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I stare at him with my mouth slightly open. I think it’s safe to say that the answer to that question is no. “But—”
“And I am loving this look,” he interrupts, pointing at the football kit. “So new. So fresh. So unusual. Inspired.”
“My jeans had sick on them,” I blurt out in disbelief.
“My Jeans Had Sick On Them. I love it. Such an imagination! Darling-foot—” and here Wilbur pauses so that he can pull me through a particularly dense crowd of really angry-looking girls – “I think you might be about to make my career, my little Pot of Tigers.”
One of the girls behind me mutters in confusion: “Hey, she’s ginger.”
(She’s wrong, by the way: I’m not. I am strawberry blonde.)
“I don’t underst—”
“All will become clear shortly,” Wilbur reassures me. “Maybe. Maybe not, actually, but hey, clarity is so overrated.” He pushes me against the wall. “Now stand there and look gorgeous.”
What? I don’t even know how to start attempting that.
“But—” I say again.
Wilbur takes a Polaroid picture, shakes it and puts it on the table. “Now turn to the side?”
I stare at him, still frozen in shock. None of this is making sense. He tuts and gently pushes my shoulders round so I’m facing the other wall, and then takes another photo.
“Wilbur—” I turn to frantically search the crowd for Nat’s dark head, but I can’t see anything.
“Baby-pudding,” Wilbur interrupts, “you know you look just like a treefrog? Darling, you could climb up a tree with no help at all and I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest.”
I pause and stare at him with my mouth open. Did he just say I look like something with suckers on its feet? Then my mind clears. Focus, Harriet. For God’s sake, focus.
“I have to go,” I explain urgently as Wilbur twists me round and takes a final photo. “I have to get out of here. I have to—”
But I can see Nat heading straight towards us. And I know two things for certain:
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iding under the table probably isn’t the best impromptu decision I’ve ever made, but it’s the only one I can think of. Which is a problem.
First of all, because Wilbur knows I’m here. He just saw me drop to my knees and crawl away. Second, because the table cloth doesn’t quite reach the floor. And third, because there’s already somebody else under here.
“Hi,” the person under the table says, and then he offers me a piece of chewing gum.
There are times in my life when the synapses in my brain move quite fast. For example, during English exams I’ve normally completed the essay with plenty of time to doodle little relevant pictures in the margin in the hope that it gets me extra points. However, there are other times when those synapses don’t do anything at all. They just sit there in confused silence, shrugging at me.
This is one of them.
I stare at the chewing gum in shock and then blink at the boy who’s holding it. He’s so good-looking, it feels like my brain has collapsed and my skull is about to fold in on itself. Which is actually not as unpleasant a sensation as you might think.
“Well?” the boy says, leaning back against the wall and looking at me with his eyelids lowered. “Do you want the gum or not?”
He’s about my age and he looks like a dark lion. He has large black curls that point in every direction and slanted eyes and a wide mouth that curves up at the edges. He’s so beautiful that all I can hear in my head is a high-pitched white noise like a recently switched-off television.
It takes an interaction of seventy-two different muscles to produce human speech, and right now not a single one of them is working. I open and shut my mouth a few times, like a goldfish.
“I can see,” he continues in a lazy accent that doesn’t seem to be English, “that it’s an extremely important decision and you need to think about it carefully. So I’ll give you a few more seconds to weigh up the pros and cons.”
He has really sharp canine teeth, and when he says Fs, they catch on his bottom lip. There’s a mole under his left eye and he smells sort of green, like… grass. Or vegetables. Or maybe lime sweets.
One of his curls is sticking up at the back, like a little duck tail. And I’ve just realised that I’m still staring at him, and he’s still looking at me, and he’s still waiting for me to answer him. I quickly trawl my mind for an appropriate response.
“Chewing gum is banned in Singapore,” I whisper. “Completely banned.” And then I blink twice. It’s probably not the best introductory statement I’ve ever opened with.
His eyes shoot wide open. “Are we in Singapore? How long have I been asleep? How fast does this table move?”
Nice one, Harriet.
“No,” I whisper back, my cheeks already hot,“we’re still in Birmingham. I’m just making the point that if we were in Singapore, we could be arrested for even having chewing gum in our possession.”
Stop talking, Harriet.
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” I gulp. “Luckily we’re not in Singapore, so you’re safe.”
“Well, thank God for UK legislation,” he says, leaning his head against the wall again. His mouth twitches. And then there’s a long silence while he closes his eyes and I go red all over and try to work out whether it’s possible to make a worse first impression.
It’s not.
“I’m Harriet Manners,”I admit finally and then I put my hand out to shake his, realise it’s sweaty with nerves, swoop it back in and pretend I’m scratching my knee instead.
“Hello, Harriet Manners,” Lion Boy says and all I can think is: I know there’s something outside the table that I’m supposed to be running away from, but I can’t quite remember what it is.
“Erm…”Think, Harriet. Think of something normal to say. “Have you been here long?”
“About half an hour.”
“Why?”
“I’m hiding from Wilbur. He’s using me as bait. He keeps chucking me into the crowd to see how many pretty girls I can come back with.”
“Like a maggot?”
He laughs. “Yes. Pretty much exactly like a maggot.”
“And have you… caught anything?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he says, opening one eye and looking straight at me. “It’s too early to say.”
“Oh.” I glance briefly at my watch. “It’s not that early,” I inform him. “Actually, it’s nearly lunchtime.”
The boy looks at my watch – which has a knife, fork and spoon instead of hands – raises an eyebrow and stares at me hard for a few seconds. His nose wiggles a little bit. And then – clearly fascinated by the mesmerising first impression I’ve made – he closes his eyes again.
With Lion Boy apparently unconscious, I suddenly feel a great need to ask him all sorts of questions. I want to know everything. For instance, what is his accent and where is he from? If I get a world map out of my bag, can he point to it for me? Does it have strange animals and really big insects? Is he an only child too? Were the holes in his jeans there when he bought them, like Dad’s, and if not, how did he get them?
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.
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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.
