Geek Drama

  “That’s it,” Miss Hammond smiles, wiggling her fingers as she wanders between us with her necklaces jingling. “Now stretch up, up, up and grow into the characters you are meant to be. Really feel it.”

  I can really feel it. My thigh muscles are nowhere near strong enough to be in this kind of squatting position for as long as they have been.

  I collapse back on the floor.

  Nat starts giggling again from where she’s waving her arms around like somebody playing the tambourine in the sixties.

  “Grow,” she whispers at me, giggling. “Grow, little bud.”

  “I think I’m more of a sprout,” I whisper back, snorting slightly.

  “Now stand,” Miss Hammond says, twirling in a circle. “And reach your full potential. You are a tree. You are strength and courage. You are amazing.”

  “I thought we were flowers?” I say, clambering to my feet. “How can we be trees too? We don’t have the necessary fibrous tissue.”

  “You’re a flower that turned into a tree,” Mr Bott says drily. “Don’t question the process, Harriet. Just accept that biologically it makes no sense and do it.”

  I nod sheepishly. “Sorry, sir.”

  We all stand and wave our branches around awkwardly for a few minutes as we ‘access the honesty of our spiritual fictional selves’.

  “OK,” Miss Hammond says brightly as Kira starts moaning that her trunk is hurting and Noah’s leaves are getting too enthusiastic again. “That’s it! Now shake it out! Doesn’t that feel great?”

  Four people lie straight down on the floor again. “I’ve got a headache, Miss,” Ben complains. “I think I didn’t drink enough imaginary water.”

  “Would you like to do a straight read-through now, Miss Hammond?” Mr Bott says calmly. “Or will the silly words just ruin everything?”

  Miss Hammond looks around the room with happy pink cheeks. “I think we’ve done enough hard work for today, don’t you? It’s clear that everyone has really connected emotionally with who they are, and that’s what’s important.”

  Mr Bott stands up and puts his book down.

  “Oh, absolutely. When the headmaster asks why Hamlet has turned into a silent botanical garden, that’s what I’ll tell him.”

  And he puts his coat on and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Can we go now, Miss?” Kira says in a bored voice.

  “Absolutely,” Miss Hammond says brightly. “Go home and enjoy this lovely spring evening! Excellent job, everyone! The Bard would be so incredibly proud of you all!”

  And I have to be honest.

  Of all the things I know about Shakespeare, that fact is definitely not one of them.

  onestly, the next day at school is a bit of a struggle.

  This is partly because my leg muscles hurt, partly because I’m now carrying my pencil case and books round in Annabel’s old leather briefcase, and partly because Nat is so excited about the Brink shoot she can’t stop asking questions.

  “Where’s it going to be?” she asks during registration. “Who’s the photographer? Who’s the stylist? What’s the theme?”

  “When’s it published?” she asks at morning break.

  “How much are you being paid?” she asks at lunch.

  Afternoon break: “Can I take photos of the photos?”

  Before physics: “Do you think my blue dress and gold heels will be OK?”

  After physics: “What about my hair? Do you think it should be down or in a topknot or …? Where are you going?”

  “Away,” I say tiredly. “You’re my best friend in the world and I love you, Nat, but you’re kind of doing my head in.”

  Seriously: after today I think I finally understand how irritating I am when I don’t stop demanding answers from everybody all the time.

  Especially when they don’t actually know any of them.

  “Sorry,” Nat says, racing after me. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just … This is my first fashion shoot, Harriet. It’s like … being Buzz Aldrin on the moon or something.”

  “Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, Nat.”

  “Exactly. I’m the second one. I’m all like, ‘Hey, Neil, what’s it like out there?’ and Neil’s all like, ‘Come out and see for yourself, wuss!’”

  I laugh. “I’m not Armstrong, Nat. I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Sure you do. Have they given you a call sheet? I wonder if they’ve issued a pull letter, or if the shoot will be tethered, or if they’ve got an LOR. Either way, you’ll end up with an amazing tear sheet.”

  I look at Nat blankly for a few seconds.

  Njerep is a language found in Nigeria, and there are only four people left in the world who speak it. She’d have had more luck being understood if she’d just opted for that instead.

  “Correction, I know a lot less than you. Like, significantly.”

  Nat laughs. “Want to meet at the train station? I’ve got to get my stuff together. I’m taking a notepad and a pencil and a camera and a spare needle and thread, just in case, and—”

  This is possibly the first time in our entire lives that Nat has ever sounded like a geek.

  I knew there was a point where we’d eventually cross over. Like some kind of Venn diagram between cool and nerd: there’s always a point of intersection somewhere.

  “I’ll meet you at five,” I say, cramming a bit of doughnut I just found in my satchel into my mouth.

  My best friend stares at my doughnut, and then at the jam dripping on to my school jumper.

  “I can’t believe I spent ten years eating celery,” she says sadly, holding her hand out. “Such a waste.”

  I give her the rest of it and grimace in agreement.

  I don’t believe in a cosmic plan, but if I did, it definitely has quite a cruel sense of humour.

  he Brink photo shoot is being held in an abandoned building.

  And when I say abandoned, I mean this very literally.

  There are no windows. Some of the walls have fallen down and a couple of the doors are missing chunks. There’s rubble on the floor, bits of plasterboard strewn haphazardly around and to get to the second floor we have to tentatively clamber up a rickety iron spiral staircase that seems to be hanging on by its fingertips.

  “It’s so cool,” Nat says with a happy sigh. “So edgy.”

  I look around sceptically.

  It’s edgy, all right. There’s definitely some kind of health and safety legislation being broken here. The only reason I’m allowed to do this shoot without my parents is that I promised them Wilbur would be here as well as Nat and I’d be back by 8pm.

  If one of these edges results in me getting tetanus, Annabel is going to sue everyone.

  “I’m not entirely sure we got the right addres—”

  “Pumpkin-koala and her biff!” a voice cries from behind a wall. “You made it! I was starting to think you might have vanished into the ether like my Uncle Bert in the sixties.”

  Nat quickly straightens her dress out. “How do I look?” she whispers urgently as Wilbur emerges from behind a disintegrating pile of bricks in a yellow jumpsuit, like some kind of neon urban butterfly.

  “Perfect,” I whisper back.

  “My little dolly-mixture,” Wilbur says, grabbing Nat’s hand and bending into a deep bow. “How cute are you? It’s a rhetorical question. You’re as cute as the tiniest button in the entire world.”

  Nat beams so hard her entire face looks like it’s about to crack and fall off.

  “Thanks very much.”

  “As for you …” My agent turns to me and looks me up and down. “Is that jam, darling-frog, or have you been a little bit murdered on the journey?”

  In hindsight, I should probably have changed out of my doughnut-encrusted school uniform. “I had some pretty important homework to do,” I explain.

  “I love it!” Wilbur giggles. “So expressive! Strawberry or raspberry?”

  “Raspberry.”

&nbs
p; “Absolute classic! And the sugar looks like tiny edible sparkles! Genius!”

  He claps his hands and then grabs us both by the shoulders and drags us around the partition.

  And everything abruptly changes.

  Gone is the mess and broken up bricks; the faint veil of dust and pieces of randomly placed cement have totally disappeared. In their place is a haven of calm and cleanliness.

  Everything is bright white.

  The floors are white, the ceilings are white, the walls are white. In the middle is an enormous white piece of paper strung from the ceiling and draped halfway across the room – so unmarked it looks like fresh snow first thing in the morning.

  And in the middle of the whiteness are enormous shiny silver lights and black boxes and shiny gold and silver circles and little black umbrellas.

  “Oh my God,” Nat sighs under her breath. “This is exactly what heaven looks like.”

  She has a point. If you listen hard enough, I’m pretty sure you can hear fashion-y harp music.

  “Come!” Wilbur says, dragging us both into a small separate room with an enormous mirror surrounded by tiny white lights. There are clothes everywhere: on racks, on tables, on chairs. Shoes are lined up like a strategic army on the floor, handbags are dangling delicately from coat hangers like little monkeys and there’s a tiered trolley exploding with cosmetics.

  I swallow hard.

  Apparently rats lack the brain circuits required for throwing up: the nerves in their mouths, throats and shoulders aren’t developed enough for them to be sick.

  This may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished I was a rat.

  Nat makes a small whimpering sound.

  “Gucci,” she whispers reverently, running into the room and holding her hand out as if she’s trying to levitate things with her mind. “Prada. Mulberry. Armani. Ralph Lauren.” She’s starting to hyperventilate. “Wow-wow-wow-wow – is that an actual Chloé handbag?”

  Wilbur smiles at Nat, gently leads her to a chair and hands her a glass of water.

  Then he turns back to me. “So we’ve got a real treat in store for you today, my little cashew-nut cake.”

  I nod nervously. “Mmm.”

  “This is going to be so fresh it’s still going to be flopping around on the floor, gasping for air. Comprende?”

  “Not really,” I admit.

  A woman in a white vest top and black skinny jeans charges into the room. “Carrots!” she shouts in a raspy voice.

  Then, without another word, she charges back out again.

  I look around the room in confusion – there doesn’t appear to be a lot of vegetation in here – and then flush. Is she talking to me?

  Carrots?

  That’s not a very polite way to greet somebody you’ve never met before.

  “Was that …?” Every feature on Nat’s face is now an O. “Was that Adrianna Bell?”

  “It certainly was,” Wilbur says, beaming. “The one and only. Now can you see what I’m talking about?”

  “Oh, wow,” Nat says fervently, clasping her hands together and looking at the ceiling. “Harriet, you are so lucky.”

  I smile tentatively.

  I know a lot of things. I know that emus lay emerald-coloured eggs. I know that the ingredient that makes Brussels sprouts bitter is cyanide and that a raindrop that falls into the Thames will pass through the bodies of eight people before it reaches the sea.

  But I have zero idea who Adrianna Bell is.

  And I can’t help thinking that right now I’d trade in every single one of those facts for just some vague idea of what she’s going to expect me to do next.

  ere are some interesting facts about orange:

  1. The fruit came before the colour.

  2. It derives from the Arabic word naranji, which became narange when the fruit arrived in England in the fourteenth century, eventually dropped the n before changing the a to an o.

  3. It takes fifty glasses of water to grow enough oranges to make one glass of orange juice.

  4. Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.

  These are all things I tell the make-up artist, because I am being covered in it.

  Over the following hour, my eyes are painted bright orange. My lips are rendered bright orange. My nails are orange, and my cheeks are powdered with a faint orange blush. My enormous fake eyelashes are orange feathers with tiny bits of orange sequin stuck to the edges, and a line of orange diamante has been glued in a long, smooth curve down my back and neck.

  My hair’s a shade of orange too, but that’s nothing to do with the stylist. That’s down to the lottery my parents played with their recessive MC1R genes.

  Finally, I’m put in a teeny tiny orange shift dress that hangs straight down in a soft, floaty sack shape.

  “You look amazing,” Nat sighs, clapping her hands. She’s spent the last hour hovering around the stylist like a moth around a lightbulb, asking questions like, “So a brush is the best way to apply foundation?” and, “Is primer really worth the investment?”

  “In the Chinese art of feng shui, orange is the colour of purpose and organisation,” I say, leaning curiously towards my reflection in the mirror. “I definitely feel very regulated.”

  Then I lean a little bit closer.

  The clumsy schoolgirl has gone; the lashless eyes have gone; the freckles have gone. The only thing I really recognise is my pointy nose, and even that appears to have been reshaped slightly with clever application of dark smudges.

  “Carrots!” Adrianna belts through the wall. “We’re ready for you, Carrots!”

  Seriously.

  Adrianna might apparently be an award-winning, celebrity-beloved photographer, but she may need to work on her people skills.

  That is not the best way to win a teenager over.

  “Coming!” I call nervously as Nat high-fives me and I make my way cautiously in bare feet back into the white room.

  And then I stop.

  The white sheet hanging from the ceiling has disappeared, and in its place is a pale orange background with large paintings of bright orange carrots all over it.

  Root vegetable carrots.

  The kind my dad keeps putting in casseroles even though they go all soggy and every single bit of vitamin C is totally heat-destroyed in the process, rendering them completely pointless.

  “There she is,” Adrianna fixes her gaze on me. “My carrot.” She grabs my face between her hands so hard it’s squidged into a potato shape. “I knew you were a carrot the minute I saw you, Harriet. You’re so carrot it’s crazy.”

  I open and shut my mouth a few times.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There was no other choice,” she says happily. “I saw your photo and I was like, wham. There’s Carrot! Call off the hunt! Nobody else will do!”

  I frown at the set, and then look down at my outfit. Things are starting to fall into place.

  Not quickly, or with any real sense, but logically nonetheless.

  “Have a look,” she says, dragging me over to the laptop. “We’ve already done Raspberry and Banana. Pear was a total nightmare – such a diva – and Broccoli was a bit rigid, but overall it’s gone really well. Brink are going to love it.”

  She clicks a few buttons, and bright images start flicking on the screen.

  A beautiful girl with pale yellow hair and bright yellow make-up, standing against a backdrop of shiny bananas. The profile of a boy with pale skin and a green mohawk, against a backdrop of green florets. Bright pink lips and a pink afro, and another girl with heavy black eyeliner and a sharp green bob.

  Who knew high fashion could be so literal?

  Not to mention nutritious. We look like some kind of NHS poster campaign.

  Still totally silent, I’m walked gently over to the middle of the backdrop and left to shift awkwardly from side to side while Adrianna fiddles with a few buttons and moves some lights around.

  “Doesn’t she have shoes?” she says, lookin
g up and frowning.

  “I wasn’t sure which ones you wanted,” the stylist calls from the back room. “We’ve got the orange Miu Mius or the orange McQueens.”

  Two hands hold them up through the door. They both look insanely high. Unless they want to shoot me lying on the floor, I’m not entirely sure either is a good option.

  “Umm,” I start, swallowing hard, and then Nat appears with flushed cheeks.

  “Or green ones?” she suggests, holding out a pair of neon kitten heels. “These Blahniks would work, wouldn’t they? I mean, carrots have green leaves, don’t they?”

  There’s a silence.

  “Who’s this?” Adrianna asks nobody in particular, turning around slowly.

  Nat straightens and I see her go into war mode: chin up, eyes narrowed. “I’m Natalie Grey,” she says defiantly.

  “Well, give the model those heels.”

  Nat’s cheeks go bright pink with happiness, and she hesitates for a few seconds before running towards me.

  I could kiss her. They’re only about two inches high.

  “Thought you might find these a bit easier,” she whispers under her breath as I take the shoes from her and slip them on my feet.

  “I love you,” I whisper back.

  “Ditto,” she winks at me.

  “Right,” Adrianna says as Wilbur starts doing some kind of celebratory t’ai chi in the background. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  And we do.

  mazingly, the shoot is a success.

  Apparently all I have to do is harness my inner carrot, and I don’t want to be vain, but it’s easier than I thought.

  I swing my handbag around and shift from side to side. I stare blankly into space as if I’ve forgotten what it is I’m about to say. I hop into the air with my leg out.

  I turn around and peer over my shoulder so that the diamante on my back is twisted into a zig zag.

  And, as I crumple and stretch, pivot and expand (only falling over twice), I can’t help wondering if Adrianna has been in cahoots with Miss Hammond this whole time. I’m basically now a trained vegetation impressionist.

  Finally, Adrianna gives a whoop, tells me we’re all finished, and I’m wiped clean and de-orangified.