Picture Perfect (Geek Girl, Book 3)

  I was sort of hoping for a friendly laugh.

  I do not get one.

  “I named him after Sir Francis Drake. I thought he looked a bit British, no offence. Are you telling me everyone in New York thinks I have a novelty pig called Bacon?”

  “You want to be remembered,” Cal reminds her.

  Kenderall looks totally horrified. “Not for being funny.”

  I stand up swiftly: Francis is starting to pee on the platform floor and I need to move before it hits my foot. “Are we the models for today, then?”

  “I am,” Kenderall says, pointing at her own face. “This needs recording as often as possible.”

  “And I’m the photographer’s assistant,” Cal says, shrugging. “I’m just here to carry things and make tea. It’s not that interesting, but on days like this it’s totally worth it.”

  He looks me up and down again.

  There are 60,000 miles of blood capillaries in the human body, which is the surface-area equivalent of three tennis courts.

  Every centimetre of mine is now on fire.

  “There’s another girl waiting for us at the fairground,” Kenderall says, bending down and tying a little orange bandana around the pig’s head. “And OMG, she’s so yawn. There isn’t a single striking characteristic about her.”

  “Not bad looking,” Cal says, shrugging. “If you like pale brunettes. Personally, I prefer perky redheads.”

  Which should be a cue for me to get even redder, but I’m not really listening any more. I heard one word, and then everything went very quiet and far away.

  “F-fairground?” I stammer. “What do you mean f-f-fairground?”

  “It’s, like, this space that hosts fun rides, like a carnival?” Kenderall says, rolling her eyes. “Oh dear. Don’t say that kind of stuff out loud, babe. It gives models a bad name.”

  “But …” I look around the station wildly, to where Wilbur is now showing Nancy the sketches in his art-pad. As he flips the pages, I see elaborate and surprisingly beautiful drawings of roller coasters and Ferris wheels and swings. “Wilbur said we were going to the beach.”

  “This is Coney Island,” Cal says, stretching his arms out wide. “There is a beach, but it’s famous for its fairground.”

  OK. This is the second time in a fortnight that someone I trust has taken me somewhere and pretended I’m going somewhere else.

  I need to start asking smarter questions.

  “B-b-but …” Sunshine. Sea. Sand. Pods of dolphins. They’re all vanishing with little pops, like lemmings off the edge of a cliff. “It’s just an elaborate set, right? A backdrop?”

  “Nope, my little Chicken-monkey,” Wilbur says, sashaying back towards us. “Isn’t this fun? You won’t even have to queue for rides.”

  No.

  No no no no no no.

  I start backing away in terror.

  “Oopsy,” Wilbur says, grabbing my arm as I manage to get one foot on the train behind me. “The fairground is this way, Bunny-boo.”

  In the distance, I can see the top of an enormous, brightly coloured wheel and a sign that says LUNA PARK.

  Luna is the Latin word for moon, which is the stem for the word lunatic because in the thirteenth century people thought that periodic insanity was caused by changes of the moon. And as they drag me towards the single thing in the world I am most terrified of, all I can think is:

  Lunatic Park.

  Sounds about right.

  am very fond of gravity.

  Gravity keeps the Earth and the other planets in orbit around the sun. It keeps the moon in orbit around the Earth. It creates tides and waves. When you drop a pen, gravity is what makes it hit the ground; when you jump, gravity is what stops you flying into space.

  Without gravity, the entire world would literally spin out of control.

  If I wanted that kind of unregulated, unmanageable nonsense, I’d go to Pluto where I would weigh nine pounds and could just float around like Peter Pan.

  Over the last ten years, I have been to five funfairs with Nat who insists on going on the wildest, fastest rides possible while I stand, terrified, at the bottom holding her coat.

  This is my punishment for running away again.

  I thought I understood karmic retribution, but the universe obviously works faster than I thought it did. You couldn’t cook a casserole in the time it’s taken for me to get my cosmic comeuppance.

  “I wasn’t sure about this initially,” Nancy smiles as we approach the fairground. “But you might actually be some weird kind of genius, Wilbur.”

  “Mais bien sûr,” he says in mock surprise. “Who said I wasn’t? Was it Stephanie at Infinity Models? I once said she couldn’t pull off leggings and she’s hated me ever since.”

  I stare at the entrance gates in shock.

  It’s an enormous, ten-metre clown face, moulded in peach-coloured plaster.

  The eyes are wide open and bright blue; the cheeks are bright pink and the lips are bright red and also open. There’s a spiky yellow crown and two brightly coloured turrets on either side. And in the gaping, wide mouth are huge white teeth: rectangular and flat, like a row of shiny headstones.

  We’re expected to enter Luna Park through the mouth of an insane clown, apparently.

  And Nat wonders why I don’t like fairgrounds.

  “Look, Munchkin,” Wilbur says, pointing upwards. “The teeth and eyes light up at night-time. Isn’t that just fabadoozy? I wish mine did that.”

  I can feel the palms of my hands getting damp.

  Since when have lit-up eyes and teeth ever made anything less scary?

  I take a deep breath and run under the teeth with my hands over my head just in case the jaws suddenly decide to come alive and clench down. Of all the many ways I do not want to die, Eaten by a Clown is pretty high up the list.

  Just underneath is having my legs chewed off by a vampire zombie-shark and being made to spend the afternoon in TopShop.

  “Harriet,” Nancy says, touching my shoulder as I quiver on the other side, arms still wrapped around my head. “Do you want to follow Marianna? She’s your stylist this morning.”

  She points at a small woman with glossy black curls, shiny pink lips and an enormous black bag.

  “Uh-huh,” I say blankly, eyes widening even more. I’ve just noticed the pods revolving around the Ferris wheel. They’re red and blue and green, with metal grids all the way round them. Like tiny cheerful little birdcages.

  If you’re being optimistic.

  Swinging death prisons, if you’re being less so.

  “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” Nancy says, frowning. “I should probably have checked that with you yesterday.”

  Am I afraid of heights? No.

  Am I afraid of being secured into a blue metal ball, attached to two bits of elastic and catapulted fifty metres into the air at 90mph?

  Absolutely.

  “Nope,” I lie, tucking my hair behind my ears and grinning so hard my ears start to ache. “I am very much looking forward to this exciting and unprecedented experience.”

  Because I am a professional model.

  Because I agreed to this job.

  Because I don’t want to let anyone down or for anyone else to be angry with me.

  But most of all, because otherwise I’ll be sent straight back home to my parents.

  And frankly I think a ride called Slingshot will be absolutely nothing in comparison to what they are going to do to me when I see them next.

  etting ready has always been my favourite part of any fashion shoot.

  It’s the bit where – with a few splashes of lotions and potions – I’m transformed into somebody else.

  Somebody glamorous. Somebody pretty.

  It’s a bit like alchemy, except that instead of turning base metals into gold they somehow manage to get a freckly, awkward schoolgirl to look vaguely presentable in front of a camera.

  Unfortunately Marianna doesn’t appear to have the same alchemical
ambitions.

  “Nobody said you’d be this pale, redhead,” she grumbles as she starts emptying the contents of her black bag all over a fold-up table in the changing room. “They could have given me warning.”

  My face obediently starts changing colour.

  “0.5 per cent of the world’s population has red hair,” I say slightly defensively. “That’s nearly forty million of us.”

  “Your hair is not the problem.” She picks up a few different pots of cream liquid and starts aggressively mixing them on the back of her hand. “You try covering up a trillion freckles without any preparation.”

  Then she starts her assault.

  She attacks me with a foundation brush and three different shades of foundation. She attacks me with a coarse eyeshadow brush and stabs enormous quantities of dark grey into my eyelids. She rubs a toothbrush along my lips and applies a gel that burns. She starts back-combing my hair so vigorously I decide to put Death by Hairbrush just below Death by Clown on my list of ways I don’t want to perish.

  At one stage, she bends down on the floor and picks up some mud which she then starts smearing on my face.

  She also adds to this physical onslaught snippy little comments, like: “God, but your eyelashes are non-existent,” and “Have you even heard of tweezers?” and “What a nose. You could find ants with that thing.”

  Finally she sprays me with an enormous can of hairspray until I start choking.

  “I’m sorry,” she says stiffly. “Is the model finding getting paid to sit still and do nothing difficult?”

  I blink a few times in surprise. “Sorry.”

  Which is another huge mistake.

  “Brilliant,” she says, getting a cotton-wool bud out and dipping it in eye make-up remover. “The mascara wasn’t dry. So I’ll just start again, shall I? It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.”

  Finally, when I’ve been satisfactorily beaten to a pulp, she goes to the corner and pulls out a bit of fabric.

  It’s shapeless and small and grey. It’s ripped and shredded, and has bits of loose thread hanging off the edges. There’s a dark smudge running across the front of it, and when she holds it out a rusty-looking safety pin falls to the floor with a clink.

  For the first time, I really miss Yuka Ito.

  “Do you have an opinion?” Marianna snaps as I blink at it.

  I shake my head. “No-o-o. It’s very …” Likely to give me tetanus. “… multi-textural.”

  “Just get into it.”

  I obediently do as I’m told. Then I’m led out of the room to where Wilbur is waiting for me.

  “Oh,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Oh oh oh. It’s amazing, my little cat-flip-flops! It’s exactly what we wanted! Do you want to see your gloriousness?”

  I look down at my ratty furry slippers: the kind old ladies leave outside the bathroom.

  “Sure,” I say doubtfully.

  Wilbur picks up a cracked mirror and holds it aloft for me.

  My eyes are dark grey and swollen and pink around the edges. My skin is the wrong colour. There’s mud on my cheeks, and my hair looks like something hamsters make in the corners of their cage.

  I don’t look like I’ve been transformed into a glamorous funfair-loving model. I look like I’ve been sleeping under one of the rides for the last five years.

  “Don’t you just love it?” Wilbur says, laughing delightedly. “You look just edible. It’s by a new designer in Brooklyn so hip almost nobody has ever heard of him. Never to be made again.”

  I can see why.

  “Umm, Wilbur?” I check as I’m led back into the sunshine. “Exactly how many people read this magazine?”

  “Three,” he says cheerfully. “Maybe three and a half.”

  “Thousand?”

  Wilbur shouts with laughter. “Oh my little poo-nut, where do you think we are – the Pitcairn Islands? Three and a half million, give or take one or two.”

  Three and a half million.

  Three and a half million people across America are going to see me looking like somebody who gets killed quite early on in Les Miserables.

  I guess karma isn’t finished with me yet after all.

  enderall is the first thing I see when I return to the fairground.

  This is partly because she’s dressed in a long, bright yellow silk dress, with huge gold earrings and gold bangles wound up her arms like some kind of Amazonian sun goddess.

  But mostly because she yells, “You have got to be freaking kidding me!” at the top of her voice as I approach.

  “Well,” she says, stomping towards me in bright gold heels. “Somebody pulled the short straw, didn’t they? You need a better agent, babe. You wouldn’t get me into an outfit like that in a million years. You look hideous.”

  I’m too busy staring beyond her to respond.

  There’s the usual group of people wearing black and holding lights and light reflectors and make-up bags and large cameras. And in the middle of this crowd is a girl.

  She’s tall and pale and beautiful. Her brown hair is up in a bun, and she’s wearing a sky-blue silk evening gown, with silver earrings and a large silver necklace with a shimmering blue stone set in the middle.

  Behind her is a winding mass of metal.

  It twists and turns and spirals and dips and tangles like the strings of a puppet that’s been left too long in the box.

  Every few minutes there’s a loud rush, and a small car zooms past at top speed, packed full of people.

  Screaming people.

  “That’s Cyclone,” Nancy quips, pointing at the giant roller coaster. “We’re going to get a great action shot with this one.”

  If you scare a vulture, it will vomit to try and drive away its predator. It’s both a peace offering, and a method of self-defence. I’m not a vulture, but I might go ahead and give it a shot.

  I look down at my hideous outfit, and then at the beautiful yellow and blue silk dresses next to me. Then I look at my nasty fur slippers. When Charles Perrault wrote Cendrillon in 1697, he accidentally replaced the word vair – fur – with verre, meaning glass.

  Which means I’m Cinderella.

  “Hello, Fleur,” I say to the least ugly sister I have seen, ever.

  “Hi, Harriet,” Fleur says softly. “Again.”

  bviously, Harriet, again can mean a lot of things.

  It can mean, “Oh, thank goodness! I was hoping I would see you again!” It can mean, “I am so sorry I ran off without giving you my number! Let’s hang out and play Monopoly as soon as possible!”

  Sadly, there is no exclamation mark, so it means neither of those things.

  Fleur looks exhausted.

  And slightly concerned that I’m either going to try and force her into an involuntary lunch or knock her on to the floor in public again.

  “How are you?” I say awkwardly as Nancy starts arranging the crowd and securing the barriers around us.

  “Fine,” Fleur tells the floor.

  “And …” I’ve run out of small talk already. There really should be a class on this at school. “The clouds are nice today, aren’t they? I think those are Cirrus, and they are usually just above six thousand metres high.”

  “Right,” Fleur says as I point vaguely upwards, and I really wish I’d just stuck with fire hydrants. At least we’d be on known territory.

  “Fleur?” Cal lifts the rope for the ride. “Ready?”

  Her collarbone is going steadily pink.

  “Mmm,” she says, staring at the toes of her shoes and climbing into the roller-coaster car.

  Cal hops into the back seat and winks at me.

  “Don’t worry about blurgh,” Kenderall says in a low voice. “I did try and warn you.”

  “Blurgh?”

  “Fleur Blurgh. She can suck the character out of anyone from a hundred paces.”

  I look at Fleur in surprise. She’s huddled in the seat of the car with her arms folded around her middle and her shoulders hunched,
as if something in the centre of her is slowly getting smaller. Where is the girl who winked at me from behind the curtain in Russia?

  Fleur looks up, catches my eye and looks away, as if I’m totally invisible.

  “On you get, my little Model-moos,” Wilbur says, gesturing towards the train. “And let me remind you, Chipmunks, this is high fashion. No screaming. No laughing. No looking like you’re having fun. I want you to appear thoroughly miserable.”

  I look at the tiny metal car and the spiralling mass of metal above us that totally defies gravity and logic. This is possibly the most inaccurate allocation of the word ‘fun’ ever.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” I say, climbing in next to Kenderall and behind a woman wearing black, holding an enormous camera. “Just shoot me.”

  And the worst three minutes of my life begin.

  ere are the three biggest roller coasters in the world:

  Kingda Da, in New Jersey. 139 metres.

  Top Thrill Dragster, in Ohio. 130 metres.

  Superman, in California. 126 metres.

  They’re all in the United States.

  This country clearly has no respect for the natural speed, height and orientation of human beings.

  For the first few seconds, I almost forget where we are. The sea is sparkling in front of us. The sand is a yellow ribbon, and – dotted like tiny stars – are people: lying on the beach, eating hot dogs, sunbathing, swimming with dolphins.

  And then the world tilts and it all disappears.

  “Woooooooooo,” Kenderall shouts next to me. “Come on, baby! Bring it on!”

  The camera starts clicking, and – in what feels like another dimension, even though she’s sitting next to me – I can feel Kenderall go very still, arch back in her seat and start pouting dramatically.

  When I was six, Nat had a little black gerbil called Fidget. It liked sniffing your finger through the cage, nibbling on bits of carrot and running very fast in its wheel.

  But every now and then it couldn’t keep up: it would end up pressed against the side of the wheel, spinning round and round until it finally got ejected on to the floor of the cage.