Geek Girl

  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.

  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.

  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 th
ink 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.

  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.