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I’m 27.2. And I was being quite kind about my nose.
Anyway, I’ve given up thinking about it. There has clearly been some kind of mistake, and at this precise moment somebody is smacking Wilbur round the head and putting him in a nice jacket that ties his arms behind his back.
And – just so you know – I’m not thinking about Nick either. He hasn’t popped into my head once, with his big liony curls and his lime-green smell and his duck-tail tuft at the back. In fact, I can barely remember him. I meet head-smashingly beautiful foreign boys all the time. I can’t hide under a table without finding one there. There is no reason whatsoever that this one would stick in my memory or make my stomach twirl at intervals.
And I definitely didn’t walk past the Infinity Models stall six or seven times during the rest of the day in case he was there. Which he wasn’t.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot else to think about. My head feels like it’s fallen off the top of a great wall and I’m waiting for all the king’s soldiers to come and put it back together again. There’s only one thing left to occupy myself with. And it isn’t that much fun to dwell on. Can you guess what it is yet?
Uh-huh.
Now I have to go home and tell my parents.
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The problem with making meticulous and well-constructed plans is that people tend to ignore them. Other people. Not me; I stick to them religiously.
As I open the front door, I’m already clearing my throat. I’ve decided to lead with the modelling because hopefully my parents will be so paralysed with confusion and shock that I can slip the vast quantity of money they now owe various stallholders in there without them noticing: like doing a root canal after local anaesthetic.
“Dad?” I say nervously, shutting the door behind me. “Annabel?”
Hugo immediately barrels into my legs and starts pawing at my stomach. He has obviously just been to the hairdresser’s because I can now see where his eyes are instead of just guessing by their proximity to his nose.
“Hey, Hugo,” I add, bending down. “You’re looking very elegant.” He licks my face, which I think means, “Thanks very much,” or possibly, “You smell of hotdog.” Then I look back up. “Dad? Annabel?”
Silence.
You know what? The welcoming atmosphere in this house needs to be worked on. I’ve been away all day and it’s dark. Why aren’t they standing in the hallway, waiting anxiously for me to arrive home safe and in one unharmed piece? What kind of parents are they?
“Dad?” I repeat again, getting a bit snarly. “Annab—”
“Harriet?” Annabel interrupts from the living room. “Come in here, please.”
I sigh loudly, put my satchel down on the floor and then do as I’ve been told. Annabel is sitting on the sofa in her office suit, inexplicably eating sardines out of a tin, and Dad is in the armchair opposite her.
You know what I was saying about young children, and how non-uniform doesn’t really exist? It’s the same for lawyers. Annabel’s either in her suit, or her dressing gown, or she puts her dressing gown on top of her suit. When she goes out for dinner, she has to buy an outfit especially.
“What are you eating?” I ask immediately, sitting down on a chair and looking at Annabel’s tin.
“Sardines,” Annabel says – as if I didn’t mean why are you eating that? – and she pops another one in her mouth. “Now, Harriet,” Annabel says as soon as she’s swallowed it. “Your dad’s in trouble at work.”
“Annabel!” Dad exclaims. “For the love of… Don’t just throw that at her! Lead up to it, for God’s sake!”
“Fine.” My stepmother rolls her eyes. “Hello, Harriet. How are you? Your dad’s in trouble at work.” Then she looks at Dad. “Better?”
“Not even slightly.” Dad scowls. “It’s nothing, Harriet. Just a small difference in opinion.”
“You told your most important client to go and French Connection UK himself, Richard. In the middle of reception.”
Dad picks a bit of fluff off the sofa. “Well, he wasn’t supposed to hear it, was he?” he says in his most defensive voice. “It just came out loudly because of the acoustics. That place is all stone walls.”
“And we’re keen that you have a sterling example of adult behaviour to follow, Harriet.”
“It was the walls,” Dad shouts in exasperation.
I look at Annabel. Under a cosy layer of flippancy she looks really worried. “How bad is it?”
Annabel puts another sardine in her mouth. “Bad. They’ve called him into a disciplinary tomorrow.”
“It’s just a formality,” Dad mutters. “I’m creative: I’m supposed to be unpredictable. I’m the sort of guy who wears brown suede shoes when it’s raining; they just don’t know what to do with me. I’ll probably get a pay rise for being such a maverick.”
Annabel lifts one eyebrow and then rubs her eyes. “Let’s hope so because we really can’t afford to just live on one salary at the moment. Anyway. What about you, Harriet? Did you have a nice day? I hope you had a fragrant day at least because when I went into the bathroom, it was knee-deep in your grandmother’s vanilla talcum powder.”
“Oh.” I look at the floor. “Sorry. I meant to clean that up.”
“Of course you did. If only your actual cleaning was as good as your intended cleaning, we would have a very tidy house indeed. Did you manage to get out of whatever it is you were trying to avoid this time?”
“Actually,” I say, ignoring this extremely slanderous insinuation, and then I take a deep breath and stand up. “I have something to tell you both.”
On second thoughts, maybe I won’t tell them about the money right now. Honesty is very important within families. But so is timing. Especially when it comes to amounts like £3,000 while your father is in the process of throwing his job out of the window.
“Well?” Annabel prompts after a pause. “Spit it out, sweetheart.”
“I, uh,” I start. “Well, it’s…” I take a deep breath and prepare myself for the…well, whatever reaction you get from parents to news like this. “I’ve been spotted,” I finally manage to blurt out. There’s a silence. “Today,” I clarify. “I’ve been spotted today.”
There’s another silence and then Annabel frowns. “What?” she snaps. “Let me see.” She puts the sardine can down and drags me up from the chair and pulls me under the light. She looks carefully at my face, and then she looks at my hand and turns it over. She stares at my wrist and the inside of my upper arm. Then she gets Dad to stand up and look at my wrist and the inside of my upper arm. What the hell are they doing?
“No, Harriet,” she finally says firmly. “There’re a couple on your forehead, but I think that’s just teenage acne.”
“Since when is spotted a human adjective?” I snap impatiently. “I’m not a leopard or a stingray. Spotted. Verb, not adjective. Scouted. Picked up. Discovered. Found.” They still look blank, so I continue even more crossly. “By a model agent. By Infinity Models, to be more specific.”
Annabel looks even more confused. “To do what?”
“To pack potatoes.”
“Really?”
“No! To be a model,” I yell in distress. It’s one thing thinking you’re not pretty, but it’s quite another having that confirmed by the only people in the world who are supposed to think otherwise.
Annabel frowns again. When I look at Dad, however, he appears to be shining with the light of a million smug fairies. “They’re my genes, you know,” he says, pointing to me. “Standing right there. That’s my genetics.”
“Yes, dear, they’re your genes,” Annabel repeats as if she’s talking to a child. And then she sits down again and picks up her newspaper.
I look from Annabel to Dad. Is that it? I mean, seriously?
OK, I didn’t expect them to start dancing round the coffee table, waving their Sudoku books in the air like exotic bird feathers, but a bit more enthusiasm would be nice. Fantastic, Harriet, they could say. Maybe you’re not as totally disgusting to look at as we all thought you were. How wonderful for the whole family.
Or something that acknowledges that this would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to anyone, if I was someone else and this was a totally different family.
Annabel looks up to where I’m still standing, mouth open. “What?” she says. “You can’t do it, Harriet. You’re too young and you’ve got exams coming up.”
“She can’t do it?” Dad repeats in an incredulous tone. “What do you mean she can’t do it?”
Annabel looks at him calmly. “She’s fifteen, Richard. It’s totally inappropriate.”
“It’s Infinity Models, Annabel. Even I’ve heard of them.”
“Hundreds of beautiful women in one place? I bet you have, darling. But the answer’s still no.”
“Oh my God,” Dad yells at the top of his voice. “This is so unfair.”
You see the problem? It’s really hard being a child in my family when that space seems to already be taken.
“I don’t actually want to do it,” I interrupt. “I’m just telling you. But you could say well done or something.”
“You don’t want to do it?” Dad yells at me.
Oh, for God’s sake.
Annabel looks at me. “It’s modelling. Fashion.” She pulls a face. “What’s there to be excited about? Why is everyone getting so worked up?”
I look from her to Dad and then at Hugo. Hugo gets off the chair, tail wagging, and promptly licks me. I think he knows I need it.
“Right,” I say in a slightly deflated voice. “Fine.”
The only remotely exciting thing that has ever happened to me and it’s over already. It lasted about as long as I thought it would. I feel a little bit like sulking. Dad still looks totally shell-shocked.
“Now,” Annabel says, shaking the remote control to get the batteries working and turning the television on. “Who wants to watch a documentary about locusts?”
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sulk for about twenty-five minutes and then get bored and spend the rest of Thursday night a) not thinking about Nick and b) getting ready to woo Nat into Best Friendship again. Flowers, cards, poetry: I even bake special, personalised, sugar-free muffins with photos of me and her on top (not edible photos – I didn’t have time – real photos). And then I put them all in my satchel and prepare to take them to school, where I will ambush Nat and convince her of my guilt and/or innocence.
Whatever it takes to make her anger with me disappear.
It’s all a total waste of time and effort and flour. Apparently I don’t need to woo Nat at all. On Friday morning, at precisely 8am, the doorbell rings.
“Nat! You’re here!” I gurgle in surprise, halfway through a jam sandwich. It comes out a sticky, strawberry-flavoured, “Nnnnnaaatcchh uuuhhh hhiiii!”
“For breakfast?” she says, looking pointedly at the other half, which is perched in my left hand.
I stick my nose in the air in my most dignified way. “Jam sandwiches have all the necessary nutrients needed to survive. Sugar, vitamins, carbohydrates. I could live entirely on jam sandwiches and lead a totally normal life.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Nat says, pulling me out of the door. It’s lucky I already have my shoes on or I’d be walking to school in my socks. “You’d be The Girl Who Only Eats Strawberry Jam Sandwiches and that’s not normal.” She looks at me and then coughs. “Can I have the other half, though? I’m totally starving.”
I give her the other half in surprise and then look at her while she eats it. Firstly, Nat never eats food with high sugar content. Ever. Not since that fateful disco, eight years ago. And secondly, is this it then? The big dramatic scene I’ve been dreading all night? I made muffins without sugar especially and now nobody is going to eat them.
“Nat,” I start and at exactly the same moment she says “Harriet?” and then she clears her throat.
“I’m sorry. For getting mad at you and stomping off.”
“Oh.” I blink in shock. “That’s OK. I’m sorry too. For… getting spotted and stuff.”
“The lying was the main problem, Harriet.” Nat twists her mouth up in an awkward half-smile and licks her fingers. “Can we just forget about yesterday?”
“Of course we can,” I beam at her.
A huge wave of relief washes over me: it’s all OK. I was being neurotic and oversensitive as normal.
And then – just like waves – the relief abruptly disappears. Nat clears her throat and I look at her again, but a little more carefully this time. Suddenly I can see what I didn’t notice before: that her neck is tense and her shoulders are all bunched up. Her collarbones have gone red and splotchy. The rims of her eyes are pink. She keeps biting her bottom lip.
“Cool,” Nat says after an infinitely long pause, and then an anxious flush climbs up her cheeks and sits there, staring at me. “So…”And she clears her throat. “Did they…”She swallows. “You know… ring you?” She clears her throat for the third time. “Infinity? Did they ring you?”
She hasn’t forgotten about yesterday at all. Not even a little bit.
“No.” I didn’t give them my number, I add in my head, but somehow I’m not sure saying that out loud is going to help.
“Oh.” Nat’s cheeks get darker. “That’s a shame. I’m sorry. So let’s just put it behind us, right?”
I frown. I thought we’d already done that. “OK.”
“And pretend it never happened,” Nat adds in a tense voice.
“…OK.”
Every time she tells us to put it behind us, it’s becoming more and more clear that Nat hasn’t done that.
“We’ll just carry on as normal,” Nat adds.
“…OK.”
Then there’s a long silence and it’s not comfortable. In ten years, it might be the first uncomfortable silence there has ever been between us. Apart from the time she peed herself on the ballet-room floor and it hit my foot. That was a little bit awkward too.
“Anyway,” Nat says after a couple of minutes, as she pats her hair and straightens her coat and pulls up her school tights with one hand. “So, Harriet.” She looks at the bite of sandwich left in her hand. “Where’s the protein in this thing, huh? I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’ve done your research properly.”
Finally, the topic has moved back to territory I can handle.
“I have done my research properly!” I shout back, pretending to be totally outraged. “The protein’s in the…” What can I say to move the conversation as far from modelling as it is possible to move it? “Chicken,” I finish and then grin at her. “There’s chicken in it too. Did I forget to mention that? Strawberry and high-protein chicken sandwiches. Mmmm. My favourite.”
“Strawberry and chicken?” Nat laughs and my shoulders relax a little bit.
“You can totally live on strawberry and chicken sandwiches,” I clarify, trying not to meet her eyes. Is there any way we can just avoid the subject of yesterday until it goes away completely? Is that how Best Friendship works? Maybe. Maybe not.
But we both spend the rest of the journey to school trying to find out.
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he really great thing about Toby Pilgrim is that you can always rely on him to treat a delicate situation with sensitivity and consideration.
