer. Fink. Apostate. Miscreant. Quisling. Snake. It’s a good thing I brought my thesaurus with me because Nat refuses to speak to me for the rest of the day so I have an awful lot of time to ponder my wrong doings.
Quisling. I quite like that word. It sounds like a baby quail.
What’s even worse is that by the time I’ve pulled myself together enough to move from the dirty little corner I’m scrunched up in, a real security guard has found me and dragged me into an office full of yet more people who look angry with me. Apparently I – or my legal guardians – owe The Clothes Show stallholders £3,000.
This is what happens when you set tables covered in ink pots next to tables covered in dresses next to tables covered in hats next to tables covered in hot wax candles and every single one of them has a YOU BREAK IT YOU BUY IT sign and insufficient insurance.
I’m not one to moan unnecessarily. In fact, I like to think of myself as a positive, life-affirming person, albeit one who also has a full grasp of the darkness and tragedy inherent in modern living.
But it has to be said: today is turning out to be just full of sugar cookies.

The rest of my Thursday can be summarised thus:


By the time we get back to school I’m so high on my own carbon dioxide and deodorant fumes that my powers of apology have been severely stunted. Before I can even focus my eyes properly Nat has raced off the bus and disappeared, and I’m left to walk home on my own.
And no, in case you’re wondering. None of this makes sense to me either. I’ve turned the facts over and over in my head like Chinese marbles for eight hours, but there is still no feasible explanation for anything that has happened today. Unless I have somehow landed in an alternative universe where everything is inside out and all the trees are upside down and people talk backwards and we walk in the sky with the earth as a ceiling and flowers growing downwards. And that seems unlikely.
I’ve even worked out an equation for the situation.



Here, M stands for Model, W is Weight, H is Height, P is Prettiness, NSN is Nice-shaped Nose, C is Confidence, S is Style and X is Indefinable Coolness. Each element (apart from Weight and Height, obviously measured by the metric system) is given an objective mark out of ten, and the higher the overall result, the better you would be as a model.
By my calculations, Nat comes out at 92.
I’m 27.2. And I was being quite kind about my nose.

Anyway, I’ve given up thinking about it. There has clearly been some kind of mistake, and at this precise moment somebody is smacking Wilbur round the head and putting him in a nice jacket that ties his arms behind his back.
And – just so you know – I’m not thinking about Nick either. He hasn’t popped into my head once, with his big liony curls and his lime-green smell and his duck-tail tuft at the back. In fact, I can barely remember him. I meet head-smashingly beautiful foreign boys all the time. I can’t hide under a table without finding one there. There is no reason whatsoever that this one would stick in my memory or make my stomach twirl at intervals.
And I definitely didn’t walk past the Infinity Models stall six or seven times during the rest of the day in case he was there. Which he wasn’t.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot else to think about. My head feels like it’s fallen off the top of a great wall and I’m waiting for all the king’s soldiers to come and put it back together again. There’s only one thing left to occupy myself with. And it isn’t that much fun to dwell on. Can you guess what it is yet?
Uh-huh.
Now I have to go home and tell my parents.

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The problem with making meticulous and well-constructed plans is that people tend to ignore them. Other people. Not me; I stick to them religiously.
As I open the front door, I’m already clearing my throat. I’ve decided to lead with the modelling because hopefully my parents will be so paralysed with confusion and shock that I can slip the vast quantity of money they now owe various stallholders in there without them noticing: like doing a root canal after local anaesthetic.
“Dad?” I say nervously, shutting the door behind me. “Annabel?”
Hugo immediately barrels into my legs and starts pawing at my stomach. He has obviously just been to the hairdresser’s because I can now see where his eyes are instead of just guessing by their proximity to his nose.
“Hey, Hugo,” I add, bending down. “You’re looking very elegant.” He licks my face, which I think means, “Thanks very much,” or possibly, “You smell of hotdog.” Then I look back up. “Dad? Annabel?”
Silence.
You know what? The welcoming atmosphere in this house needs to be worked on. I’ve been away all day and it’s dark. Why aren’t they standing in the hallway, waiting anxiously for me to arrive home safe and in one unharmed piece? What kind of parents are they?
“Dad?” I repeat again, getting a bit snarly. “Annab—”
“Harriet?” Annabel interrupts from the living room. “Come in here, please.”
I sigh loudly, put my satchel down on the floor and then do as I’ve been told. Annabel is sitting on the sofa in her office suit, inexplicably eating sardines out of a tin, and Dad is in the armchair opposite her.
You know what I was saying about young children, and how non-uniform doesn’t really exist? It’s the same for lawyers. Annabel’s either in her suit, or her dressing gown, or she puts her dressing gown on top of her suit. When she goes out for dinner, she has to buy an outfit especially.
“What are you eating?” I ask immediately, sitting down on a chair and looking at Annabel’s tin.
“Sardines,” Annabel says – as if I didn’t mean why are you eating that? – and she pops another one in her mouth. “Now, Harriet,” Annabel says as soon as she’s swallowed it. “Your dad’s in trouble at work.”
“Annabel!” Dad exclaims. “For the love of… Don’t just throw that at her! Lead up to it, for God’s sake!”
“Fine.” My stepmother rolls her eyes. “Hello, Harriet. How are you? Your dad’s in trouble at work.” Then she looks at Dad. “Better?”
“Not even slightly.” Dad scowls. “It’s nothing, Harriet. Just a small difference in opinion.”
“You told your most important client to go and French Connection UK himself, Richard. In the middle of reception.”
Dad picks a bit of fluff off the sofa. “Well, he wasn’t supposed to hear it, was he?” he says in his most defensive voice. “It just came out loudly because of the acoustics. That place is all stone walls.”
“And we’re keen that you have a sterling example of adult behaviour to follow, Harriet.”
“It was the walls,” Dad shouts in exasperation.
I look at Annabel. Under a cosy layer of flippancy she looks really worried. “How bad is it?”
Annabel puts another sardine in her mouth. “Bad. They’ve called him into a disciplinary tomorrow.”
“It’s just a formality,” Dad mutters. “I’m creative: I’m supposed to be unpredictable. I’m the sort of guy who wears brown suede shoes when it’s raining; they just don’t know what to do with me. I’ll probably get a pay rise for being such a maverick.”
Annabel lifts one eyebrow and then rubs her eyes. “Let’s hope so because we really can’t afford to just live on one salary at the moment. Anyway. What about you, Harriet? Did you have a nice day? I hope you had a fragrant day at least because when I went into the bathroom, it was knee-deep in your grandmother’s vanilla talcum powder.”
“Oh.” I look at the floor. “Sorry. I meant to clean that up.”
“Of course you did. If only your actual cleaning was as good as your intended cleaning, we would have a very tidy house indeed. Did you manage to get out of whatever it is you were trying to avoid this time?”
“Actually,” I say, ignoring this extremely slanderous insinuation, and then I take a deep breath and stand up. “I have something to tell you both.”
On second thoughts, maybe I won’t tell them about the money right now. Honesty is very important within families. But so is timing. Especially when it comes to amounts like £3,000 while your father is in the process of throwing his job out of the window.
“Well?” Annabel prompts after a pause. “Spit it out, sweetheart.”
“I, uh,” I start. “Well, it’s…” I take a deep breath and prepare myself for the…well, whatever reaction you get from parents to news like this. “I’ve been spotted,” I finally manage to blurt out. There’s a silence. “Today,” I clarify. “I’ve been spotted today.”
There’s another silence and then Annabel frowns. “What?” she snaps. “Let me see.” She puts the sardine can down and drags me up from the chair and pulls me under the light. She looks carefully at my face, and then she looks at my hand and turns it over. She stares at my wrist and the inside of my upper arm. Then she gets Dad to stand up and look at my wrist and the inside of my upper arm. What the hell are they doing?
“No, Harriet,” she finally says firmly. “There’re a couple on your forehead, but I think that’s just teenage acne.”
“Since when is spotted a human adjective?” I snap impatiently. “I’m not a leopard or a stingray. Spotted. Verb, not adjective. Scouted. Picked up. Discovered. Found.” They still look blank, so I continue even more crossly. “By a model agent. By Infinity Models, to be more specific.”
Annabel looks even more confused. “To do what?”
“To pack potatoes.”
“Really?”
“No! To be a model,” I yell in distress. It’s one thing thinking you’re not pretty, but it’s quite another having that confirmed by the only people in the world who are supposed to think otherwise.
Annabel frowns again. When I look at Dad, however, he appears to be shining with the light of a million smug fairies. “They’re my genes, you know,” he says, pointing to me. “Standing right there. That’s my genetics.”
“Yes, dear, they’re your genes,” Annabel repeats as if she’s talking to a child. And then she sits down again and picks up her newspaper.
I look from Annabel to Dad. Is that it? I mean, seriously?
OK, I didn’t expect them to start dancing round the coffee table, waving their Sudoku books in the air like exotic bird feathers, but a bit more enthusiasm would be nice. Fantastic, Harriet, they could say. Maybe you’re not as totally disgusting to look at as we all thought you were. How wonderful for the whole family.
Or something that acknowledges that this would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to anyone, if I was someone else and this was a totally different family.
Annabel looks up to where I’m still standing, mouth open. “What?” she says. “You can’t do it, Harriet. You’re too young and you’ve got exams coming up.”
“She can’t do it?” Dad repeats in an incredulous tone. “What do you mean she can’t do it?”
Annabel looks at him calmly. “She’s fifteen, Richard. It’s totally inappropriate.”
“It’s Infinity Models, Annabel. Even I’ve heard of them.”
“Hundreds of beautiful women in one place? I bet you have, darling. But the answer’s still no.”
“Oh my God,” Dad yells at the top of his voice. “This is so unfair.”
You see the problem? It’s really hard being a child in my family when that space seems to already be taken.
“I don’t actually want to do it,” I interrupt. “I’m just telling you. But you could say well done or something.”
“You don’t want to do it?” Dad yells at me.
Oh, for God’s sake.
Annabel looks at me. “It’s modelling. Fashion.” She pulls a face. “What’s there to be excited about? Why is everyone getting so worked up?”
I look from her to Dad and then at Hugo. Hugo gets off the chair, tail wagging, and promptly licks me. I think he knows I need it.
“Right,” I say in a slightly deflated voice. “Fine.”
The only remotely exciting thing that has ever happened to me and it’s over already. It lasted about as long as I thought it would. I feel a little bit like sulking. Dad still looks totally shell-shocked.
“Now,” Annabel says, shaking the remote control to get the batteries working and turning the television on. “Who wants to watch a documentary about locusts?”

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sulk for about twenty-five minutes and then get bored and spend the rest of Thursday night a) not thinking about Nick and b) getting ready to woo Nat into Best Friendship again. Flowers, cards, poetry: I even bake special, personalised, sugar-free muffins with photos of me and her on top (not edible photos – I didn’t have time – real photos). And then I put them all in my satchel and prepare to take them to school, where I will ambush Nat and convince her of my guilt and/or innocence.
Whatever it takes to make her anger with me disappear.
It’s all a total waste of time and effort and flour. Apparently I don’t need to woo Nat at all. On Friday morning, at precisely 8am, the doorbell rings.
“Nat! You’re here!” I gurgle in surprise, halfway through a jam sandwich. It comes out a sticky, strawberry-flavoured, “Nnnnnaaatcchh uuuhhh hhiiii!”
“For breakfast?” she says, looking pointedly at the other half, which is perched in my left hand.
I stick my nose in the air in my most dignified way. “Jam sandwiches have all the necessary nutrients needed to survive. Sugar, vitamins, carbohydrates. I could live entirely on jam sandwiches and lead a totally normal life.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Nat says, pulling me out of the door. It’s lucky I already have my shoes on or I’d be walking to school in my socks. “You’d be The Girl Who Only Eats Strawberry Jam Sandwiches and that’s not normal.” She looks at me and then coughs. “Can I have the other half, though? I’m totally starving.”
I give her the other half in surprise and then look at her while she eats it. Firstly, Nat never eats food with high sugar content. Ever. Not since that fateful disco, eight years ago. And secondly, is this it then? The big dramatic scene I’ve been dreading all night? I made muffins without sugar especially and now nobody is going to eat them.
“Nat,” I start and at exactly the same moment she says “Harriet?” and then she clears her throat.
“I’m sorry. For getting mad at you and stomping off.”
“Oh.” I blink in shock. “That’s OK. I’m sorry too. For… getting spotted and stuff.”
“The lying was the main problem, Harriet.” Nat twists her mouth up in an awkward half-smile and licks her fingers. “Can we just forget about yesterday?”
“Of course we can,” I beam at her.
A huge wave of relief washes over me: it’s all OK. I was being neurotic and oversensitive as normal.
And then – just like waves – the relief abruptly disappears. Nat clears her throat and I look at her again, but a little more carefully this time. Suddenly I can see what I didn’t notice before: that her neck is tense and her shoulders are all bunched up. Her collarbones have gone red and splotchy. The rims of her eyes are pink. She keeps biting her bottom lip.
“Cool,” Nat says after an infinitely long pause, and then an anxious flush climbs up her cheeks and sits there, staring at me. “So…”And she clears her throat. “Did they…”She swallows. “You know… ring you?” She clears her throat for the third time. “Infinity? Did they ring you?”
She hasn’t forgotten about yesterday at all. Not even a little bit.
“No.” I didn’t give them my number, I add in my head, but somehow I’m not sure saying that out loud is going to help.
“Oh.” Nat’s cheeks get darker. “That’s a shame. I’m sorry. So let’s just put it behind us, right?”
I frown. I thought we’d already done that. “OK.”
“And pretend it never happened,” Nat adds in a tense voice.
“…OK.”
Every time she tells us to put it behind us, it’s becoming more and more clear that Nat hasn’t done that.
“We’ll just carry on as normal,” Nat adds.
“…OK.”
Then there’s a long silence and it’s not comfortable. In ten years, it might be the first uncomfortable silence there has ever been between us. Apart from the time she peed herself on the ballet-room floor and it hit my foot. That was a little bit awkward too.
“Anyway,” Nat says after a couple of minutes, as she pats her hair and straightens her coat and pulls up her school tights with one hand. “So, Harriet.” She looks at the bite of sandwich left in her hand. “Where’s the protein in this thing, huh? I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’ve done your research properly.”
Finally, the topic has moved back to territory I can handle.
“I have done my research properly!” I shout back, pretending to be totally outraged. “The protein’s in the…” What can I say to move the conversation as far from modelling as it is possible to move it? “Chicken,” I finish and then grin at her. “There’s chicken in it too. Did I forget to mention that? Strawberry and high-protein chicken sandwiches. Mmmm. My favourite.”
“Strawberry and chicken?” Nat laughs and my shoulders relax a little bit.
“You can totally live on strawberry and chicken sandwiches,” I clarify, trying not to meet her eyes. Is there any way we can just avoid the subject of yesterday until it goes away completely? Is that how Best Friendship works? Maybe. Maybe not.
But we both spend the rest of the journey to school trying to find out.

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he really great thing about Toby Pilgrim is that you can always rely on him to treat a delicate situation with sensitivity and consideration.
“Woooooaaah,” he says as Nat and I walk into the classroom. We’ve got to school in one piece – just. I’ve talked about the Greek origin of the delphinium flower (delphis, because it looks like a dolphin), just how many wives Henry VIII actually had (between two and four, depending on whether you’re Catholic or not) and the fact that the Egyptian pyramids were originally shiny and white with crystals on the top. Nat has stared into the distance, nodded and grown progressively quieter, stiffer and pinker around the collarbone.
But the important thing is we’ve managed to avoid talking about modelling or dream stealing or the bone-crushing disappointment of thwarted lifelong ambitions. Or the fact that there’s palpable tension between us.
Anyway. “Wooooooaaaah,” says Toby. “Look at the palpable tension between you! It’s like the Cold War, circa 1962. Harriet, I think you’re probably America. You’re sort of trying to make lots of noise in the hope it goes away. Nat, you’re more like Russia. All kind of cold and frosty and covered in snow.” Then he pauses. “Not literally covered in snow,” he clarifies. “Although it’s terribly wintry today, isn’t it? Do you like my new gloves?”
And then he holds out a pair of black knitted gloves with a cotton-white skeleton hand attached to the back. There’s an embarrassed silence while Nat and I put a lot of energy into getting our books out of our bags. All our morning’s hard work has just been totally undone.
Thank you, Toby.
“You know,” Toby continues obliviously, turning his gloves over and over with an affectionate expression, “I had to sew these bones on myself. I was inspired by an old Halloween costume, but it just wasn’t warm enough for December.” He holds a glove up to my face. “Plus, I thought it would be an excellent way of developing my medical knowledge.”
I can now see that on quite a few of the 27 white bones in the hand he’s written in grey pen the Latin name for them: carpals, metacarpals, proximal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, distal phalanges.
“Very nice, Toby,” I say in a distracted voice because Nat’s already getting out of her seat.
“I’ve just got to go hand in my biology homework,” she says in an awkward voice. “See you at breaktime, OK?”
For the record, Nat and I don’t have any lessons together. Despite trying very hard to get put in the same sets last year (Nat studied more and I did my best to answer things wrong), I’m still in the top sets and Nat is in set two or three for everything.
“OK,” I say. She’s still not really looking at me. “Meet you in the school canteen?”
“Sure,” she says, and then she flicks me a smile and shoots out of the classroom faster than I’ve ever seen Nat shoot out of anything.

The rest of the day can be summarised thus:


By the time the final class comes around and she tells me she’s going to be kept behind after school as well, I’m fairly convinced that Nat is specifically getting detentions just to avoid me. I’m torn between being devastated and simultaneously impressed by her extremely cunning strategic bad behaviour.
Toby has been making the most of Nat’s absence to follow me around like a small kitten follows a ball of wool; he even pats me now and then to check that I’m still there.
“Harriet,” he whispers during sixth period English literature. “Isn’t it lovely to spend so much time together?”
I make a noncommittal grunt and doodle another eye on my textbook.
“I really feel that I know you better now,” Toby continues enthusiastically. “For instance, I know that at ten o’clock exactly you tend to go straight to the toilet, and when you come back out, your hair is much neater so I can only assume that you redo your ponytail in front of the bathroom mirror.”
I continue doodling.
“And,” he whispers in excitement, “at five past twelve you go back to the bathroom and when you come out at twelve fifteen, your eyes are sort of pink and gummy around the edges. Which I can only conclude means that you go in there to cry in private.”
I glare at him. “I don’t do that every lunchtime, Toby.”
“No?” He gets out a little notepad and opens it to a page that appears to have a list on it. He draws a line through the corresponding entry.
I can sense that I’m about to lose my temper. I’ve hurt Nat, it’s been a rubbish day and I suspect that Toby is about to bear the brunt of it.
“And,” he continues, “at approximately three pm you go to the bathroom again, but this time you’re in there for the entire break so I believe you might be avoiding me. Either that or you’re… you know. Engaged in intricate bowel activities.”
I can feel my cheeks suddenly flame. He was right the first time, but I’m not happy with that second insinuation. I don’t like talking about bowel activities, regardless of intricacy.
“Could you just leave me alone perhaps?” I whisper and I can feel my voice getting louder with every word. “I mean, is there any chance that you could – I don’t know – find someone else to stalk?”
Toby looks astonished. “Who?” he says, looking around. “There’s nobody else worth stalking, Harriet. You’re the only one.”
I grit my teeth. “Then don’t stalk anyone.” My voice is getting more abrasive. “How about you just don’t stalk anyone, Toby? Otherwise known as LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE.”
And then there’s a silence. Toby looks at me in astonishment. A low snigger ripples round the classroom.
When I look up, Mr Bott has paused writing on the board and is staring at me with an expression that a geek like me doesn’t see very often. One of anger, frustration and a fervent desire to punish.

It looks like I might be seeing Nat after school today after all.

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look at Mr Bott with round eyes.
“Miss Manners,” he says icily from the front of the classroom, and I suddenly remember that we’re supposed to be reading act four, scene five of Hamlet. “Do you have a thought you would like to share with us?”
“No,” I say immediately and stare at my desk.
“I find that very hard to believe,” Mr Bott says in an even sharper voice. “You always have a thought to share with us. In fact, it’s usually difficult to stop you from sharing it with us.”
“I’ve no thoughts,” I tell him in a meek voice.
“Good to know. That’s what I like to see: a student approaching her exams with nothing at all in her head.”
Alexa looks up from where she’s been texting somebody under the desk and snorts with laughter.
Oh, yes, Alexa’s in the top sets too. Unfortunately, she’s both mean and smart. I have at least another three years left of her to look forward to, and then she’ll probably follow me to university. Although, given the amount of time she spends on her phone in our classes, I can only assume she’s really, really good at last-minute cramming.
“Alexa?” Mr Bott snaps, whipping round to face her. “Is something funny?”
Alexa looks over to me and raises an eyebrow. “No,” she says in a meaningful voice. “Quite the opposite. Mostly sad, I’d say.”
Nice. She’s managed to insult me in front of the teacher and he hasn’t even noticed.
“Well,” Mr Bott says, but he doesn’t look happy either. In fairness, he rarely looks happy. I don’t think he teaches because it fills him with a deep inner light. “How about Little Miss Shouter and Little Miss Giggles both come up to the front here and give us your perspectives on a little question I have.”
Alexa’s face goes suddenly pale, and as we walk to the front, she’s throwing metaphorical daggers in my direction.
“Now,” Mr Bott says, “turn and face the whole class, please.”
My cheeks are getting hotter and hotter. I turn so that my body is in the right direction, but try to focus on the floor.
“So, Alexa Roberts and Harriet Manners.” Mr Bott sits down and gestures gracefully to the board. “As you are both clearly fascinated by this text, would you like to explain the significance of Laertes in Hamlet?” He looks at Alexa. “Please go first, Miss Roberts.”
“Well…” Alexa says hesitantly. “He’s Ophelia’s brother, right?”
“I didn’t ask for his family tree, Alexa. I want to know his literary significance as a fictional character.”
Alexa looks uncomfortable. “Well then, his literary significance is in being Ophelia’s brother, isn’t it? So she has someone to hang out with.”
“How very kind of Shakespeare to give fictional Ophelia a fictional playmate so that she doesn’t get fictionally bored. Your analytical skills astound me, Alexa. Perhaps I should send you to Set Seven with Mrs White and you can spend the rest of the lesson studying Thomas the Tank Engine. I believe he has lots of buddies too.”
Alexa’s face suddenly goes bright red and she looks utterly humiliated. I feel really sorry for her, actually.
Mr Bott then turns to me. “It’s your go, Miss Manners. Anything to add?”
I stare at the floor for a few seconds. Answering interesting intellectual questions correctly in public is possibly my single greatest weakness. Every time I do it, I make myself even less popular. But I can’t help myself.
“Well,” I say slowly, and even though I know I should say in my most stupid voice, No idea, sorry, I say: “Laertes is a literary mirror for Hamlet. The play is ostensibly about Hamlet avenging the murder of his father, but actually, it’s about Hamlet procrastinating instead. Laertes is a sort of alternative universe Hamlet, because when Hamlet murders his father, Laertes takes immediate revenge and pushes the play to its conclusion straight away. So as a literary construct, I think he’s there to show what would have happened if Hamlet had been somebody else instead. It’s sort of Shakespeare’s way of saying that our stories are driven by who we are and what we do, and not by the events that happen to us.”
I take a deep breath. Toby starts clapping, but I shoot a look that stops him.
“Very good, Harriet,” Mr Bott says, nodding. “Excellent in fact. Possibly even a degree-level answer, although a distinctly second-class one.” He looks at Alexa coldly. “Alexa, English literature doesn’t have any right answers. But it has a hell of a lot of wrong ones. And your cracker was one of them.”
“Sir!” Alexa exclaims indignantly. “This isn’t fair! We haven’t got to the end of the play yet! Harriet cheated!”
“It’s not called cheating,” Mr Bott says tiredly, putting his hand over his eyes. “It’s called having a vague interest in the storyline.” Then he puts his fingers briefly on the bridge of his nose and breathes out.
“But—” Alexa says, cheeks even redder.
“I can see my time here is well spent,” Mr Bott interrupts. “And on that encouraging note, I am going to go and collect some more textbooks from the staffroom. At least three members of this class appear to be reading Romeo and Juliet, hoping I won’t notice the difference.” He sweeps a look of total disdain round the classroom. “Entertain yourselves for five minutes. If you can.”
And then he leaves. Like a circus master who has just bashed an angry tiger on the nose and then locked it in a cage with his assistant.
I turn slowly to face Alexa, and somewhere in the distance – outside of the terrified buzzing that has just started in my head – I can hear the sound of thirty fifteen-year-olds sucking in their breath at the same time.
“Well,” Alexa says eventually, turning to look at me, and I swear she sort of growls. “I guess now it’s just you and me, Harriet.”

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ou know in romantic films, there’s always that moment where the love interest just can’t hold back how they feel any more and has a sudden need to declare themselves in public?
It’s always totally predictable, and always totally expected, yet the heroine is always shocked and surprised, as if it’s out of the blue. I’ve never understood that. I mean, how dense is she? Couldn’t she see it coming a mile off? Couldn’t she feel the gradual build-up of tension, like everyone else?
Now it all makes a little bit more sense. You don’t see things happening to you. Only when they’re happening to somebody else. Alexa’s passionate, inexplicable hatred for me has nowhere else to go. It has come to a big pulsing head and now it’s going to come bursting out.
I look at the door desperately. Should I try to escape? Or keep my head down and try to get through it? We’re at school. Just how bad could it be? And you know the scary bit? There’s still a part of me that’s about to correct her grammar. “You and I,” I’m tempted to reply. “Not you and me. Now it’s just you and I, Alexa.”
“Well,” Alexa says again and I can tell the whole class is still holding its breath. “Harriet Manners.”
I swallow and take one step towards my seat.
“Oh, no. No, no. You’re not going anywhere.” She grabs the back of my school jumper and pulls me to the front of the class. It’s not a violent tug; it’s gentle, almost like a mother trying to stop her child from walking across the road when a car is coming. I stop and stare at the floor, making myself as small as possible.
“Could you have made me look any more stupid?” Alexa asks, almost conversationally. “I mean, ostensibly? Did you actually use the word ostensibly?”
“It means ‘apparently’,” I explain in a whisper. “Or ‘supposedly’.”
Why didn’t I use ‘supposedly’?
This seems to make her even angrier. “I know what it means!” she shouts. “God, you really do think I’m thick, don’t you!”
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes, you do. You and your smart little comments and your crap little facts and your geeky little face.” She pulls that expression again: the one with the crossed eyes and protruding teeth. Which is really unfair: she knows I had my braces taken off years ago, and my left eye is only lazy when I’m tired. “You really think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I mumble again. The humiliated burn has spread to my neck and my ears and is creeping up my scalp. I can feel the entire class staring at me the way they stared at the monkey at the zoo with the red bottom. “I don’t.”
“I can’t hear you,” Alexa says more loudly. She walks closer – way past my personal space boundaries – and for a brief second I think she’s going to slap me. “I’ll rephrase. Do you think you’re better than everyone else, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I say as loudly as I can.
“Yes, you do,” she hisses, getting even closer, and even in my shock I can’t believe the expression on her face: pure, almost shining, hatred. As if it’s burning on the inside of her and lighting her up like one of those little round candles with pictures of penguins on the outside. “You have no idea how much of a loser you really are.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper.
Because I totally do. I know exactly who I am. I’m Harriet Manners: A++ student, collector of semi-precious stones, builder of small and perfectly proportioned train sets, writer of lists, alphabetiser and genre-iser of books, user of made-up nouns, guardian of twenty-three woodlice under the rock at the bottom of her garden.
I’m Harriet Manners:
GEEK.
Alexa ignores me. “So I think it’s time we put it to the test,” she continues and then she looks around the room. I can feel my eyes filling up with water, but I’m totally frozen. Even my tongue feels numb. “Who in this room,” Alexa says slowly and loudly, “hates Harriet Manners? Put your hand up.”
I can’t really see anything because the whole room is wobbling.
“Toby,” Alexa adds. “Put your hand up or you’re going down the toilet every lunchtime for the next week.”
I close my eyes and two tears roll down my face. I think it’s really important that I don’t see this.
“Now open your eyes, geek,” Alexa says.
“No,” I say as firmly as I can.
“Open your eyes, geek.”
“No.”
“Open your eyes, geek. Or I will make this worse for you today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. And I will keep making it worse for you until you realise what you are and what you are not.”
So even though I know precisely what I am – and even though I’m not sure it’s even possible to make it worse – I open my eyes.
Every single hand in the classroom is up.
I wish she had just punched me.
And, with that final thought, I burst into tears, grab my satchel with GEEK written all over it and run out of the classroom.

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y the time I get home, I’m crying so hard it sounds like somebody sawing wood.
I’m not really a crier, though, and there’s a good chance my parents won’t understand what I’m doing, so I scoot into the bush outside my house until I can be absolutely certain – without a shadow of a doubt – that I can breathe without either hiccuping or a bubble of snot coming out of my nose. Then I sit in the bush in the hole that Toby’s made for himself in four years of stalking and sob quietly into the sleeve of my school jumper.
I’m not sure how long I cry for: it’s like a never-ending circle of tears because every time I calm down and look up, I catch sight of the red letters on my satchel and it sets me off again. It even feels like they’re getting bigger and bigger, although rationally I know they must be staying the same size.
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
And I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter any more because it does. Because they just won’t leave me alone.
I’m so tired of it all. I’m tired of not fitting in; of being left out; of being hated. I’m tired of having everything I am ripped up and strewn around the room the way a puppy wrecks an abandoned toilet roll. I’m tired of never doing anything right; of constantly being humiliated; of feeling like I’m just not good enough, no matter what I do.
I’m tired of feeling like this. And most of all, I’m tired of being a polar bear, wandering around the rainforest on my own.
When the letters are two metres high and flashing, I finally lose it completely. I give a little scream of frustration and attack the word with my belt buckle until the material’s so ripped you can’t read anything. And then – finally calmer – I curl out of a ball, climb out of the bush, wipe the mud off my uniform and try to pretend that I’m behaving in a totally rational way for 4pm on a Friday afternoon.
I sniff my way to the front door.
“Dad?” I say quietly as I open it, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “Annabel?” Then I stop, startled. Because Annabel, Dad and Hugo are all standing in the hallway.
And they all appear to be waiting for me.

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K, are you kidding me?
Now that I just want to go straight to bed without being hassled my parents have finally started working on the house’s welcoming atmosphere?
“What’s going on?” I ask, embarrassed and quickly rubbing my eyes with my hand. Hugo jumps up at my trousers and starts experimentally licking at the mud. “Is everything all right? Dad, did you have your meeting?”
Annabel frowns and peers at me. “What’s wrong, Harriet? Have you been…” And then she stops, confused. I can see her searching her mind for a word that matches my face. “Crying?” she finishes uncertainly.
“I have a cold,” I explain firmly, sniffing. “It started this morning.” And then I look at Dad, who has his mouth clamped shut. “Dad? Your important meeting? Did it go OK?”
“Huh?” Dad makes a face. “Yeah, no problem. They said I was a maverick like I predicted they would, but I asked for a pay rise and they said no.” Then he looks at Annabel and bounces up and down on his toes a couple of times. “Tell her, Annabel.” Dad nudges her with his elbow. “Tell her.”
“Tell me what?” I look at Annabel and she stares back in silence. “What?”
Annabel sighs. “They rang, Harriet,” she finally says in a reluctant voice. “The modelling agency. They rang. While you were at school.”
My mouth opens slightly in shock. “They rang? But…” I stop for a few seconds in total confusion. “I didn’t give them my number. How could they ring?”
“Well, they found it anyway and they rang!” Dad shouts, exploding and punching the air. Hugo responds by taking a few steps backwards and barking. “Infinity Models, Harriet! This is massive! This is more massive than massive! This is massiver! They rang and they said they love the photos and they want to see us all! Tomorrow, first thing! In the agency! With them! And us! And them again!”
“Massiver is not a word, Richard,” Annabel sighs. “Anyway, what they want is irrelevant. As we discussed, Harriet’s not doing it. She doesn’t even want to do it.” Then she looks at me. “Right?”
There’s a long silence.
“Right?” Annabel repeats in confusion.
I look at my parents – Annabel with her hands on her hips and Dad bobbing around like a happy little duck – and suddenly I can’t really see them. I can’t really see anything at all. It’s as if the whole world has just gone strangely dark and quiet and I’m standing in the middle, waiting for everything to start making light and noise again.
And then it hits me, like a metaphorical train or a hammer or a fist or something fast and heavy and absolutely inescapable. And it’s so clear I don’t know how I didn’t see it before, except that maybe I couldn’t because I didn’t need it like I need it now, at this exact moment.
This is it.
This is what I can do to change things.
This could be my metamorphosis story, like Ovid’s or Kafka’s, or Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling or even Cinderella (originally called Rhodopis and written in Greece in 1BC). I could go from proverbial caterpillar to butterfly; from tadpole to frog. From larva to dragonfly (which is actually only a half metamorphosis, but still – I think – worth mentioning).
MODELLING COULD TRANSFORM ME. And I’d no longer be Harriet Manners – hated, ignored, humiliated. I’d be… someone else. Someone different. Someone cool. Because if I don’t do something now, I’m going to be me forever. I’m going to be a geek forever. And people are just going to keep hating me and laughing at me and putting their hands up. Forever. And things will never, ever change.
Unless I do.

“I…I…” I start stammering, and then I stop and swallow because I can hardly believe what I’m about to say.
“Well?” Annabel and Dad say, except with totally different tones.
“I… think maybe I want to see them.”
There’s a stunned pause. “What?” Annabel finally gasps. “You want to what?”
“I want to see them,” I repeat, but this time my voice is clearer. For a few seconds, Nat’s face flicks into the back of my mind. My Best Friend’s tense, flushed, miserable, heartbroken face. And then Alexa’s flicks up next to it like a double slide show and I switch them both off. “I want to go and see the modelling agency,” I confirm.
Dad jumps up in the air. “You said, Annabel!” he crows. “Do you remember? We fought and I won and you said if she wanted to do it, we’d go and see them!”
“I didn’t think she’d actually want to,” Annabel huffs. “You tricked me, Richard. I can’t believe you tricked me.”
“Please?” I say, looking at her with my widest eyes. When I look to the side, Dad’s doing the same thing. “Just to see? Please, Annabel?”
Annabel opens her mouth and then shuts it again. She’s looking at my face as if it’s a maths sum and the answer is harder than she was expecting it to be. “You actually want this?” she asks in a totally shocked and slightly disgusted voice, as if I’ve just said I’d like to pick fleas from stray cats for the rest of my life, and possibly eat them. “Clothes, Harriet? Photographs? Fashion? Modelling?”
“Yes,” I say and I look her straight in the eye. “Maybe,” I clarify.
Annabel looks straight back for a few seconds and then sighs and puts her head in her hands. “Has the world gone topsy-turvy?”
“Definitely,” I confirm.
“Then…”And Annabel breathes out crossly. “Well, I’m sort of trapped by my own integrity, aren’t I?”
“Yesssss,” Dad shouts as if he’s just scored a goal, and – when Annabel gives him a short, sharp look – he clears his throat. “I meant, good decision, darling. Excellent. Very sensible.”
“Don’t get carried away, Richard,” Annabel snaps. “I said we’d see them. That is all. I’ve made no other promises. I’m not agreeing to anything right now.”
“But of course,” Dad says in an apparently insulted voice. “That’s also very sensible, darling.”
But as Dad winks at me and runs off into the kitchen to do a celebration dance, I realise I’m not really listening. Because all I know is – after ten years – I’m finally doing something to make things better.
And – frankly – it’s about time.

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he first thing any good metamorphosis needs is a plan. A nice, well thought out, structured, considered and firm plan.
And if that plan happens to be in a bullet-pointed list, typed out and then printed from the computer in Dad’s ‘office’ (the spare room) then so much the better.
It goes like this:

Plan for Today

Wake up at 7am, and press the snooze button precisely three times.
Don’t think about Nat.
Find an outfit from my wardrobe suitable for a visit to a modelling agency.
Go downstairs wearing said outfit. My calm and supportive parents say things like ooh and aah and tell me they didn’t realise I had so much inherent style.
Blush prettily and agree because I probably do have inherent style.
Don’t think about Nat.
Leave the house at 8.34am on the dot, to catch the 9.02am train to London.
Arrive just in time to eat a pain au chocolat and drink a cappuccino in the local café because this is what models do every morning.
Get transformed into something amazing.
Admittedly, the last point on the list is a bit vague – because I’m not quite sure what they’re going to do, or how they’re going to do it – but it’s fine. As long as I have control over the rest of my plan, everything should go exactly as it’s supposed to.
Unfortunately, nobody else appears to have read it.
“Richard Manners,” Annabel is shouting as I come down the stairs. It’s already not going well: I pressed snooze fifteen times, and finally got out of bed to the calming, dulcet sounds of my parents trying to scratch each other’s eyes out. “I cannot believe you ate the last of the strawberry jam!”
“I didn’t!” Dad is shouting back. “Look! There’s some here!”
“What use is that much strawberry jam to anyone? Do I look like a fairy to you? With little tiny fairy pieces of toast? I’m five foot ten!”
“How do I answer that without accidentally calling you fat?”
“Be very careful what you say next, Richard Manners. Your life depends on the next sentence.”
“Well… I… Harriet?” and Dad turns to me. I’m not sure how the argument’s turned to me when I’m barely in the room, but apparently it has. “What the hell are you wearing?”
I look down indignantly. “It’s a black all-in-one,” I say with my nose as high as I can get it. “I don’t expect you to understand because you’re old. It’s called fashion. Fash-ion.”
Now it’s Annabel’s turn to look confused. “Is that last year’s Halloween outfit, Harriet?” she says, scraping some of the jam off Dad’s toast and putting it on her own. “Are you dressed as a spider?”
I cough. “No.”
“Then why do you have a leg hanging off your shoulder?”
“It’s a special kind of bow.”
“And why are there seven remaining circles of Velcro down your back?”
“Style statement.”
“And the cobweb stuck to your bottom?”
Oh, for God’s sake.
“Fine,” I snap. It’s not that I’m unnecessarily emotional or worked up, but why won’t anyone just stick to the plan? “It’s my Halloween Spider outfit, OK? Happy now?”
“I’m not sure that’s the best choice for today,” Dad says dubiously as he starts stealing his jam back, and I can tell he’s trying not to laugh. “I mean, there are other trendier insects. Bees, I hear, are very big this season.”
“Well, tough,” I bark again. “Because it’s all I have, OK?”
“What about a wasp?” Dad offers, voice breaking.
“Everything else I own has a cartoon on the front.”
“Or a grasshopper?” Annabel suggests, winking at Dad. “I like grasshoppers.”
At which point I lose it completely. They’re not being calm or supportive at all. “Why are you such terrible parents?” I yell.
“I don’t know,” Dad yells back. “Why are you such a naughty little spider?” And then Annabel bursts out laughing.
“Aaaargh!” I scream in frustration. “I hate you I hate you I hate youihateyouihateyouihateyou.”
Then I run out of the room with as much dignity as I can muster.
Which – as my spare leg gets caught in the door frame until Annabel unhooks me in peals of laughter – isn’t much.

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y door doesn’t slam nearly as loudly as it used to. I think my parents must have sanded it down. Which is very underhanded of them, and also suppresses my legal freedom to express myself creatively. I shut it three times to make up for it.
Once I’m lying flat on my bed, though, I start to feel ever so slightly ashamed of myself. The thing is I broke the plans myself before I’d even got down the stairs. I’ve been thinking about Nat all morning. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, and that’s what I was doing for fifteen snoozes. Picturing Nat’s face when I tell her where I’ve been today. Imagining Nat’s expression when she realises I’ve stolen her dream, for all the wrong reasons. Not because I love fashion, but because it’s my short cut out of this.
And I can’t get it out of my head.
So, yes, I’m pretty irritated with my parents for going on about insects, and I’m also a bit frustrated that the inherent style I was hoping I might have is either not there or is so inherent that it’s never going to come out. Like the last bit of toothpaste.
But mostly I’m just angry at myself.
“Harriet?” Annabel says as I’m huffing and puffing and helping myself to one of the chocolate bars I keep stashed in my bedside table. “Can I come in?”
She never normally asks, so this must mean she’s feeling quite sheepish.
“Whatever,” I say in a sulky voice.
“Now you know ‘whatever’ isn’t a grammatically correct response to the question, Harriet.” Annabel puts her head round the door. “Try again.”
“If you must,” I correct.
“Thank you. I will.” Annabel comes into the room and sits down on the bed next to me. Her arms are full of plastic bags and despite myself I’m curious. Annabel likes shopping about as much as I do. “Sorry we wound you up,” she says, brushing a strand of hair out of my eyes. “We didn’t realise you’d be so nervous about today.”
I make a noise that is intentionally ambiguous.
“Is something wrong?” she sighs. “You’re all over the place at the moment. You’re normally so sensible.”
Maybe that’s the problem. “I’m fine.”
“And there’s nothing you want to talk about?”
For a few seconds all I can see in my head are thirty hands in the air. “…No.”
“Then…” and Annabel clears her throat, “I’ve bought you a present. I thought it might cheer you up.”
I look at Annabel in surprise. She rarely buys me presents, and when she does, they absolutely never cheer me up.
Annabel unfolds a large bag and hands it to me. “Actually, I bought this for you a while ago. I was waiting for the right moment and I think this might be it. You can wear it today.” And she unzips the bag.
I stare at the contents in shock. It’s a jacket. It’s grey and it’s tailored. It has a matching white shirt and a pencil skirt. It has very faint white pinstripe running through the material and a crease down each of the arms. It is, without any question of a doubt, a suit. Annabel’s gone and bought me a mini lawyer’s outfit. She wants me to turn up looking exactly like her, but twenty years younger.
“I guess you’re an adult now,” she says in a strange voice. “And this is what adults wear. What do you think?”
I think the modelling agency are going to assume we’re trying to sue them.
But as I open my mouth to tell Annabel I’d rather go as a spider with all eight legs attached, I look at her face. It’s so bright, and so eager, and so happy – this is so clearly some kind of Coming of Age moment for her – I can’t do it.
“I love it,” I say, crossing my fingers behind my back.
“You do? And you’ll wear it today?”
I swallow hard. I don’t know much about fashion, but I didn’t see many fifteen-year-olds last week in pinstripe suits.
“Yes,” I manage as enthusiastically as I can.
“Excellent,” Annabel beams at me, shoving some more bags in my direction. “Because I bought you a Filofax and briefcase to match.”

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he entire plan was a total waste of time. And Dad’s paper and printer ink.
By the time I’m dressed up like some kind of legal assistant and my parents have stopped fighting about Dad’s T-shirt (“It hasn’t even been washed, Richard,”; “I won’t bow down to the rules of fashion, Annabel,”; “But you’ll bow down to the rules of basic hygiene, right?”), we’ve missed our train and we’ve also missed the train after that.
When we eventually get to London, there isn’t time for a pain au chocolat or a cappuccino, and apparently, even if there was, I wouldn’t be allowed to have one.
“You’re not having coffee, Harriet,” Annabel says as I start whining outside the window.
“But Annabel…”
“No. You are fifteen and permanently anxious enough as it is.”
To make matters worse, when we finally locate the right street in Kensington, we can’t find the building: mainly because we’re not looking for a blob of cement tucked behind a local supermarket.
“It doesn’t look very…” Dad says doubtfully as we stand and stare at it suspiciously.
“I know,” Annabel agrees. “Do you think it’s…”
“No, it’s not dodgy. I saw it in the Guardian.”
“Maybe it’s nicer on the inside?” Annabel suggests.
“Ironic, for a modelling agency,” Dad says, then they both laugh and Annabel leans over and gives Dad a kiss, which means they’ve forgiven each other. Honestly, they’re like a pair of married goldfish: squabbling and then forgetting about it three minutes later.
“Well,” Annabel says slowly and she squeezes Dad’s hand a few times when she thinks I won’t notice. She takes a deep breath and looks at me. “I guess this is it then. Are you ready, Harriet?”
“Are you kidding me?” Dad says, ruffling my hair. “Fame, fortune, glory? She’s a Manners: she was born ready.” And – before I can even respond to such a shockingly incorrect statement – he adds, “Last one in is a total loser,” and runs to the door, dragging Annabel behind him.
Leaving me – shaking like the proverbial leaf in a very enthusiastic proverbial breeze – to sit down on the kerb, put my head between my knees and have a very non-proverbial panic attack.

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fter a few minutes of heavy breathing, I’m still not particularly calm.
This might surprise you, but here’s a fact: people who plan things thoroughly aren’t particularly connected with reality. It seems like they are, but they’re not: they’re focusing on making things bite-size, instead of having to look at the whole picture. It’s procrastination in its purest form because it convinces everyone – including the person who’s doing it – that they are very sensible and in touch with reality when they’re not. They’re obsessed with cutting it up into little pieces so they can pretend that it’s not there at all.
The way that Nat nibbles at a burger so that she can pretend she’s not eating it, when actually she’s eating just as much of it as I would.
Despite my rigorous planning, I can’t break this down into any smaller pieces. Walking into a modelling agency and asking strangers to tell me objectively whether I’m pretty or not is one big scary mouthful, and the truth is I’m terrified.
So, just as I think things can’t get any worse, I abruptly start hyperventilating.

Hyperventilation is defined as a breathing state faster than five to eight litres a minute, and the best thing you can do when you’re hyperventilating is find a paper bag and breathe into it. This is because the accumulation of carbon dioxide from your exhaled breath will calm your heart rate down, and your breathing will therefore slow.
I haven’t got a paper bag, so I try a crisp packet, but the salt and vinegar smell makes me feel sick. I think about trying the plastic bag that came with the crisp packet, but realise that if I inhale too hard, I’m going to end up dragging it into my windpipe, and that would cause problems even for people who weren’t struggling to breathe in the first place.So, as a last resort, I close my eyes, cup my hands together and puff in and out of them instead.
I’ve been puffing into my hands for about thirty-five seconds when I hear a human kind of noise next to me.
“Go away,” I say weakly, continuing to blow in and out as hard as I can. I’m not interested in what Dad thinks. He plays games of Snap with himself when he’s stressed.
“This isn’t Singapore, you know,” a voice says. “You can’t just fling yourself around on the pavement. You’ll get chewing gum all over your suit.”
I abruptly stop puffing, but I keep my eyes closed because now I’m too embarrassed to open them again. My suit is grey and the pavement is also grey; perhaps if I stay very still and very quiet, I’ll disappear into the background and the owner of the voice will stop being able to see me.
It doesn’t work.
“So, Table Girl,” the voice continues, and for the second time today somebody I’m talking to is trying not to laugh. “What are you doing this time?”
It can’t be.
But it is.
I open one eye and peek through my fingers, and there – sitting on the kerb next to me – is Lion Boy.

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f all the people in the whole world I didn’t want to see me crouched on the floor in a pinstripe suit, hyperventilating into my hands, this one is at the top of the list.
Him and whoever hands out the Nobel Prizes. Just – you know. In case.
“Umm,” I say into my palms, thinking as quickly as I can. Hyperventilating doesn’t sound very good, so I finish with: “Sniffing my hands.”
Which, in hindsight, sounds even worse. “Not because I have smelly hands,” I add urgently. “Because I don’t.”
I take a quick peek through my fingers again and see that Lion Boy is lazily flexing his feet up and down and staring at the sky. Somehow – and I don’t know how he has done this – he has managed to get even better looking than he was on Thursday.
“And how are they?”
“A bit salty,” I answer honestly. Then I nervously blurt out: “Do you want to smell them?”
I trawl through fifteen years of knowledge, passions and experience and the best I can come up with is: Do you want to smell my hands?
“I’m trying to cut back,” he says, lifting an eyebrow. “But thanks anyway.”
“You’re welcome,” I reply automatically and then there’s a short silence while I wonder if – in an alternative universe somewhere – another Harriet Manners is having a conversation with a ridiculously handsome boy called Nick without making herself sound like a total idiot.
“So,” Nick says eventually. “Are you ready to go upstairs yet? Because your parents are waiting in reception, and judging by the look on your mum’s face five minutes ago, everybody up there may already be dead.”
Oh, sugar cookies. I knew Annabel was going to start channelling Tomb Raider: she’s been in a scratchy mood all morning. “How do you know they’re my parents?” I ask coolly, hoping to pretend that I’ve never seen them before in my life.
“Your mum is wearing exactly the same thing as you, for starters. And you have the same hair colour as your dad.”
“Oh.”
“And they keep saying, ‘Where the hell is Harriet?’ and looking out of the window.”
“Oh,” I say and then I stop talking. My hands are shaking and I’m not sure I can handle any more shades of embarrassment. I’m already purple as it is. “You know,” I say, after giving it a little thought, “I think I might just stay here.”
“Hyperventilating on the kerb?”
I look up and see that Nick is grinning at me. “Yes,” I tell him curtly. He has no business laughing at breathing problems. They can be very dangerous. “I am going to stay here and I am going to hyperventilate on the kerb for the rest of the day,” I confirm. “I’ve made an executive decision and that is how I shall entertain myself until nightfall.”
Nick laughs again, even though I’m being totally serious. “Don’t be daft, Harriet Manners.” He stands up and a little flicker of electricity shoots through my stomach because I’ve just realised he has remembered my name. “And don’t be nervous either. Modelling’s not scary. It can actually be sort of fun sometimes. As long as you don’t take it personally.”
“Mmm,” I say because frankly I take everything personally. And then I watch as he starts wandering lazily back towards the building. Everything Nick does is slow, as if he lives in a little private bubble that’s half the speed of everything around it. It’s mesmerising. Even if it does make me feel like everything I do and say is too fast and frantic and sort of unravelling like the cotton on my grandma’s sewing machine.
“And you want the really good news about modelling?” Nick says, abruptly turning round.
I glare at him suspiciously and try and ignore the flip-flop feeling as my stomach turns over and starts gasping for air, like a stranded fish. “What?”
“It’s an industry full of tables to hide under. If you decide you don’t like it, you can literally take your pick.”
Then Nick laughs again and disappears through the agency doors.

Forty-eight hours ago, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me was having my hand accidentally touched by the least spotty boy in the local bookshop, and that was just because he was handing me a book. Now I’m expected to get off the pavement and follow the best-looking boy I have ever seen into an internationally famous modelling agency as if it’s the most natural, normal thing in the world.
So let me clarify something, in case you don’t know me well enough by now.
It’s not.

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wait as long as I can because it’s important to maintain a high level of personal dignity at all times and also to show that you’re not madly in love with someone by chasing them up the stairs. And then I get off the kerb and walk as fast as I can.
It’s no use: Nick stays just ahead of me, as if he’s the carrot and I’m the eternally optimistic donkey. By the time I reach the reception of Infinity Models (three floors up) he has disappeared completely, and all that’s left is a slightly swinging door to convince me I didn’t just invent him in the first place.
One quick glance, however, shows me that he was right and Annabel is totally fuming. While Dad bounds around the room, annoying the hell out of the receptionist, Annabel is sitting in total silence, bolt upright, with her back nowhere near the chair. The tendons in her neck are standing out like the bubbles in our living-room wallpaper.
Then I realise why. Somewhere in the direction Annabel keeps looking, I can hear the distant sound of a girl crying.
“Where have you been?” she demands as soon as I walk in, but I’m saved by Wilbur, who bursts through the reception door in an explosion of orange silk trousers and a shirt with paint splashes all over it, except they’re clearly not a result of anyone painting.
“Gooooood mooooorrrnniiiinnng,” he squeals, clasping his hands together. “And if it isn’t Mr and Mrs Baby-baby Panda! Just right there in front of me, like two little matching pots of strawberry fromage frais! Ooh, I could just eat you both up. But I won’t because that would be terribly antisocial.”
Annabel’s eyes have gone very round and her mouth has dropped open. Even Dad has stopped bounding and he takes a slightly frightened seat next to her.
“What?” she whispers to him. “What did that man just call us?”
“This is fashion,” Dad murmurs reassuringly, taking her hand gently as if she’s Dorothy and he’s the White Witch. “This is how they speak here.”
“And it’s Mini-panda herself!” Wilbur continues obliviously, waving at me. “In a suit this time, no less! What’s the inspiration this time, Monkey-chunk?”
I glance quickly at Annabel and see that she’s mouthing Monkey-chunk? at Dad, who shrugs and mouths Mr Baby-baby Panda? back. “My stepmother’s a lawyer,” I explain.
“My Stepmother’s a Lawyer,” Wilbur repeats slowly, a look of growing amazement on his face. “Genius! I’m Wilbur, that’s with a bur and not an iam,” he continues happily, semi-skipping over and grabbing Annabel and Dad’s hands, “and I am so thoroughly, thoroughly giddy to meet you both.”
“It’s an – erm,” Annabel manages, and Wilbur holds his fingers up to her mouth to stop her speaking.
“Ssssshhh. I know it is, my little Pumpkin-trophy. And I have to tell you I’m totally incandescent right now about your beautiful daughter’s visage. It’s special. New. Interesting. And we don’t get much of that round here. It’s all legs up to here,” (he points to his neck) “and eyelashes out here,” (he moves his hand a few centimetres in front of his face) “and lips out here,” (he keeps his hand in the same place).“Dull, dull, dull.” He turns to me, beaming. “You don’t have any of those things, do you, my little Box of Peaches?”
I open my mouth to answer, and then realise he’s telling me I don’t have any of those things. Otherwise known as beauty. Fantastic.
In the meantime, Dad is still staring at the hand Wilbur is holding. “Um,” he says, trying to tug it away as politely as he can.
“I know,” Wilbur agrees, holding on tighter. “Doesn’t it feel like a whirlwind of adventure?”
And before either of them can say anything else he pulls both Annabel and Dad to their feet and starts dragging them across the reception floor.

(#ulink_0b021ead-c027-5831-86f7-dd497fac176a)

ow I’d love to stand on ceremony,” Wilbur says as he physically pushes my parents into a little office at the back of the room. “But we don’t have a minute to lose. I have another engagement in six minutes. So let’s get this done speedio and make the magic happen, right?” He holds his hand up to Dad.
“Right!” Dad says and high-fives him.
“For crying out loud,” Annabel sighs as Wilbur shows us to little plastic seats. “Will somebody other than me please take this seriously? And you should know that I’m making notes,” she adds sternly, getting out her notepad.
“How funalicious!” Wilbur cries. Annabel writes one word down, but I can’t see what it is. “Now,” he continues, “are we definitely set on the name Harriet?”
We all look at him in shock because… well, it’s my name. I’ve been sort of set on it for the last fifteen years.
“My name,” I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, “was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died.”
There’s a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, “Who told you that?”
“Annabel did.”
“Well, it’s not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world.”
There’s a silence while I stare at Dad, and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. “Richard,” she moans quietly.
“A tortoise?” I repeat in dismay. “I’m named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?”
“Longevity?”
I stare at Dad with my mouth open. I don’t believe this. Fifteen years of the worst name ever and I can’t even blame my dead mother for it?
“We could try Frankie?” Wilbur suggests helpfully. “I don’t believe there were any famous reptiles, but I’m sure there must have been a cat or two.”
“She stays Harriet,” Annabel says in a strained voice.
“You have to admit it was worth a punt,” Wilbur whispers to me, but I’m too busy giving my father the evil eye to say anything back.
“Now,” Annabel continues. I can see that she has a list in front of her. “Wilbur. You’re aware that Harriet’s still at school?”
“Of course she is, Fluff-pot; the others are decidedly too old.”
Annabel glowers at him. “I see I need to rephrase that. What happens with Harriet’s school work?”
“We work around it. Education is so very important, isn’t it? Especially when you stop being beautiful and perhaps get a little fat.”
Annabel’s eyes narrow a bit more. “How much is this going to cost?”
“Gosh, she’s to the point, isn’t she?” Wilbur says approvingly, winking at Dad. “If it’s a testshot, everyone works for free and it costs nothing. If it’s a job, Harriet gets paid and the agency gets a cut of that. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? I’m not here just for the free dinners.” Wilbur pauses thoughtfully. “I’m a little bit here for the free dinners,” he corrects. “But not entirely.”
“And who looks after her? She’s only fifteen.”
“You do, poppet. Or Panda Senior over there. At fifteen she has to have a chaperone at all times, and I’m going to suggest that it’s one of you two because the total strangers we drag off the streets just don’t seem to care as much.”
I glance quickly at Dad and note that his excitement levels are getting dangerously high. Annabel scowls at him. “And who was that crying earlier?” she hisses. “Why were they crying?”
Wilbur sighs. “We had to turn a girl away, Darling-cherub. If we made everyone who wanted to be a model a model, we’d just be an agency for human beings, wouldn’t we? Fashion’s exclusive, my little Butternut-squash. That means excluding people.”
“That was a child,” Annabel says in an angry voice.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Wilbur shrugs. “It’s hard to tell: sometimes they just don’t eat very much. Confuses the growth hormones, you know? Either way, we sent them packing.” And then he beams at us all. “I won’t be sending you packing, though, because you’re here by special invitation of moi.” And he throws the Polaroids from The Clothes Show on the table. “Your daughter is adorable. I’ve never seen such an alien duck in my entire life.”
“A what?”
“Frankie here looks just like the ginger child of an alien and duck union, and that is so fresh right now.”
“Her name is not Frankie,” Annabel hisses in barely contained frustration. “It’s Harriet.”
“Could you not at least have smiled, Frankie?” Dad sighs as he studies the photos. “Why do you always sulk?” He looks apologetically at Wilbur. “She ruined eighty per cent of our photos when we were in France last summer.”
“Her name is Harriet!” Annabel almost shrieks at Dad.
“Oh, no,” Wilbur says earnestly. “That works for me. People like their high-fashion models to look as deeply unhappy as physically possible. You can’t have beauty and contentment: it would just be unfair.” He looks at the photos again with a satisfied expression. “Harriet looks thoroughly miserable: she’s perfect. Once we’ve straightened out that lazy eye, obviously.”
“What are you talking about?” Annabel shouts and her voice is getting higher with every sentence, as if she’s singing it. “Harriet does not have a lazy eye.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Wilbur says, waving his hands around in an attempt to calm her down. “What’s a more politically acceptable way of putting it? Directionally challenged?”
Annabel looks like she’s about to bite him.
“Are you sure,” I finally manage to interrupt before Annabel rips the entire room to shreds, “that I’m what you’re looking for? That there isn’t some kind of mistake?”
Because with all of the nerves and the tension and the shouting, I haven’t been able to get a word – or a thought – in edgeways, but some of the things I’ve heard have kind of stuck. Words like: ginger, tortoise, alien, duck, lazy and eye. This isn’t quite the magical metamorphosis moment I was looking for. I don’t feel very beautiful at all. In fact, I think I feel worse than I did before I came in here.
“My little Tortoise,” Wilbur says, reaching out to grab my hand as my squinty, directionally challenged, short-lashed alien eyes start welling up. “Cross-eyed or not, there’s no mistake. You’re perfect just the way you are. And it’s not just me that thinks so.”
“No, your daddy does too,” Dad says, leaning over and ruffling my hair in an attempt to make peace with me. I growl and bat his hand away crossly.
Wilbur smiles. “Actually, I’m rather enigmatically referring to an enormously important fashion designer who saw the Polaroids and wants to meet Harriet asap.” He pauses and looks at his watch. “Asap is an abbreviation of as soon as possible,” he adds.
There’s a long silence while Annabel, Dad and I stare at Wilbur with blank expressions. After twenty seconds of nothing, Annabel finally snaps. “What the hell are you talking about, you strange little man? When?”
Wilbur’s watch starts beeping. “Now,” he says, grinning and standing up. “It’s the other engagement I was talking about.”
“Now?”
“Yes.” And then Wilbur looks directly at me. “She’s sitting next door.”

(#ulink_0de62216-1960-5a36-8710-8eab0071971b)

ow I know many things.
I know that the word ‘mummy’ comes from the Egyptian word for ‘black gooey stuff’. I know that every year the moon steals some of the Earth’s energy and moves 3.8cm further away from us. I know that when you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, including the heart.
And I know nothing about modelling.
However, I’m pretty sure that this is not how the story is supposed to go. The agency are supposed to assess me and then think about it, we’re supposed to assess them and think about it, and then we’re all supposed to make lots of careful decisions and go through lots of boring waiting time before anything interesting happens. If anything interesting happens.
They’re not just supposed to lob a fashion designer at me the way Alexa lobs a netball at my head before the game has even started. What’s more, I haven’t been transformed at all yet. I’m not ready. I’m still a caterpillar.
“What?” Annabel finally stammers in total disbelief. “She’s what?”
In the meantime, Wilbur has manually picked me out of my chair and is pushing me towards the door on wobbly Bambi legs. “She’s next door,” he repeats. “You know, they sell the most fabulous little ear syringes in chemists that will clear these hearing problems right up for you.”
“I don’t think so,” Annabel hisses, starting to get out of her chair too.
“Oh, they do,” Wilbur insists. “It’s like pop, and suddenly you can hear again.”
Annabel clicks her tongue in frustration. “I mean, Harriet’s going nowhere.”
Wilbur looks at Annabel in confusion. “But it’s a super important designer, my little Door-frame. I don’t think you quite understand. Frankie’s a very lucky little girl to even get a chance to meet them.”
“I don’t give a flying duck if they’re Queen of the World,” Annabel snaps. “Harriet’s not just being thrown into it like that.”
Wilbur sighs. “Let’s be rational about this, non? You haven’t signed anything and you haven’t decided anything. You can still say no. But isn’t it best to know what you’re saying no to? That’s just basic maths.”
“It’s not maths,” Annabel sighs. And then her head furrows in the middle. I can see the logic has started worming its way in.
“Plus, Annabel,” Dad says anxiously. “What if it’s the Queen of the World?”
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Annabel says after staring at Dad for a few seconds, and then she turns to me. (“Are you Pete?” I hear Wilbur whisper to Dad.) “Do you want to meet this person?”
“Uh,” I say because everything has suddenly gone very far away and quiet, and my whole body is shaking – even my thumbs.
This cannot be happening. This is not on the plan. This is not on any of the plans.
They want me to go in without a plan?
Yes. Apparently that’s exactly what they want me to do.
“Perfectomondo!” Wilbur cries and – before I can work out what my next thought is going to be – he pushes me out of the door and closes it behind us.

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ow,” Wilbur says as we stand alone in the hallway and I start hyperventilating again. I knew I should have bought the crisp packet with me. “There’s nothing to worry about, Plum-cake. This woman can’t hurt you.” He thinks about this statement for a few seconds. “Actually, that’s not totally true. She can and she might. But try and forget about that because if she smells fear on you, it’ll make her worse. She’s like a vicious Rottweiler, except with less muscle mass and much better table manners.”
“B-b-but who is it?” I stammer.
“If I tell you, you’ll panic,” he says, frowning at me.
I’m already panicking. I’m not sure he can say anything that’s going to make it worse. “I won’t,” I lie.
“You will. You’ll panic, and then I’ll panic, and then you’ll panic again, and she’ll be able to tell we’re weak and she’ll eat both of us.”
“Wilbur, I promise I won’t panic. Just tell me who it is.”
Wilbur takes a deep breath and grabs my arms. “Darling Strawberry-mush,” he says in a reverential voice. “It’s Yuka Ito.”
And then he waits for my reaction. Which is obviously extremely disappointing for him because, after a short silence, he shakes me gently and taps my head. “Are you still in there? Has the shock killed you?”
“Who?”
“Yuka Ito.” Wilbur waits a little longer for the penny to drop and then sighs because the penny is clearly going nowhere at all. “Legendary designer, personally discovered at least five supermodels? Best friends with eight Vogue editors around the world? Has her own personalised seat at New York Fashion Week? Current Creative Director of Baylee?” Wilbur pauses and then sighs again. “Bunny-button, this woman doesn’t work in fashion, she is fashion. She is the beginning of it and she is the end of it. A bit more panic might be appropriate.”
According to scientists, the slowest that information travels between neurons in the brain is 260mph. I don’t believe them because my brain is working nowhere near that fast.
My mouth has gone suddenly dry. I haven’t heard of Yuka Ito, but I have heard of Baylee. People at school buy the fake version handbags at the local market. And they’re just going to send me in like this? In a suit? Without any preparation at all? Where the hell is my metamorphosis?
“B-b-but w-w-what do I d-d-do?”I start stuttering because my ears have done what they always do when I’m extremely frightened: they’ve gone totally numb. “W-w-w-what do I s-s-say?”
Wilbur sighs in relief. “That’s better. Total breakdown. A much more respectable reaction.” He pats me and pushes me towards the second glass cubicle. “You don’t do anything, Doughnut-face. Yuka Ito does. Trust me, she’ll know straight away if you’re what she’s looking for. And if you’re not… Well. She’ll probably just bite you.”
“B-b-b-but…”
“It’s OK, she’s totally sterile. This is the moment when the rest of your life takes shape, Harriet,” Wilbur says, putting his hand reassuringly on my shoulder. And then he considers this statement. “Or fails completely,” he amends. He opens the door. “No pressure,” he adds.
And pushes me forward.

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K.
Deep breaths. In, out. In, out. But keep them subtle: I don’t want Yuka Ito to think I’m going into labour.
Everything is dark, except I don’t know whether it’s just my brain closing down in shock or my eyes adjusting to the light. The whole room is pitch-black, and there’s just a small lamp in the corner. And right in the middle, sitting in a chair, is a very small woman.
She’s very still, and very silent, and she’s wearing black from head to toe. Everything is black: her long hair is black, her minuscule hat is black and the lace hanging over one eye is black. Her dress is black and her shoes are black and her tights are black. The only thing on her that isn’t black is her lips, and they’re bright purple. Her hands are folded very neatly in her lap, and the only other way I can think of to describe her is that she’s everything that Wilbur isn’t: quiet, controlled and absolutely rigid. She looks exactly like a fashionable spider.
I knew I should have stuck to my first outfit choice.
As if on cue, Wilbur cries, ‘Sweetheart!’ and flounces across the room to greet her. ‘It’s been tooooo long!’
She looks at Wilbur without a flicker of expression on her perfect, pale face. “I saw you eight minutes ago. Which I believe is two minutes longer than we agreed.”
“Precisely! Tooooooo long!” Wilbur runs back to me, totally unfazed, and pushes me forward. “I had difficulty retrieving this one,” he explains happily, as if he’s Hugo and I’m some kind of really nice stick. “But retrieve her I finally did.”
He gives me another nudge with his fingertips until I’m standing awkwardly in front of Yuka. There is something so queenly about her that I find myself suddenly dropping into a curtsy, the way I was taught to in ballet class before the teacher asked Annabel not to bring me back because it was “impossible to teach me grace”.
Yuka Ito looks at me with a stony face and then – almost without moving – touches a little button on a remote control on her lap. A bright spotlight fades in dramatically, almost directly above me, and I jump a little bit. Seriously. What kind of room is this?
“Harriet,” she says as I squint upwards. There’s no inflection to her voice, so I’m not sure whether it’s a question or a statement or whether she’s just practising saying my name.
“Harriet Manners,” I correct automatically.
“Harriet Manners.” She looks me up and down slowly. “How old are you, Harriet Manners?”
“I’m fifteen years, three months and eight days old.”
“Is that your natural hair?”
I pause briefly. Why would anyone dye their hair this colour? “…Yes.”
Yuka raises an eyebrow. “And you’ve never modelled before?”
“No.”
“Do you know anything about clothes?”
I look down at my grey pinstripe suit. It must be a trick question. “No.”
“And do you know who I am?”
“You’re Yuka Ito, Creative Director of Baylee.”
“Did you know who I was before Wilbur told you thirty seconds ago?”
I glance at Wilbur. “No.”
“But she’s very bright,” Wilbur bursts enthusiastically, clearly no longer able to contain himself. “She picks things up ever so quickly, don’t you, my little Bumblebee? Once I told her who you were she didn’t forget straight away at all.”
Yuka slowly slides her gaze over to him. “At what point exactly,” she says in an icy voice, “did it seem as if I was attempting to engage you in conversation, Wilbur?”
“None at all,” Wilbur agrees and takes a few steps back. He starts gesturing at me to get behind him.
“And,” she continues, looking at me, “how do you feel about fashion?”
I think really hard for a few seconds. “It’s just clothes,” I say eventually. Then I close my mouth as tightly as possible and mentally flick myself with my thumb and middle finger. It’s just clothes? What’s wrong with me? Telling the fashion industry’s most powerful woman that It’s Just Clothes is like telling Michelangelo, It’s Just A Drawing. Or Mozart, It’s Just A Bit Of Music. Why is there no kind of net between my brain and my mouth to catch sentences like that, like the one we have in the kitchen sink to catch vegetable peel?
“Would you mind explaining why you want to be a model in that case?”
“I guess…” I swallow uncertainly. “I want things to change.”
“And by things she means,” Wilbur interrupts, stepping forward, “famine. Poverty. Global warming.”
“Actually, I mean me mainly,” I clarify uncomfortably. “I’m not sure fashion is going to help with anything else.”
Yuka stares at me for what feels like twenty years, but is actually about ten seconds with a totally blank expression on her face. “Turn around,” she says eventually in a dry voice.
So I turn around. And then – because I’m not sure what else to do – I keep turning. And turning. Until I start to worry that I’m going to be sick on the floor.
“You can stop turning now,” she snaps eventually, and her voice sounds high and strained. She flicks her finger again and the light above me abruptly switches off and plunges me back into the dark. “I’ve seen enough. Leave now.”
I stop, but the room continues spinning, so Wilbur grabs me before I fall over.
I can’t believe it. That was my chance and I blew it. That was the escape hatch from my life and I managed to shut it on myself within forty-five seconds. Which means I’m stuck being me forever.
Forever.
Oh, God. Maybe I am actually a moron after all. I might have to recheck my IQ levels when I get home.
“Go, go, go,” Wilbur whispers urgently because I’m still standing in the middle of the room, staring at Yuka, totally paralysed with shock. “Out, out, out.”
And then he bows to Yuka, shuffles backwards out of the room with me behind him and shoves me back into the real world.

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he real world, as it turns out, is even icier than the fashion one.
I stomp back miserably into the little office where my parents are waiting: Annabel, with her head in her hands, and Dad, pointedly ignoring her and staring out of the window in huffy silence.
“Tell your stepmother you don’t mind being named after a tortoise,” Dad immediately demands, still staring out of the window. “Tell her, Harriet. She won’t talk to me.”
I sigh. Today is really going downhill. And given the start, I wasn’t sure that was possible. “I suppose I should just be grateful you weren’t browsing the FBI’s Most Wanted lists as well as scanning the Guinness Book of Records, Dad.”
“Tortoises are incredible creatures,” Dad says earnestly. “What they lack in elegance and beauty they more than make up for in the ability to curl up and defend themselves from predators.”
“What, like me?”
“That’s not what I was saying, Harriet.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“No,” Annabel snaps suddenly, lifting her head.
Dad remains nonplussed. “They do, Annabel. I saw a documentary about it on telly.”
Annabel whips round and her face is suddenly the colour of the paper she’s still gripping in her hands. “Why you felt the need to tell her about that bloody tortoise I have no idea. What’s wrong with you?” Dad looks at me for help, but I’m not going to drag him out of this one. “And,” she continues, turning to look at me, “I mean no; you’re not modelling. Not now, not next year, not ever. Full stop, the end, finis, whatever you want to put at the end of the sentence that makes it finite.”
“Now hang on a second,” Dad says. “I get a say in this too.”
“No, you don’t. Not if it’s a stupid say. It’s not happening, Richard. Harriet has a brilliant future in front of her and I’m not going to have it ruined by this nonsense.”
“Who says it’s brilliant?” I ask, but they both ignore me.
“Have you been listening to a single word that crazy man has been saying, Richard?”
“You just want her to be a lawyer, don’t you, Annabel!” Dad shouts.
“And what if I did? What’s wrong with being a lawyer?”
“Don’t get me started on what’s wrong with lawyers!”
They’re both standing a metre away from each other, ready for battle.
“Do I get a say in this?” I ask, standing up.
“No,” they both snap without taking their eyes off each other.
“Right,” I say, sitting down again. “Good to know.”
Annabel puts her handbag over her shoulder, quivering all over. “I said I would think about it and I have. I’ve even made notes and I have seen nothing that convinces me that this is right for Harriet. In fact, I’ve only seen things that convince me of exactly the opposite: that this is a stupid, sick, damaging environment for a young girl, it was a terrible idea and it needs to stop now before it goes any further.”
“But—”
“This conversation is over. Do you understand? Over. Harriet is going to go to school like a normal fifteen-year-old and she is going to do her exams like a normal fifteen-year-old and have a normal, fifteen-year-old life so that she can have a brilliant, successful, stable adult one. Do I make myself clear?”
I could point out that it’s irrelevant – seeing as I’ve just blown any chance I have – but Annabel looks so scary and we can both see so far up her nostrils that Dad and I both duck our heads and mutter, “OK.”
“Now, when you’re ready, I’ll be outside,” Annabel continues from between her teeth. “Away from all this rubbish.”
And Dad and I continue to stare at the table until we hear the front door close, with Annabel safely on the other side of it.

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e continue to stare at the table for quite some time: me absorbed in thought and Dad possibly just really interested in the table.
You know, the human brain never stops surprising me. It’s always evolving: not just through the centuries, but from day to day, and minute to minute. Always in a constant state of flux. Forty-eight hours ago, I would have laughed if somebody had told me I couldn’t be a model or perhaps stared at them as if they were strange alien beings with feet coming out of their heads. I’ve always wanted to be a palaeontologist, or maybe a physicist. But… I don’t want to go back to my life the way it was.
Not now I’ve imagined an alternative.

I look at Dad and realise he’s studying my face. “What do you want, Harriet?” he says gently. “Never mind Annabel, I think it must be her time of the month. You know, when she turns into a werewolf. What is it you want to do?”
I think about Nat and how devastated she would be if this went any further. I think about Annabel and her fury, and then I think about Yuka Ito and her open contempt.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say in a small voice. “It’s not going to happen anyway.”
At which point Wilbur bursts back into the room and flings himself dramatically into the chair that Annabel just vacated. He doesn’t seem to realise that anyone’s missing.
“You got the job,” he says abruptly, flinging his arms out in a wide motion. “She loves you.”
I stare at him in silence. “B-b-but – no, she doesn’t, she hates me,” I finally manage to stammer. “She turned the light off on me and everything.”
“Hates you?” Wilbur tinkles with laughter. “Golly-knickers. Did you see what she did to the other girls? Well, no, obviously not. We’d have all sorts of tribunals on our hands if anyone did. She does not hate you, my little Goldfish. She didn’t even turn the light on for most of the other candidates.”
“What’s going on?” Dad is still saying. At least, I think he is. My brain is making that high-pitched TV noise again. “What job?”
“The job of the century, my little Crumpet of Loveliness; the position of the millennium. The employment opportunity to end all employment opportunities.”
“Which is?” Dad snaps crossly. “Drop the jazz, Wilbur, and just tell us.”
Wilbur grins. “Gotcha. Yuka Ito wants Harriet to be the new face of Baylee. We’re on a deadline, so we start shooting tomorrow. In Moscow. For a twenty-four-hour whirlwind of fashion.”
I feel like I’m in an elevator, dropping thirty storeys in three seconds. My stomach doesn’t even feel remotely attached to my abdomen.
Dad opens and shuts his mouth a few times.
“For real?” he says eventually, and even in my catatonic state I cringe. I wish Dad would stop trying to be ‘street’.
“So real it could have its own TV show,” Wilbur confirms seriously. “We’ve been looking for the right person for ages. The advertising spaces are already booked and the crew is on standby. Now we’ve found her, it’s lift-off.”
“Gosh,” Dad says and he suddenly looks strangely calm. I thought he’d be up and dancing around the room, but he looks very composed and very – you know – fatherly. “Right,” he says in a faraway voice. “Wow.” He looks at me again. “So it’s actually happening then. Who’d have thought it?”
The white noise in my head is getting louder and louder. “Dad?” I manage to squeak. “What do I do?”
Dad clears his throat, leans toward me and puts his hand on my head. “Harriet,” he says gravely, in his most un-my-dad-like voice. “Think about it carefully. If you don’t want this, we walk now. No questions. If you do want it, I’m behind you.”
“But Annabel…”
Dad sighs. “I’ll deal with Annabel. She doesn’t frighten me.” He thinks about this. “OK, she frightens me. But I’ll just frighten her back.”
I try to swallow, but I can’t. The door has just been thrown wide open when I thought it was locked. This is the forked road that the poem talks about. I can take my old life back. I can be Harriet Manners: Best Friend to Nat, Prey to Alexa, Stepdaughter to Annabel, Stalkeree to Toby. Stranger and total Hand-sniffing Weirdo to Nick. Geek.
Or I can try to become something else entirely.
Something inside me breaks. “I want to do it,” I hear myself saying. “I want to try and be a model.”
“Well, duh,” Wilbur says happily.
“But what happens now?” Dad asks, taking hold of my hand and squeezing it. I squeeze it back. My whole body is trembling.
“Now?” Wilbur says, laughing and leaning back in his chair. “Well. Let’s just say that Harriet Manners is about to become very fashionable.” And he laughs again. “Very fashionable indeed.”

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o Dad and I have worked out a cunning plan. It’s not particularly complicated and it consists of one simple step: lie. And that’s it.
We debate the telling-the-truth option for about thirty seconds, and then decide that it’s probably much better all round if we just… don’t. Because we’re scared mainly. As Dad says, “Annabel is absolutely bonkers at the moment, Harriet. Do you really want to awaken the Kraken?”
So we’re going to lie to Annabel. And – I add this silently in my head – Nat. We’re obviously not going to lie to them forever. That would be ridiculous. We’re just going to keep the truth from them until the timing is right. And it feels like a suitable moment.
And we have absolutely no other alternative. Which makes me feel no better about anything at all, so as soon as we’re home from the agency, I make my excuses and go straight to the only place in the world I go when I need to run away.
The local launderette.
It’s about 300 metres away from my house, and I’ve been coming here since I was allowed to leave the house on my own. For some reason it always makes me feel better. I love the soft whirring sounds, I love the soapy smells, I love the bright lights, I love the warmth coming out of the machines. But most of all I love the feeling that nothing could ever be bad or wrong in a place where everything is being cleaned.
I dig fifty pence out of my pocket and put it in one of the tumble dryers. Then – when it’s switched on and hot and vibrating – I lean my head on the concave glass window and shut my eyes.
I don’t know how long I sit with my head on the dryer, but I must nod off because I suddenly jerk awake to the sound of: “Did you know that the average American family does eight to ten loads of laundry each week, and a single load of laundry takes an average of one hour and twenty-seven minutes to complete from wash to dry? That means that the average American family spends approximately 617 hours a year doing laundry. What do you think it is for England? Less, I think. We just seem to be a bit dirtier.”
And there – sitting on top of a washing machine – is Toby.
I stare at him in silence.
“Hey, you’re awake!” he observes. “Look!” And then he points to his T-shirt. It has a picture of drums on it. “It’s interactive! When I press the drums, they make the sound of drums.” Thud, thud.
“Toby. What are you doing here?”
“Did you hear that?” He’s wearing a yellow bobble hat and it’s bobbling in excitement. Thud, thud, thud. “They’re realistic, aren’t they? Do you think if you got one with a guitar on it, we could start a band?”
“No. What are you doing here?”
“Obviously I’m doing laundry, Harriet.”
I raise my eyebrow. He looks completely at ease with this terrible excuse, which – considering the fact that he has no laundry with him – is a little worrying. “Did you just follow me here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You looked sad. And also because it’s dark and it could be dangerous if you wander around on your own.”
I scowl. “Yes, Toby. I might be at risk from stalkers.”
Toby looks around us. “I think it’s just me, Harriet. I’ve not run into any others while on the job. Are you excited about the modelling assignment?”
I stare at him for a few seconds. “How the hell do you know about that?”
How am I supposed to keep it a secret from Nat and Annabel if I can’t even keep it secret from Toby?
“Well, I wouldn’t be a very good stalker if I didn’t, would I?” Toby laughs. “I’d have to hang up my stalker gear in shame.” He thinks about it. “Which would be unfortunate because all I’ve really got is this flask and I’m quite attached to it.” He pulls out a red flask and shows it to me. “Soup,” he explains. “In case I get hungry.”
“Toby, nobody is supposed to know.”
“So that makes this a secret between the two of us, right?” I glare at him. “Which makes us kindred spirits? And – correct me if I’m wrong – soulmates?”
“We’re not soulmates, Toby. You can’t just go round stealing secrets and then forcing people into being your soulmate.”
“OK.” He seems unabashed by the rejection. “But you’re glad I gave that model man your number.”
For a few seconds all I can do is stutter without any noises coming out. “You gave the modelling agency my number?”
“You ran off at The Clothes Show so quickly I think you forgot. Good, huh?” Toby grins at me and the yellow bobble bounces up and down cheerfully. “Now the whole world is going to see you the way I already see you. I’ve always been a little bit ahead of the trends.”
I point to the scraped-up word on my satchel. “And what if they see me the way everyone at school sees me, Toby?”
Toby considers this for a few moments. “Then I think you’re going to need a bigger bag.” And he hits the drum on his T-shirt. Thud, thud.
Suddenly I’m not so sure the launderette was a good idea after all. “I’m going home.”
“OK. Would you like me to follow a few metres behind?” I frown at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “By the way,” he adds, “did Nat tell you what she did yesterday? She was amazing, Harriet. Like Boadicea, except without the chariot. Or the horses, or the swords, but still: it was awesome.”
I stop near the door. “Nat?” I say, totally confused. “What are you talking about?”
“She heard what happened to you in Mr Bott’s English class and she went crazy. She stormed into the changing rooms while Alexa was getting ready for hockey and did a whole world of yelling.” Toby pauses. “I didn’t see this because they wouldn’t let me in. Apparently that room is only for girls and I am not one of those, Harriet. I assure you. Whatever Alexa might say. I am all man.”
My blood is running cold, and not just because Toby just said the phrase all man.
“And you want to know the best bit?” Toby adds, apparently totally unaware that every single muscle in my face is now twitching with guilt and horror. “You want to know what else she did?”
“What?”
“Honestly, you won’t believe it when I tell you.”
I almost snarl at him, I’m so tense. “Tell me,” I pretty much shout across the launderette. “Tell me what she did.”
“She chopped Alexa’s ponytail off. Right off. At the base. With some scissors. And then she said, ‘Now let’s see how you like everyone laughing at you,’ and stormed off.” Toby laughs. “Apparently Alexa looks a bit like she’s all man too now.”
Oh my God. I groan and put my hand over my eyes. This is the school equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, which led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia, which led to Russian mobilisation, which led to Germany declaring war on Russia. Which led to World War One.
Nat just started a war for me. In defence of me. Because of me.
And I am not worth it.
This is about as horrible as it’s possible to feel. I’ve reached new heights of self-shame (or lows, depending on which way up the scale is). “I…I…” I say faintly, holding on to the door handle. “I really have to go home, Toby.”
And I run out of the door as fast as my legs will carry me.

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run all the way home.
OK, that’s not true. I don’t run all the way. I just wanted you to think I could if I needed to. Because I probably could. I run most of the way and then I Brownie Walk for the rest of it (walk twenty paces, run twenty paces). But I can’t run fast enough to get me away from what it is I’m running from. Which is me, mainly.
What am I doing? I’m about to screw over my Best Friend while she defends me, my stepmother while she protects me and possibly – depending on exactly how bad I am at this modelling thing – Wilbur and the entire fashion industry.
My head feels like it’s starting to rattle with words bouncing around inside it like balls. Every time Moscow, Nick, Baylee or Metamorphosis hit the side, my entire body jolts with excitement. Every time Nat and Annabel make contact, I feel like I’m about to implode with guilt and anxiety. And every time the Alexa ball bounces, I feel like vomiting.
But it’s too late. I’ve made my choice. So I spend the rest of the evening making an imaginary box in my head. And into this box I put all of the balls. I close the lid. And then I lock it up and temporarily misplace the key.
I’m going to Russia, I’m going to be transformed and there is nothing anybody can do to stop me.

First thing on Monday morning, the lies begin.

Lie No.1
Nat, I have a bad cold. Really do this time. Not coming to school today or tomorrow probably. Hope you’re OK. See you Wednesday xx

Lies No.s 2 and 3
Annabel: “Why are you wearing your Winnie the Pooh jumper, Harriet?”
Me: “…It’s non-uniform day.”
Annabel (long silence): “And why haven’t you gone to work already, Richard?”
Dad: “It’s non-uniform… Hang on. No. Late start today. Going in later. Look: I bought some strawberry jam.”
Annabel: “Why? I hate strawberry jam.”

Lie No.4
Me: “Annabel, do you know where my passport is?”
Annabel: “Why on earth would you want your passport at 8am on a Monday morning?”
Me: “…International school project?”
Annabel: “Why does that sound like a question? Are you asking me or telling me?”

Lie No.5
Toby, have gone to Amsterdam for a shoot. H

By the time Annabel’s frowned at both of us, checked me for a temperature and gone to work, Dad and I are running late for the airport so packing consists of throwing everything I own into a little suitcase, bouncing on top of it to get it to shut and contemplating just trimming round the edges as if it’s some kind of pie.
I’ve decided if I’m doing this, I have to do it properly, so I’ve made a bubble chart plan on the computer and given a copy to Dad. My lies are pink bubbles, Dad’s lies are blue bubbles and the lies we have to share are – obviously – purple.
In synopsis: Nat thinks I’m at home, sick, Annabel thinks I’m at Nat’s tonight for a sleepover, followed by school, and Annabel also thinks that Dad’s flown to Edinburgh for a late emergency client meeting that will run over until tomorrow evening.
“I can’t believe you made a bubble chart,” Dad keeps saying in disbelief as we finally climb into our plane seats.
“It’s the most suitable kind of chart for this kind of plan,” I tell him indignantly. “I made a flow chart and a pie chart, but they didn’t work nearly as well. This one is a lot more sensible.”
Dad looks at me in silence. “That’s not what I meant,” he says eventually.
“I made a timeline graph too,” I tell him as we buckle our seatbelts. “The lies are spread across it on an hourly basis. But if I show it to you, you might get confused. I think it’s best if I simply alert you when you’re supposed to be saying something that isn’t true.”
Dad stares at the bubble chart again. “Harriet, are you sure you’re my kid? I mean, you’re sure that Annabel didn’t bring you with her and swap you in?”
I scowl at him and then wince in pain because the universe has apparently decided to wreak vengeance upon me by making my metaphorical devil horns literal. By the time the air hostesses start pointing to the exits, my entire forehead is hot and throbbing; by the time they bring round the free peanuts, I can’t really frown without it hurting, and by the time we start the descent into Moscow, Dad’s calling my brand-new and massive zit “Bob” and talking to it like a separate entity.
“Would Bob like a drink of orange juice?” he asks every time a flight attendant walks past. “Perhaps a piece of cracker?”
It takes every single bit of patience I have not to ask the pilot if we can just turn round and drop my father back in England because he is not behaving. None of this, however, is enough to crush my excitement.
I’m going to Russia.
Land of revolutions and preserved leaders with lightbulbs stuck in the back of their heads. Land of the Kremlin and the Catherine Palace and the lost Amber Room, which was covered in gold and somehow ‘went missing’ during World War Two. Land of big fur hats and little dolls that fit inside each other.
And if I have to model while I’m there, so be it.

“This is it,” Dad says as the plane comes down. He nudges me with his elbow and grins. “Do you know how many teenagers would kill for this, sweetheart?”
I look out of the window. There’s a flurry of soft white snow and everything is covered in white powder, like a postcard. Russia looks exactly as I imagined it would. And trust me, I’ve imagined it a lot. It’s on my Top Ten List of Countries to Visit. Number Three, actually. After Japan and Myanmar.
I swallow hard. Things are starting to change already. From this point on, everything is going to be different.
“You’re living the dream,” Dad smiles at me, looking back out of the window.
“Yes,” I say, smiling back at him. “I think I just might be.”

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he really great thing about Moscow airport is that it’s so Russian.
The signs are in Russian. The books are in Russian. The brochures are in Russian. The shops are in Russian. All the things in the shops are Russian. All the people are Russian. OK, maybe all the people aren’t Russian – most of them are getting off planes from the UK and America, and if I’m totally honest, everything is also in English – but everyone looks sort of… different. Exotic. Historical. Revolutionary.
Even Dad looks more sophisticated, and he’s still wearing that nasty T-shirt with the robot on the front of it. None of which seems to have made any impression on Wilbur.
“Oh, my Billy Ray Cyrus,” he sighs when we finally find him. He’s sitting on top of a pink suitcase, wearing a silk shirt covered in little pictures of ponies, and the second he gets close to me he puts his hands over his eyes as if I’m about to poke them out with my zit. “Where did that come from? What have you been eating?”
“Chocolate-chip cereal bars,” Dad informs him helpfully. “She had three for breakfast.”
“You look like a baby unicorn, Twinkletoes. Could you not have held off for another twenty-four hours before you started sprouting horns?”
I scowl in humiliation, wince, and try to push the spot back in again. “It’s only one,” I mumble in embarrassment. “Horn, singular.”
“Stop trying to climb the mountain with your fingers, Cookie-crumble,” Wilbur sighs, gently smacking my hand away. “Unless you’re planning on sticking a flag on top for posterity.”
Dad laughs so I thump his arm. Adults really need to learn to be more sensitive about teenage skin problems. They can be devastating to mental health, and to confidence, and also – I’d imagine – to modelling careers. “It’ll cover up with make-up, though, right?” I ask nervously.
“Treacle-nose, putting make-up on that is like sprinkling sugar on the top of Mount Fuji. Thank God for computers, that’s all I’m saying.” Then Wilbur takes a step back and surveys my outfit. “Luckily,” he exclaims, “we’ve saved the day with another moment of sheer fashion brilliance. Turn around, my little Rhino.”
I squint at him and then look down. “My Winnie the Pooh jumper?” I say in disbelief. “And my school skirt?”
It was all I had that still fitted and wasn’t a) in the wash, covered in sick, b) a football kit c) a suit or d) designed with an insect as a template.
“Winnie the Pooh Jumper and School Skirt,” Wilbur says, looking at the sky in wonder and slapping himself on the forehead. “You are truly an original, my little Jellyfish. Anyhoo, while I could stand here all day and talk about dermatological disasters and your sense of style, sadly I’m being paid to make sure I don’t.”
And he starts wobbling across the airport with his suitcase in one hand and the other held inexplicably high in the air.

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