Geek Girl

  “Is this a teenage thing?” Wilbur eventually asks in excitement when it beeps yet again. “It’s been a couple of years since I was a teenager, so maybe I’m out of the loop. Do you have a special ringtone you can’t hear or something?”

  Dad coughs. “A couple?” he says, gazing out of the window. “A couple of years?”

  Wilbur sticks his nose in the air. “I just have a very carved face,” he says haughtily. “Like Wolverine. It’s always been carved.”

  Dad and I both look at him for a few seconds. If Wilbur’s under forty, I’ll eat that gold light reflector.

  “No,” I sigh eventually, picking up my phone. “I can hear it. Unfortunately.” And then – extremely reluctantly – I click on the text messages.

  H, how are you? Wish you were here. Shall I bring round soup after school? I can pick up some of that green Thai chicken stuff you like Nat x

  H, no green stuff. Is red OK? Nat x

  Dear Harriet, Toby Pilgrim here. Things are erupting at school. To wit: Alexa’s torturing Nat. Shall I come to Amsterdam and bring you home to avenge her like a flaming angel? Yours truly, Toby Pilgrim

  Harriet, don’t forget to floss Annabel

  H, is red too spicy? There’s a picture of three chillis. Is that bad? Nat

  Nausea rises up my trachea and I stare at my phone, totally frozen.

  I’m the devil. I’m actually the devil. Any minute now the horn that matches Bob is going to sprout and my hair is going to catch fire. I’ve been prancing around in the snow like a shoeless idiot, while Nat runs around fighting for me and buying me soup, and Annabel worries about my dental hygiene. And all I can think about is holding a boy’s hand.

  I touch the painful spot on my forehead and tap my feet on the floor of the car. They’re starting to sound a little bit like – oh, I don’t know – cloven hooves.

  I quickly type out a reply.

  Nat, no soup thanks – am going straight to sleep. Am also contagious so don’t come round. See you soon. H x

  I stare at it for a few seconds then press send.

  That’s another lie. Two in fact. The balls inside the box in my head are going crazy, so I mentally sit on the lid so they don’t all come bursting out at the same time.

  When I glance to the side, Dad looks pretty uncomfortable too. “Hell’s a pretty cosy place, right?” he says, closing his phone. “I mean, it’s probably not as bad as they say, I reckon.”

  “Let’s hope not,” I sigh as we draw up outside an astonishing, white, beautiful, huge carved building with a red carpet spread out in front of it.

  Because I have quite a strong feeling we’re about to find out.

  he Baylee fashion show is being held in a proper red-velvet-seated Russian theatre. A runway has been built down the middle of the room, in the bit where I’d imagine they normally sell ice cream, and there are chandeliers hanging low over the centre of it. Russian architecture isn’t exactly known for minimalism: true to form, the entire room is gold and gilt and carved and embroidered and mirrored.

  “Oh, my heavenly mango juice,” Wilbur says when we walk in, putting his hand over his eyes and making a loud retching sound. “It’s like the Sugar Plum Fairy exploded in here.”

  “If you don’t like it, William,” Yuka says, stalking past in her heels, “I can send you somewhere a lot less fancy.” She walks up to the front of the stage.

  Wilbur looks at me in shock. “Where did she come from?” he whispers, placing a hand over his heart. “Am I right in thinking that was a physical threat?” He looks resentfully at Yuka, who’s now checking the runway. “And it’s bur not iam,” he points out loudly.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how little I care,” Yuka snaps and beckons me over to where she’s standing. “Harriet Manners,” she continues seamlessly. “Everyone’s getting ready backstage. Please go and join them. Important people are going to start arriving imminently and I can’t have the face of my new campaign standing here in a hamster and horse jumper.”

  I look down, momentarily stunned. “He’s not a hamster. He’s Winnie the Pooh. A bear.” And then I turn round and point to my back. “Eeyore’s a donkey.”

  Yuka studies me for a few seconds. “I don’t like donkeys,” she decides eventually. “Or bears. Please go away and get into the outfit I’ve chosen for you, which features neither. Your name is on the tag.”

  I nod meekly. I’m not sure what to say to a woman who doesn’t recognise Winnie the Pooh.

  “And Harriet?”

  I turn round on the stage, where I’m trying to find my way behind the curtains. My foot is caught in one of them. “Yes?” I say, trying to extricate it as subtly as possible.

  Yuka’s eyes slide down until she’s staring at it. “If somebody offers to shave your legs,” she snaps, “let them.”

  *

  Well, I’ve found all of the Russian people.

  All of the really good-looking female ones anyway. They’re tucked into a little room behind the stage, crammed together like beautiful, thin, blonde sardines. I’ve never been so uncomfortable. There is skin everywhere. It’s not flashes of puppy fat and training bras either. Really tall, toned girls are wandering around, laughing and almost naked, as if it’s the most natural state in the world.

  And I don’t care what documentaries on television say: it’s not.

  I’ve climbed down the backstage stairs, beyond a screen, and now I’m standing by the doorway. Nobody has noticed I’m here; they’re just walking past me as if I’m on work experience. At school, Alexa is the Cool girl, Nat is the Beautiful girl and a girl called Jessica is the girl who insists upon stripping down to her underwear at any possible opportunity. I’m the hairy-legged geek in the corner with the white ankle socks. I think the scale has just shifted and I should be in a hole under the floor somewhere.

  I start backing out of the door I just came through.

  “My daughter needs me,” a voice yells from behind me. When I look round, Dad’s standing on his tiptoes by the door, trying to see over the screen. “She needs me, I tell you.”

  “I don’t need you,” I call back.

  “You see?” Dad says again, doing little jumps so that the top of his head bobs up and down. “I demand you let me into the room full of tall Russian models this minute.”

  Oh, for the love of sugar cookies.

  “Dad,” I hiss through the screen, “if you embarrass me any more, I’m sending you home. I mean it.”

  There’s a pause and then Dad sighs dramatically. “Fine,” he snaps in a sulky voice. “I’ll just go and eat pickled cabbage at the back of the hall, shall I?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Being a sidekick sucks,” he mutters and strops back into the theatre.

  I look at the room again, which is getting more overwhelming by the minute. There’s commotion and chaos everywhere: mountains of clothes, dozens of people, the shine of bright lights, the smell of hairspray, the roar of hairdryers and girls. People taking off clothes and putting them back on again. Confidence oozing out of every pore in the room. I am totally and utterly out of my depth.

  I reckon if I just tucked myself into a ball in one of the prop cupboards, nobody would notice I was missing. I mean, how important can I be?

  “There she is!” somebody shouts, running forward and dragging me into the room by my arm. “The most important model of all!”

  Oh.

  I guess that’s my answer.

  his is a new start, I keep reminding myself as I’m pulled through the crowd of girls. What’s the saying? You’ve got to fake it to make it. It’s time I start pretending to belong and then maybe I will.

  This isn’t school after all. I can be someone else here. Someone cool. Someone different. I don’t have to be a geek any more. I look down at my satchel. The red words are still vaguely visible and I hastily put my hand over it. I have got to get a new bag.

  “Hello,” I say confidently to the models who have all stopped what they’re doing
and are now watching me with their eyes narrowed. “I’m Harriet Manners. It’s nice to meet you.”

  It’s totally working. They’ve all stopped talking, and I can tell from the expressions on their faces that any minute now they’re going to stand up, envelop me in a warm group hug and start arguing over who will get to be my Russian penpal. I grin in relief and hold out my hand to an astonishingly beautiful brunette.

  “Bite me,” she says in a strong accent, and then she turns round and continues putting on black stockings.

  “Black with no sugar. Don’t forget the lemon,” another giggles and she high-fives her friend, who starts muttering darkly in Russian.

  “I lost the Baylee campaign to her? Seriously? Has Yuka gone totally insane?”

  “She looks like a little boy,” another one says in a perfectly audible whisper.

  “Maybe she is. Let’s see what happens when she takes off her skirt.”

  “I reckon she doesn’t have anything going on down there. Like Action Man.”

  “Have you ever seen freckles like it?”

  “Yeah. Definitely. On a, like, egg.”

  “Or, like, a Dalmatian.”

  I can literally feel my face collapsing. This is exactly like school. Except that they’ve all got a fewer clothes on, which somehow makes it even worse.

  I’ve said nine words so far. How can it have gone so badly wrong already? How do they know all the same insults?

  “Actually,” I say in the most reprimanding voice I can find, “there are no animals that have no reproductive organs at all. Even hermaphrodites have both sets, for instance the great majority of pulmonate snails, opisthobranch snails and slugs. So that is a physical impossibility.”

  There’s a surprised silence and then the room erupts into nasty giggles. It’s probably not going to go down in history as one of my most incisive comebacks.

  “And,” I add, looking at the girl with the stockings, “I’d rather not bite you. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

  The giggling stops.

  That’s better, Harriet. That’s the sort of thing Nat would have said.

  The girl blinks at me a few times in shocked silence. “What did she just say to me?” she eventually snaps to the girl next to her and her forehead starts to get all scrunched up in the middle. “I’m the face of Gucci. I’m Shola. People don’t talk to me like that. I won’t be talked to like that.”

  “Don’t get worked up, honey,” a blonde with huge blue eyes whispers back. “It’ll just make you ugly and we’re about to go on. Vogue’s out there. Stay pretty for Vogue.”

  Shola swallows and concentrates. “Thanks, Rose. I am so not getting wrinkles for her.” She looks back at me and narrows her eyes. “You’re how old?”

  “Fifteen and three-twelfths.”

  “My God, you still measure your age in fractions. I’m not getting worked up over a child. I’m just not. I am a woman. I am the face of Gucci Woman. It’s right there in the title.”

  “It is,” Rose agrees, patting her on the shoulder. “It’s right there on the advert under your face, Shola. Woman.”

  “Harriet?” a friendly lady in red says, tapping me on the shoulder just in the nick of time. Models are clearly bonkers. “This is your outfit.” And she unzips a clothes bag.

  A general hiss goes round the room as I stare at the contents. It’s a long, silky gold dress with thousands of tiny little gold feathers layered around the bottom. It has thin straps made of sort of gold fish scales and it shimmers when you touch it, like a magic cloak. It’s really, really beautiful: even I can see that. Although it is going to make me look a bit like the toffee finger in a box of Quality Street.

  “That’s mine? For me?”

  “It is, darling. You’re the Closer.”

  Another slightly louder hiss goes round the room. “I’m the what?”

  “The Closer. You’re the last girl on the catwalk. All eyes are going to be on you, honey.”

  I quickly look into the mirror, and behind me I can feel every single eye in the room glaring at my back.

  “You’re the new face of the line,” she continues. “Yuka wants you to be as prominent as possible.”

  I can see Shola’s face getting paler under her make-up. She glances quickly at Rose and a look passes between them, but I’ve no idea what it means.

  “OK,” I say, trying to ignore the new clenching sensation in my stomach. “But…”And then I take a deep breath. “The… Ummm.” I stop. How can I put this subtly? “The… er.” And then I take in as much oxygen as I can. “What shoes am I wearing?” I finally blurt out.

  The lady smiles at me kindly. “These,” she says. And then she holds out a pair of little gold-scaled shoes with one-inch kitten heels. I almost collapse with relief.

  “Yuka says she would prefer it if you could stay upright,” she says with a wink. “Now, Miss Manners, let’s get your hair and make-up sorted so we can have a little practice, shall we?”

  can do it.

  I can actually do it. I can walk up and down a room with a pretty dress and heels on and not rip anything, ruin anything, break anything or fall over.

  It seemed like an impossibility an hour ago. But… I’ve practised and practised backstage for about an hour until I’m pretty sure I can get through this evening without a disaster. I mean, it’s one walk. A toddler could do it, with a bit of encouragement and maybe one of those push-along toys. How hard can it be?

  “Thank you so much,” I say to Betty, the stylist who has been helping me. She’s even managed to find time to quickly de-fluff both my legs without causing any damage.

  Betty winks at me. “My pleasure, chicken. Quick revision: what are you walking in time to?”

  “The music,” I say eagerly. She gave me her iPod to practise with. I have no idea what the music is, but it’s actually quite nice. At least I know when to put each foot forward.

  “And what do you do when you get to the bottom of the runway?”

  I’m back in my comfort zone: studying and revision. “I pause with one hand on my hip, and then I face towards the left, and then the right, and then I pause again, and then I turn round slowly and walk back.”

  “Facial expression?”

  “Totally blank and slightly bored.”

  “Excellent. And what side are you walking on?”

  “Centre, and when you see a girl coming, keep to the left.”

  “I think you’re set.” She smiles at me and points at the door. I was taken out of the area where everyone was getting ready so that I could concentrate, and also so that I could fall over without anyone laughing at me. “Knock ’em dead,” Betty adds.

  Which – given the probability of that happening – is not the best thing she could have said to me.

  And she gently nudges me back into the world of fashion.

  It is now manic.

  The earlier commotion was obviously just the buzz before the mania: the whole room has exploded into a mess of lights and noise and panic. I can hear the music pumping from the stage and I don’t think the girls have time to be nasty any more: they’re whizzing in and out of clothes and being shouted at by people wearing headsets as if they’re working in call centres.

  “Next!” an angry man shouts. “Come on! We don’t have time for a lipgloss touch-up! Get on the stage!”

  There’s a small queue of models forming this side of the curtains and I’m totally mesmerised. They’re all twice my height, and willowy, and curvy in the right places, with the most amazing faces. Every single one of them looks like a different example of beauty, from a different imagination. And now they look like a collection of amazing birds, or butterflies, covered in greens and blues and reds and sparkles and feathers. It’s less fashion, I think, and more… plumage.

  It’s like that butterfly farm I go to every summer with Annabel: the room is covered in colours. I feel a sudden pang of envy. I’m the little brown moth, going round and round the light bulb. Then I look at the mirror
next to the stage. My eyes have been painted dark black, and my hair’s been fluffed up and pinned at the back. My cheeks are pink and flushed and the light is reflecting off the top of my head, and off my shoes, and off the straps over my back. The gold dress sort of shoots straight down because there’s nothing to stop it – but… it still looks pretty. Sparkly.

  I’m not a moth, I realise with a lurch. I’m not one of them exactly, but maybe I’m still a butterfly. One of those little white ones that doesn’t live very long, but is happy just to get the chance to be there for a little while.

  “Harriet?” the man with the headset on shouts. “Where’s Harriet?”

  “I’m here,” I say as clearly as I can and realise my hands are damp. Dad’s somewhere out in the audience: Yuka reluctantly gave him a seat near the back. I have to make him proud. I have to. I have to make Annabel proud too, even though she isn’t here and doesn’t know about it.

  “Get ready,” the man says. “You’re nearly up.”

  I stand against the curtains and notice that there are three girls in front of me. Rose, Shola and a girl I haven’t spoken to – or been shouted at – before with a set of earphones in. A very, very beautiful girl with pale brown hair in curls.

  “I’m Harriet Manners,” I say automatically, holding out my hand and trying to stop it shaking.

  She takes her headphones out. “Hmm?” she says. “Sorry. I listen to music to help calm my nerves before a show.”

  “I’m Harriet Manners,” I say again. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I know who you are,” she says, nodding and giving me a wry smile. “I’m Fleur. I’m not the face of anything.” And she gives me an almost imperceptible wink.

  “This is the Closer,” Shola says, nodding at me. Fleur shrugs and puts her headphones back in again, and Shola smiles sweetly. “So they told you about the change of plans, right?”