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Also don’t forget the itineraries for tonight! Hxx
Apparently one in three teenagers send over three thousand text messages a month, and according to my last phone bill I am definitely heading towards that minority. (Although judging by my parents’ reaction, you’d think I was already there.)
Being in a happily organised gang is a surprising amount of work.
There’s another buzz, and the barista pauses from frothing up my milk to grab his phone out of his apron pocket and stare at it with one bright blue eye and one brown.
“You know, Harriet,” Jasper says, “you’re standing right in front of me. You could just say it.”
I glance up in surprise.
His lightly tanned face is flushed by the steam, his dark blond hair has grown into a kind of scruffy mohican and his dark eyebrows are knitted together in their standard frown.
“But what if you forget? You might need it written down for later.”
OK, there might be another, slightly less poetic, reason why we hang out here. Jasper’s family owns this cafe, so he works here most evenings and every weekend and we usually get a discount or an extra sprinkle of chocolate.
If Jasper’s in a good mood, that is. If he’s in a grump, he gives us cinnamon.
“Take your fake-uccino,” he sighs, shaking his head and passing it over the counter. “Burnt biscuit? I’ve screwed up another batch and need to get rid of them before Mum notices.”
I beam at him: I love the burnt ones. “Yes, please.”
“Such a little weirdo,” he says, grabbing two from under the counter. “And what other documentation do I need to bring this evening? A passport? Some kind of visa? Do you have a fingerprinting machine for security purposes?”
Oh my goodness, that would be awesome.
Then I spot his smirk.
“Jasper King,” I tell him airily, “I am very busy so if you’re just going to be sarcastic, I have more important things to do.”
He thinks about that for a few seconds. “I am literally always going to be sarcastic.”
“In that case, I shall be over there, eating my biscuits.” I stick my nose in the air. “Which I appreciate very much, by the way. Please send more over in due course.”
Then, humming to myself, I take my hot chocolate contentedly over to my special section of the corner sofa.
I put little bits of typed-out, laminated paper on the rest of the seats to make sure they’re officially reserved.
I take a huge gulp of my delicious Harriet-uccino.
And I sit down patiently to wait.
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nfortunately, we could be here some time.
Regardless of my gentle yet informative lectures about the importance of punctuality – and the street maps I drew for each of them individually – the rest of Team JINTH is almost always late.
Even though every single one of them lives closer to the cafe than I do.
So I may as well use this delay to update you on what else has been going on in the four months since you last saw me. Just try not to imagine me breaking up my biscuit and crumbling it into my hot chocolate at the same time, because that’s not what I’m doing.
I’m not dropping three more sugar cubes in there either: that would be gross.
Or sprinkling extra chocolate on top.
Ahem.
Well, none that I plan on telling you about right now, anyway.
I’m far too traumatised to go into it quite yet. All you need to know is I never want to hear the words “Paris Couture Fashion Week”, “fluorescent swimming pool” or “giant rabbit head” ever again.
The humiliating nightmares are still recurring.
What else?
Nat and Theo broke up and she won a big fashion award at college – consequently she seems to spend even more time there, if that’s possible; India was promoted from new girl to Head Girl – making her simultaneously cool and powerful; Jasper has done a lot of stomping around, covered in paint and scowling at everyone. (Everybody in my gang has a talent and that’s his speciality.)
In fact, every person in my social circle appears to be on a similarly positive trajectory: the only way is up.
Literally, in Toby’s case.
My ex-stalker has managed to grow another three inches over the last two terms, and we’re beginning to worry that – much like Alice in Wonderland – he’s just going to keep eating things and shooting up vertically until he hits the ceiling.
And that’s pretty much everything.
My entire life: neatly summarised in a series of beautifully organised bullet points and decisive sentences.
Except that’s not what you want to know, is it?
You’re sitting there, nodding – yes, Harriet, lovely, Harriet, how interesting, Harriet – but there’s one burning question I haven’t answered and you’re not going to pay any attention until I do.
Trust me, I understand: that’s how I feel about burning questions too.
So here it is.
I’m just sorry if it’s not what you were hoping for, that’s all.
Every time we fall in love, we statistically lose two good friends: reducing our average friendship group from five people to three.
So six months ago, I pushed a wooden box full of memories under my bed.
I opened the big box in my head.
I put love and romance inside and locked it up tightly.
Then I kept moving forward with the things that make me happy: into a neat, tidy and organised world with lots of extra space in my story now for other things. Like learning that polar bears can eat eighty-six penguins in one sitting and if you lift a kangaroo’s tail it can’t hop, or that outer space tastes of raspberries.
For spending time having fun with my gang.
So no, I don’t have a boyfriend.
And no, I definitely don’t want one.
Because there are approximately a hundred thousand billion cells in the human body, and for the first time in over fifteen months every single one of mine belongs to me again.
I think that’s all you really need to know.
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nyway.
A lot can happen in fifteen seconds.
In just fifteen seconds, 69,000 tweets are posted and eighteen hours of YouTube videos are uploaded.
Every fifteen seconds, 615,000 Facebook statuses are updated, 51 million emails are written and 600,000 texts are sent.
Basically, a lot of socialising goes on.
Over the next quarter of a minute, I do my best to single-handedly boost those statistics.
With my phone mere centimetres from my face, I type as fast as I can: sending a group message letting everyone know it’s unseasonably warm today so they probably don’t need coats, and another asking if I should get their drinks in for them so they don’t have to wait in line.
A text, asking where everyone is now.
Another, asking if they’d like a biscuit or slice of cake, then another just to let them know that I’m totally fine about the cancelled night-trip to the zoo last weekend.
A funny joke I just remembered about a duck.
Another about a whale.
An observation about an interesting squirrel I saw in a tree on the way here.
In fact, I’m texting so hard the only thing I don’t do over the next fifteen seconds is look up or glance around the room.
Which means I’m just sending everyone an interesting fact about biscuits – it comes from the old French word bescuit which means ‘twice cooked’ – when a laugh comes completely out of nowhere.
And it takes a lot longer than it probably should to realise that although it doesn’t belong to anyone in my friendship group, I still know it very well indeed.
Better than I’d like to.
“Well,” a tall blonde girl says as I glance up, finger still paused on SEND, “if it isn’t Harriet Manners.”
And there – looming over me with an extremely confusing statement – is the one part of my life I failed to update you on: the single bullet point I completely left off.
Alexa.
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stare at my arch-nemesis blankly.
Apparently as soon as a young sea-squirt finds a rock to anchor itself to, it will eat its own brain because it doesn’t really need one any more.
I think that’s possibly what’s happened to me.
This place is so safe and so comfortable – such a source of inner strength – I’m not really on my guard any longer.
Now my head is totally empty.
“What a charming surprise,” Alexa continues with another laugh, blowing on her proper, caffeinated coffee. “I didn’t realise you hung out here. Do you mind if I sit with you?”
Seriously: again?
Why does she alwaysinsist on sitting with me? The surface of the earth is 510 billion square metres. Can’t she just – for once – pick one that isn’t directly adjacent to mine?
I watch as my bully of eleven years flicks the paper that says Natalie Grey on to the floorand sits down, propping her spiky high-heeled boots on the chair that says Toby Pilgrim and flinging her handbag on to India Perez.
So much for reservations.
“You know,” she continues with a little smirk, “I wasn’t sure about this place at first, but I think maybe it’s kind of growing on me.”
I nod vaguely. “Mmm.”
“What are you drinking?” she asks curiously, staring into my cup. “Go tea!”
I blink a few times. My beverage is quite clearly not tea: it has fluffed-up milk on top and a ridiculous amount of chocolate sprinkles.
“Actually,” I say, flushing slightly, “it’s an extremely strong cappuccino. The caffeine molecule mimics the molecule adenosine and binds to natural receptors that would otherwise make you sleepy, thus keeping you – I mean me – super-awake.”
Thanks to Jasper’s drink-making skills, there’s no way she can prove this is actually a kiddy-beverage. Thank goodness this time there are no pink mini-marshmallows floating on top.
“Please,” Alexa takes another delicate sip and wiggles her eyebrows, “do tell me mo’.”
I stare at her a little longer, totally bemused. Why does she sound like an American belle from the Deep South?
Then I decide I don’t really care.
There’s a spider in the United States called the Loxosceles reclusa. Its venom is so powerful it destroys flesh: chewing up cell membranes and cutting off the blood supply. Thousands of people every year used to be badly wounded by it.
They’re not any more.
In 1984, scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville found the anti-venom that blocked the spider’s venom and stopped it destroying anything.
There’s a brilliant reason why I left Alexa off my list: she no longer matters. She doesn’t make me cry and she doesn’t make me hide under tables. After eleven years, I finally found the only thing in the world that could stop my bully hurting me.
Myself.
