Picture Perfect (Geek Girl, Book 3)

  No biggy.

  My chest suddenly pings so badly I’m slightly worried the wire on my tiny bra may have poked through and stabbed me.

  This is my portfolio. I hadn’t even seen most of these photos before.

  “You’re not bad at this old modelling lark, Possum,” Wilbur says, raising an eyebrow. “So don’t think I’m doing you any favours, because I’m not. If anything, it’s the other way round.”

  And then he pulls up his sunglasses and gives me a look.

  A human can make more than 10,000 facial expressions, and I’m suddenly so embarrassed, so pleased, so grateful, I’m not entirely sure which one to pick.

  So instead I flush and pull my phone out of my satchel.

  Then I pause. “Why, Wilbur?”

  “Why what, my little Carrot-cake? Did I fall asleep and miss a chunk of dialogue? I’m always doing that.”

  “Why do you always rescue me?”

  Wilbur laughs. “Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother, Baby-baby Panda,” he says, shrugging and putting his sunglasses on. “But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.”

  ccording to statistics, three billion phone calls are made every day in America.

  This is the only one I care about.

  “I’m sorry,” I say the second Nick answers. “Before you say anything, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologise, Harriet. It was an important day and I screwed up badly.”

  “But you didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “But I did screw up.”

  “But not on purpose.”

  My boyfriend laughs. “Do you want to fight? It’s not your birthday any more, Manners, and I’ll take you down. Verbally, with my sharp wit and free internet calls.”

  I smile. “Where are you?”

  “The middle of Manhattan, between fittings. But I was thinking I could try to get to Greenway this evening? Although I probably won’t blow the balloons up until I get off the train this time. Electronic doors are surprisingly difficult to negotiate.”

  “You could,” I say, smiling a bit harder. “Or you could stay here.”

  “Here?” There’s a pause and then, “As in America?”

  “As in here.” I hold my phone into the air so he can hear a fire engine screeching past and the blare of a thousand taxi horns.

  “You’re in New York?”

  When I put my phone back to my ear I can hear the faint echo of a siren getting louder. If it’s the same one, judging by the speed it was moving and the direction it was going in, Nick’s probably less than half a mile away.

  My entire stomach feels suddenly full of electricity.

  My internal octopus is about to get fried.

  “Uh-huh,” I grin. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything,” I say, beaming at the tiny, far away sky. “I just want to talk to you, Nick. About anything at all.”

  think it’s safe to say that plans matter to me.

  Lists, schedules and itineraries: they’re the cement that holds me together. Without them, I’m scared that I’ll just dissolve into an illogical mess that makes no sense.

  That I won’t be me.

  But as I turn the corner and see Nick, I suddenly couldn’t care less about any of them.

  His curly black hair is huge and sticking up everywhere. His grey T-shirt is crumpled, and his hands are slung into the pockets of grass-stained jeans. He’s leaning against a wall – head cocked to the side – and as I approach his smile gets bigger and bigger until it breaks his entire face in half.

  “Hi,” he says as I get close.

  “Hi.” I put my arms around his waist and lean up. He smells of cinnamon for once. “Did you know,” I say as I touch my nose against his, “that the energy Americans expend every day when chewing bubblegum would light a city of ten million people for a day?”

  Nick laughs, takes out his cinnamon gum and neatly lobs it into a nearby bin. “In that case, for the sake of the environment, I should look into getting a bigger mouth.”

  I had so many plans for us.

  We’re supposed to be at the top of the Empire State Building. We’re supposed to be on a boat, in the middle of a lake in Central Park. We’re supposed to be holding hands on an ice-skating rink outside the Rockefeller Center (despite it not actually being built yet, which I admit was a massive oversight in my itinerary).

  We’re supposed to be in a field with a tree and blowing corn and sunshine and a random dove or at least a clean-looking pigeon.

  There’s supposed to be a sunset or a sunrise.

  But there’s none of that.

  Instead, any sunshine is blocked out by an enormous cement skyscraper, and it’s cold and weirdly dark.

  When I look down, I see we’re on top of a grate blowing warm, stale-smelling air into the street and up my dress, making it flutter around my knees.

  We’ve stopped next to the back of a restaurant: dubious-looking water is running down the pavement, and there’s a bit of mushy bread stuck to the edge of my flip-flop. A truck pulls up and starts yelling at the truck next to it for blocking the road, and a man walks past with his finger up his nose.

  I can smell cooked cheese, cabbage, detergent and something that may or may not be a blocked toilet.

  I feel nothing like Marilyn Monroe.

  But – as Nick leans down and kisses me – all of my romantic lists, schedules and itineraries disappear.

  My plans evaporate, and I don’t care.

  e wander around New York for the rest of the day.

  We walk down Fifth Avenue, past Cartier and Saks and Trump Tower and all the tourists wearing trainers and not buying jewellery in Tiffany & Co.

  We walk through Times Square and see the flashing neon lights, with the enormous ticker showing the news and Madame Tussauds and red stairs that lead nowhere.

  We walk past the Grecian-looking New York Library, and pop in to see the original Winnie the Pooh, which apparently has been taken out of England and not given back again.

  At which point we discuss notifying the British Embassy.

  We walk past the white, ship-like Guggenheim Museum and the Rubin Museum of Art and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace, with its brownstone walls and tourists and American flag.

  We keep going past Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Joe’s and Lombardi’s and Katz’s and Scott’s and I point out just how fond Americans seem to be of places that belong to people, and how nice it is to see apostrophes in all the right places.

  We walk through Little Italy and the buildings painted green and white and red, and Chinatown with its bright reds and turquoises, and the shiny roasted ducks hanging upside down in the windows.

  We spin round every few minutes so Nick can make observations about the Empire State Building getting smaller behind us: looming from behind the skyline like tall, pointed royalty.

  And I barely see any of it.

  I might as well be in the local park behind my house for all the attention I give to New York.

  I see the little black curl at the back of Nick’s head, and the tangle of his eyelashes. I see the points of his sharp teeth and the little line next to the right side of his mouth. I smell the warmth of his cheek and the greenness where his forehead meets his hair. I feel the dip in his shoulder where my head fits, and the way he beats a tune on my thumb as we walk.

  And New York slides past behind him like an enormous, expensive backdrop. As if it’s been put there, just to give us something to walk through.

  We hold hands a lot. We kiss a lot.

  A lot.

  And we talk.

  We talk about the blacked-out windows of his car in Africa and the hairdresser in Greenway and how if two rats were left alone for eighteen months they would have a million descendants and about the first time Nick learnt to surf and how the man who had the longest beard in the world stepped on it and broke his own neck and isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever hea
rd?

  We talk so fast and for so long that I barely notice that it’s dark, or that we’ve walked right through the city.

  Finally, we look at the wooden slats under our feet and the enormous river running beneath us.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “This is Brooklyn Bridge.”

  I look through the silver webbing of wires holding it together, as if it’s been built by a giant spider. To either side of us are millions of lights: Brooklyn on one side, and Manhattan on the other.

  It’s a glittering, hovering mass of white, yellow, green, red, blue: all shooting into the sky and mixing into the water. There are lights above us, linking the two sides: at the top of the Empire State Building, in the curves of the Chrysler.

  It’s like looking at the world’s biggest Christmas decoration.

  I take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds.

  “Nice, huh,” Nick grins.

  “It’s …” I search my internal thesaurus. Beguiling. Resplendent. Pulchritudinous. “Perfect.”

  Nick stands behind me, puts his arms around my waist and tucks his chin into my neck.

  “This is my favourite bit of New York. You can be part of the city but not part of it at the same time. It kind of gives everything perspective.”

  I nod. “I read that in 1884 a circus entertainer walked twenty-one elephants across Brooklyn Bridge to prove how strong it was.”

  Nick laughs, kisses my neck and looks up. “See up there?”

  I follow his gaze to the top of the stone arches and nod.

  “Peregrine falcons nest in the eaves. They fly all over the world, but they always come back here.”

  “The word peregrine actually comes from the Latin peregrinus which means wanderer, you know.”

  Nick suddenly goes very quiet so I lean my head backwards until it’s resting on his collarbone.

  We stand like that for a few minutes. And I appreciate the unspoken moment that hangs between us.

  “Nick,” I say tentatively: “I lo—”

  “Shoot,” Nick sighs.

  OK, maybe not.

  “Harriet, I left your birthday present at the model flat. I didn’t know I was seeing you.”

  I shrug. “It’s OK. You can give it to me some other time.”

  “Sorry.” Nick squeezes my shoulder and grazes his nose against my ear. “It’s getting late. Text Annabel and tell her I’ll walk you to the station.”

  “Mmmm,” I say, turning so he can’t see my face as I stare out at the water. “Did you know that the Statue of Liberty wears a size 879 shoe?”

  There’s a long pause, and then Nick says, “Did you catch the train this morning with your dad?”

  I clear my throat and squint at a tiny light in the distance. “Did you know there are seven spikes on the crown of the Statue of Liberty, representing the seven oceans and seven continents of the world?”

  Then I hold on to Nick’s arms really tightly and pretend to really invest in the importance of this hug.

  “Harriet,” he says calmly, prising himself away from me. “Tell me your parents know where you are.”

  I sniff. “They’ve probably worked it out by now, yes.”

  “What?”

  “Well, telling them where I am kind of defeats the point of running away, doesn’t it?”

  Nick’s eyes widen, and then he takes a few steps back.

  “What the hell, Harriet? You can’t just run away to New York without telling anyone!”

  “You’re only a year older than me,” I point out. “And you’re here alone too.”

  “That’s totally different,” he snaps. “My parents know where I am, for starters. You’re in a foreign country. It’s dark. You’ve been missing all day. Your parents are going to be out of their minds.”

  “Well,” I shrug, “that’s what they get for—”

  “No. That’s not what they get for anything. I’m taking you home. Now.” Nick turns round and starts marching back across the bridge.

  I blink, and then run after him. “Wait …”

  “Give me your phone.”

  He’s so angry I hand it to him without another word. He presses a few buttons and then starts talking almost immediately. “Annabel? It’s Nick. Harriet’s in New York, but she’s on her way home.”

  There are a few high mouse squeaks on the other end and then Nick puts his hand over his face and adds, “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  There are a few more squeaks and then silence.

  I can feel myself starting to get angry.

  “You had no right to do that,” I say when he hangs up. My cheeks are burning and I feel about five years old. How dare he? “This is between me and my parents. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “When you spend the day with me, it absolutely does.”

  Without another word Nick turns around.

  And marches me all the way back to Grand Central station in total silence.

  am forced to sit with the ticket inspector the whole way home.

  Nick tells her that I’m foreign and lost, and I have to sit right next to her and then follow her up and down the carriage while she checks people’s tickets.

  It is totally humiliating.

  And also a little bit fun: she lets me punch holes into them with a tiny metal clipper.

  Now, I know a lot of things:

  I know an ant can lift fifty times its own weight, which is like a human lifting a really big car. I know that snails can sleep for three years, and sharks lose 30,000 teeth in a lifetime. I know an iPhone has 240,000 times the power and memory of the Voyager spacecraft and that a gorilla once ripped a sink out of a wall and blamed it on its pet kitten.

  I know in Wyoming it is illegal to take a photo of a rabbit in the month of June, and Disneyland uses 5,000 gallons of paint every year to keep it looking new.

  And I know very little about being a girlfriend.

  But there are some basic rules for us all to stick to.

  I’ve read the books and seen the films and heard the songs, and the conclusion is always that a boyfriend is supposed to be on your side. Fighting for you, protecting you, defending you, against all odds. No matter what you’ve done.

  Laughing at your foibles and eccentricities and finding your weird bits adorable, whatever happens.

  They’re supposed to be on your team.

  I don’t remember Romeo yelling at Juliet. I don’t recall any chapter where Darcy rang Mrs Bennett and dropped Lizzie in it. Rochester didn’t march Jane Eyre all the way through New York without even pausing or turning around to talk to her. Heathcliff never put Cathy on a train and told her to stop being such a brat.

  Frankly, I don’t think Nick is reading the right books. When he’s talking to me again I shall have to give him a list.

  I grumble all the way to Greenway, then stomp and grumble all the way down the road, and then all the way up the garden path. Then – just for good measure – I add under my breath: What kind of boyfriend does that? Whose side is he on? How dare he?

  Who does Nick think he is: my parents?

  At which point I open the front door and am forced to reassess that last question.

  Because Annabel and Dad are both standing silently in the hallway: feet apart, arms crossed, jaws set. Their faces are white, their lips are thin, and there isn’t a smidgen of humour on their faces.

  If I thought Nick was angry, I might have to think again.

  My parents aren’t cross.

  They are livid.

  ’m not going to detail the following conversation in full.

  This is because:

  it is not a conversation

  it’s so loud everyone in a four-million-mile radius heard it anyway

  you already know exactly what was said.

  As soon as the door shuts behind me, my parents go absolutely berserk.

  They didn’t know where I was. Miss Hall had to be sent home. They nearly called the police. New York? Dad had to leave work
early. They spent hours wandering the streets, trying to find me. It’s midnight. Do I have no consideration for anyone else? NEW YORK? I could have been murdered, or mugged or kidnapped.

  Anything could have happened.

  “Except it didn’t,” I point out when Annabel finally draws a breath and Dad sits down on the bottom stair because he’s worn himself out. “I’m OK.”

  A little wave of guilt is rolling around the bottom of my stomach. I knew they’d be worried, but I had no idea they’d be this upset.

  “That is not the point,” Annabel shouts, and Tabitha starts crying via the baby monitor.

  “Well,” Dad says more cautiously. “It is kind of the point, isn’t it?”

  Annabel opens her mouth in fury, and then pinches the bridge of her nose tightly.

  “Look, I understand you’re angry with us, Harriet,” she says more gently. “But this is not the mature way to deal with it. You can’t just go. It’s dangerous.”

  I kick the edge of a stair a few times with my toe. “I just wanted to see New York and …”

  Some basic survival instinct kicks in just in time to stop me mentioning Wilbur, magazines or modelling. The pulsing of the vein in Annabel’s forehead has just started slowing down: I don’t want it to explode and kill us all.

  “Nick,” I finish.

  “Then just tell us that. Your dad could at least have gone with you.” Annabel sighs and sits down on the stairs.

  “So what did you do?” Dad asks. “Because I walked up and down Fifth Avenue about six times, asking anyone if they’d seen you, and frankly I’m keen to see how I should have spent that three hours.”

  I open my mouth, and then shut it again. Agreed to a modelling job and kissed my boyfriend a lot. “Oh, you know,” I say as sensibly as I can. “Museums. Galleries. Interactive exhibitions.”

  “Yes?” Annabel narrows her eyes. “Like what?”

  “Umm, well.” I swallow. “I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which spans 5,000 years of culture, and the Guggenheim Museum, which is housed in the Frank Lloyd Wright building and is a work of art in itself, and the Museum of Modern Art, which has one of the world’s most comprehensive collections including Picasso and Warhol.”