“Harriet?” Annabel says as I run through the hallway and fling open the front door. “I thought I could hear crying. Is everything OK?”
“Yes,” I say as I close the door softly behind me. “At least, I think it will be now.”
I run all the way to the postbox. Which isn’t saying much: it’s only at the bottom of the road.
But still.
And as I run, Nick runs with me.
Home, Hertfordshire – January (10 months ago)
“Did you know that snow isn’t actually white? It’s translucent. It just reflects light uniformly, which makes it look white.”
“Jump,” he instructed, hopping over a large slushy ice puddle and squeezing my hand with his warm, dry fingers. I’d taken my left glove off, claiming it was because I had one randomly hot hand.
This was a small white lie.
Or possibly a translucent one, reflecting light.
My stomach flipped over, and I jumped too late to avoid a totally wet and icy sock.
“Like polar bears, right?” Nick continued as we kept running towards the train station. “They’re not actually white either, are they?”
I was impressed: I told him that months ago. His ability to retain useless but fascinating information was getting nearly as good as mine.
“Exactly,” I said, slipping slightly so that his arm went temporarily round my waist. “We – I mean they – aren’t what they look like at all.”
Then I cleared my throat in embarrassment.
Oops. It was one thing comparing myself to a misfit polar bear in a rainforest in my head occasionally: quite another to do it out loud to my boyfriend.
“I was twelve the first time I saw snow,” Nick grinned as we started running down the stairs to the train platform. “I was so excited I got out of bed at 3am and tried to make a snow angel in shorts and a T-shirt.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Half of the world’s population has never seen snow, Nicholas. Considerably fewer would be that stupid.”
He shouted with laughter and my heart squeezed shut for a few seconds, just as it had the first time he did it in Moscow.
“Luckily, I’ve now got the world’s biggest smarty-pants to balance me back out again.”
With a quick spin, Nick stopped, wrapped his arms round me and pulled me so close I could feel his breath warming the end of my cold nose. I had just a second to notice that everything was white and still and calm, like a snowglobe just before it gets shaken.
Then he kissed me and it all disappeared: the snow, my wet sock and both my feet with it.
When we finally stopped kissing, we’d missed the train.
“I think I need to balance you faster, in that case,” I laughed, cheeks ridiculously warm. “It’s an hour to the next train and now you’re going to miss your Hilfiger casting.”
“Totally worth it. Tell me something else about snow.”
“Umm.” I rummaged through my brain for a few seconds while Nick opened his big grey coat and pulled me inside it so I wouldn’t get cold. “Anything?”
“Tell me anything, Polar Bear Girl,” he said, wrapping his arms round me. “Anything at all.”
“OK.” I found my best snow fact and smoothed it out for a few seconds until it was all neat and clean. “If you had a million snow crystals and compared two of them every second, you’d be there for nearly a hundred thousand years before you found two that matched.”
Nick wiped a snowflake off my cheek and pulled me a bit closer. “Funny,” he said as it started snowing again. “I must be smarter than we thought. It only took me seventeen years.”
And he kissed me again.
I run until I reach the bright red postbox.
For a disorientating second, I can almost believe Nick’s here and not on the other side of the world. That it’s snowing again and I have one cold sock and two hot cheeks. That he’s still with me.
That I’m not on my own.
“I miss you,” I whisper, kissing the envelope and posting it through the hole.
And it’s like magic: I immediately feel lighter.
As if I’ve pulled out all the heavy words and sent them far, far away, where they can’t weigh me down any more. I miss you is gone and – just like that – my heart lifts to a white dwarf, then to the sun, then to Jupiter. Then Neptune and Saturn.
Until, finally, I’m on earth again.
Back where I belong.
ou know what?
People can say what they like about my hippy grandmother – and judging by my parents they often do – but Bunty told me once that sometimes all you need is a good cry and an even better pen.
I think she might have been right.
By 7am the next morning, I’m feeling infinitely brighter and more positive. In fact, I’ve even found the massive flaw in my First Day Back plan.
I didn’t have one.
After years of careful strategising, I can’t believe I tried to fit back into a new life with nothing but a toilet book and an apparently pathological interest in bananas to win people over.
I will never be winging anything again.
Luckily my new plan – aka Harriet’s Win People Over And Make Them Like Me Again Plan (HWPOAMTLMAP, for short) – is so well designed it starts working before I’m even through the school gates.
That’s how powerful it is.
“Hey,” a girl in a yellow dress says, tapping me on the arm. “Do I know you from somewhere? We played volleyball last year, right? Or were you at Meg’s party in February, dancing on a table?”
Volleyball. Party. Dancing on a table.
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I say doubtfully. “If I’d been there I’d have definitely been under it.”
She laughs, even though I wasn’t actually joking.
“No worries – I’ll work it out. Catch you around!”
The girl wanders off and I stare in amazement at the enormous bag I’m carrying with the plan inside it.
Goodness. It’s not even open yet.
Another two students smile as I wander through the corridors, a girl I vanquished in debate club two years ago nods at me and a group of three boys abruptly stop talking as I walk past.
And no: I’m not dressed as a bumblebee or a duck, my trainers are matching and my clothes are seasonally appropriate.
For the first time ever, I’ve actually checked.
“Yo, Harriet,” Robert says as I reach the classroom. I open my bag and pull a pink plastic Tupperware box out. “It is Harriet, isn’t it? You look really … nice today.”
I blink at him. “Sorry?”
“Yeah. You look really … Err. Cute.”
Robert has been in my form for five years, and he once sat on my foot: that’s how utterly invisible I usually am to him. I stare at him in shock, then at the box I’m holding, and it all promptly makes sense again.
Oh my goodness: the poor, poor boy.
His parents clearly aren’t feeding him properly. His blood sugar levels must be dangerously low.
“Thanks, Robert,” I say gently. “You look nice too.”
“Do I?” He grins and leans forward until I’m at risk of being stabbed in the eye by one of his gel-points. “Maybe we could look nice together at lunch sometime?”
“Sure,” I say sympathetically, awkwardly patting his arm. “I’ll save some sugar for you.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows. “I reckon there’s a bit of sugar with my name all over it.”
Huh? How does he know that?
“There is, actually,” I say in surprise, pushing the classroom door open. “And chocolate chips too, and quite a lot of peanut butt—”
But before I can get any further, every person in the room swivels round.
And the room explodes around me.
ll I can hear now is a chorus of my name.
“Good morning, Harriet!” “Hey, Harriet!” “How was your evening, Harriet?” “What did you g
et up to, Harriet?” “Over here, Harriet!”
As if my class has been replaced by a flock of twittering, excited birds.
“Harriet!” Ananya says as I take a bewildered seat. “Or can I call you Ret?”
Ret? That makes me sound like a man with a big moustache and a Panama hat.
“Umm, of course,” I mumble in surprise, putting the box on the desk in front of me and getting an even bigger one out. “Ret. Retty. Or … you know. Harriet is also fine.”
“I’m so sorry we didn’t get a chance to catch up properly yesterday. Sixth-form homework is mad, right? I mean, where do they think we get the time from? Does it grow on trees?”
“Actually, thyme is a flowering herb,” I say distractedly, still blinking at the rest of the class. “It grows best in pots.”
Ananya stares at me blankly, and then explodes in a fit of giggles. “Oh my God, that’s so funny! How do you think that quickly?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. One neuron in the brain fires 200 times a second, but none of mine have done a single thing since I walked into the room.
I knew my plan was good, but this is ridiculous.
“Oh wow-wow-wow,” Liv breathes, pointing at me. “IsthatChanelIloveitit’ssoretroIreallywishIhadonetoo wheredidyougetitfrom?!”
I glance down in confusion at my bright jumper. I don’t know much about designers, but I don’t think Coco Chanel was a big fan of badgers wearing top hats and bow ties.
“My grandmother embroidered it for me.”
I mean Granny Manners: not Bunty, obviously. The latter would rather poke her own eyes out with a biro than get caught appliquéing knitwear.
“OMGthatissounfair. My nan died years before badgers became cool. That is literally so typical.”
I’m not quite sure how to respond to that.
Then I glance cautiously around the room. Everyone’s still staring: Robert keeps winking at me, five girls are whispering and even India gives me a brief nod.
This lot must be starving.
I can’t help but notice that Jasper is still facing the front, utterly unmoved.
We’ll just see about that.
With a sense of triumph, I open my Tupperware box and the comforting smell of freshly baked butter and sugar rises into the air. Inspiration hit me last night, at some point around the fiftieth mumbled sugar cookie.
All I needed was something simple and traditional. Something that would show the class that I care about them and want to be their friend: that I’m not as stuck-up as I made them think.
So – in a flash of positivity – I rushed down to a late-night supermarket.
Then I spent the entire night making, icing and decorating three hundred dinosaur-shaped sugar cookies. Pink Isisauruses and green Tangvayosauruses; purple Argentinosauruses and orange Camarasauruses. Each one personalised so that everyone in my class had their very own biscuit: name written in silver balls and jelly sweets perched on top.
With enough to win over the rest of the year too.
Maybe a few extra for the teachers.
Three for Steve, obviously: he looks like he has a sweet tooth.
And I might be exhausted, and I may still have flour in my eyebrows, but I don’t care. The word mate comes from the Middle Low German word gemate, which literally means to eat together. So maybe this is my best shot at making friends.
Because as people start smiling, chattering to me and munching their way through the biscuits, I think I’ve actually done it.
I am finally part of a team again.
ews of my awesome dinosaur biscuits spreads far and wide.
In fact, I don’t want to sound smug but I may need to rethink my career objectives. Had I known my baking talents were this prodigious, I’d have taken home economics instead of woodwork.
Unless you intend to be an undertaker, there are only so many wooden boxes a girl needs to make.
During double maths, Raya sits next to me and asks “how I did it” because “it’s the sort of thing she’s always wanted to do but never had the confidence.”
“Well,” I say. “It’s actually surprisingly easy.”
Then I explain all about the importance of making sure the room is cool and how it’s essential to really focus on the dough. “Although you don’t want to work it too hard,” I add helpfully. “It’ll make it tough.”
Raya shakes her head in amazement. “I’ve heard that it can be tough,” she says with wide eyes. “Is there … you know. A lot of dough involved?”
“It depends,” I say, thinking about it honestly. “On this particular occasion, huge amounts. Like, ridiculous quantities. Masses.”
I mean, it was 300 cookies, after all.
During breaktime, the girls from the netball team tell me how “lucky” I am because they’re “so amazing”.
“Thank you, but it’s not really luck,” I say as modestly as I can. “There’s an awful lot of hard work involved and a lot of horrible ones get thrown out in the process. I have to stop my dog eating them.”
“Your dog? How does that work?”
“I lock him in the laundry room for an hour or so.”
“Huh.”
By lunchtime, I’ve been asked to go ice-skating, offered an “ironic” pen with a plastic, fluff-coated unicorn coming out of the top, and gifted a bracelet made out of pink and yellow rubber bands.
I obviously make the best biscuits in the world.
Seriously.
Recent studies have shown that a combination of fat and refined sugar can reduce levels of neurofactors produced by the hippocampus, thus slowing brain capabilities. I’m slightly concerned I may have chemically damaged my classmates permanently.
Let’s put it this way: I may postpone trying any until I’ve at least finished my AS levels and maybe graduated university.
Plus I offered Toby one and he didn’t take it.
I think enough said.
By the final period, I’ve basically set up my own market stall in the corner of the common room. There’s a flurry of people lounging around it: chatting and eating and laughing merrily, covered in a fine layer of icing sugar like plastic snowmen.
“Harriet! Want to go shopping this evening?”
“Or down to the local park?”
“Hey, Harriet! How about we go to the cinema and watch something with …” Robert looks me up and down. “Talking cartoon penguins in it?”
I beam at him. I do love a good cartoon penguin.
“That’s hilarious,” Ananya says flatly, taking his sixth biscuit off him. “Are you actually kidding? I think Ret’s got slightly higher standards than a sixteen-year-old schoolboy with a face she could buy in Pizza Hut, thanks very much.”
Liv appears from behind her.
“I mean, as if you could ever compete. Make a wish, fall asleep and dream on.” She starts giggling. “OMG, that’s brilliant. I’m so funny.”
India looks up from the sofa and stares at Robert levelly in silence for a few seconds. “Don’t be so creepy,” she says coolly. “Also, consider holding back on the hair gel. It’s not a dangerous weapon.”
Robert glances at all three girls, and then shrugs.
“Oooh, I’m so intimidated,” he says, taking another biscuit. “Hubble bubble. Laters, witches.”
He wanders out of the door, winking at me and still munching away, and I blink at the girls now flanking me: one in front, and one to either side.
Quietly, the rest of the group around the table is dispersing: four girls make an impromptu trip to the vending machine, Christopher decides he has a monologue to learn somewhere far away and Raya apparently needs to redo her make-up in a different room.
Why does it suddenly feel like I’ve got another three-headed Cerberus? And – much more importantly – what on earth are they talking about and what is going on?
“Umm …” I say awkwardly. “I’m not sure you had to be that …”
Unkind, I’m about to say when I spot two differentco
loured eyes in the corner of the room, fixed firmly on mine. There’s a plant called the Mimosa Pudica that curls up abruptly when touched: folding in on itself to protect itself. It suddenly feels like that’s what my stomach is doing too.
Jasper and I stare at each other for a few seconds as my insides retract sharply.
Then he looks away with a scowl, picks up his bag and starts pounding with a rigid back towards the door of the common room. At which point it flings open and Alexa storms in, staring at her phone.
“Hey,” he says, dodging to the side. “Be careful where you’re—”
But it’s too late.
Alexa keeps walking and – with an enormous crash – the two people who like me least in the world collide.
Straight into each other.
here’s a very good reason why anacondas and crocodiles aren’t kept in the same zoo enclosure.
The same logic should probably extend to these two.
Jasper’s art bag has fallen open and paints have gone everywhere: smashing into little pieces all over the floor. Reds and blues and greens and yellows are spread in a powdery, wet rainbow across the carpet. A couple of sheets of white paper have fallen out, and they’re soaking it all up like soggy rectangular butterflies.
“Brilliant,” he sighs, bending down. “Just … brilliant.”
He holds the paper up, and for a few seconds I catch an incredibly beautiful pencil sketch of a large orange leaf with an autumn forest drawn inside it: browns and oranges and reds, now ruined by a thick splodge of black and purple.
In the meantime, Alexa is still finishing her text.
“Watch where you’re going,” she says without looking up. “Freakazoid.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Jasper throws his paints back in his bag. “I hadn’t realised I was the invisible man. Huge apologies for your inability to walk straight through me. I’ll look into a way of rectifying that as soon as possible.”
Then he flings his bag back over his shoulder, crumples up the ruined pages, throws them into a nearby bin and thunders out of the door. Honestly, there’s some comfort to be taken from seeing that Jasper seems to dislike Alexa nearly as much as he dislikes me.