Geek Girl (24 page)

’m too late.

That’s the only thing I know for certain when I open Nat’s bedroom door. She’s sitting on her bed in her pyjamas with the newspaper next to her. And on her face is the most hurt expression I’ve ever seen on anyone. Ever.

“Nat—” I start and then grind to a halt. “Nat, it’s not what it looks like.” Then I pause because actually, it’s
exactly
what it looks like.

“What’s this?” she asks in a bewildered voice. She holds the newspaper up. “Harriet? What’s going on?”

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her sound so young. It’s like we’re five years old again. “It’s… It’s…” I say and then I swallow and look at the floor. “It’s exactly what it looks like.”

“You haven’t been sick?”

“No.”

“You were in Russia?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a model?”

“Yes.”

“I defended you…”

“I know.”

“And you left me to Alexa and didn’t even tell me why?”

Oh God. “Yes.”

“You’ve been lying about…” Nat pauses for a few seconds. “About
everything
?”

“I was going to tell you, but I was looking for the right way to do it.”

“Via national newspaper?”

I stare at her in confusion and then the penny drops. I look at the envelope. On the front is printed in familiar red capital letters:
NAT, IT WAS THE EASIEST WAY TO TELL YOU.

Alexa really is a piece of work.

“
No
,” I gasp. “You weren’t supposed to know for
months
.” Then I flinch. I’m not sure that’s the best thing I could have said.

Nat’s eyes widen. “You were going to keep lying for
months
?”

“Well,
no
… you know… just… a few more days,” but I’m not even sure what the truth is any more. Was I ever going to be honest, unless I was caught? Have I been lying to myself as well as everyone else?

Nat’s cheeks are getting pinker and pinker. “
Why?”

“Because… Because…” It all made so much sense at the time, but it suddenly doesn’t any more. “You were so angry at The Clothes Show…”

“
Because you lied
, not because you were
spotted.
I told you that.”

“It would have hurt you.”

“More than this?”

I lick my lips. “I thought you would ruin it for me.”

“
You thought I would ruin it for you?
” she repeats, amazed. “I’m your
best friend
, Harriet.
Why would I ruin anything for you?”

“You wouldn’t understand and… and… you wouldn’t want to be my friend any more.”

The excuses are coming thick and fast. But the truth that I can’t even admit to my best friend is that I lied because it was easier.

Because I’m a coward.

Because I clearly don’t think very much of the people I love.

Because all I was thinking about was me.

Nat stands up and the hurt five-year-old suddenly disappears. “No,” she says abruptly. “Now I don’t want to be your friend any more.
Get out of my bedroom
.”

“But…” I start. I open my mouth and promptly shut it again. All I’ve done is think about myself and lie compulsively. I don’t have a leg to stand on.

“
Now
,” she yells, totally furious, and she starts rummaging in a plastic bag at the foot of her bed.

“Nat, I’m sorry
.
”

“
Out
,” she screams and I’ve never seen her so angry. “What are you waiting for, Manners?
Soup?
You still want
soup
?
”
And she pulls something out of her bag and throws it. A carton of green Thai soup hits the wall behind me and explodes. “
There’s your bloody soup.
” She rummages in her bag again, and before I know it for the second time this afternoon food is hitting my head. “
And there’s the bread
.
I hope you feel better soon. NOW GET THE HELL OUT!
”

And – just as I think things can’t get any worse – Nat puts her hand in the air and looks at it. My chin starts to wobble: of all the hands in the air this week, I think this might finally be the hand I actually deserve.

Then, because I’m frozen to the spot, Nat pushes me across the room and into the hallway.

And slams the door behind me.

ll I want to do is crawl into bed and cry, but I can’t. The minute I open the front door I know things are about to get even worse.

Hugo’s lying in his basket with his chin on the edge. His eyebrows twitch unhappily and he immediately looks at the wall as if he’s blanking me. According to scientists, dogs can make approximately 100 facial expressions and it’s quite clear which one Hugo is using right now.

“Annabel?” I whisper. “Dad?”

There’s a long silence, so I put my bag down and tiptoe into the living room. Then I tiptoe into the kitchen, and the bathroom, and the garage, and the laundry room, and Annabel and Dad’s bedroom. It’s only when there’s nowhere else to tiptoe that I go into my own bedroom and find Dad sitting on the floor with his back against my chest of drawers.

He looks at me desolately. “You know,” he says, “for somebody so organised, you’re incredibly untidy.”

There are clothes everywhere: books strewn all over the floor, sweet wrappers across the bottom of the bed, teddybears stuck halfway behind the wardrobe, clothes scattered. He has a point. I’m just not sure it’s the most important one right now.

“Dad, where’s Annabel?”

“She’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“She’s gone, is what I mean. She’d gone by the time I got your message and managed to get back to the house. She took her bags with her and the cat.”

“But why?”

Dad shrugs. “It was her cat.”

“No, why did she leave?”

Dad reaches into his pocket. “She wrote this.” And he hands me a yellow Post-it.

Then he pulls out the article from the newspaper. “This was next to it.”

I stare at it, my heart making little sputtering sounds. “This is all my fault.”

“Not really.”

“Of course it is, Dad. What else would she be talking about?”

“A couple of things maybe.” He reaches in his pocket and pulls out another piece of paper. “This was on the kitchen table too.”

It’s a letter from The Clothes Show lawyers, addressed to my parents.

“Dad, I…”And my voice breaks. “I’m sorry.”

The amount I’m saying that at the moment, maybe I should just get a little MP3 track with it on loop so that I can simply press a button and offer out earphones.

Dad shakes his head. “That’s not everything.” Then he looks at the carpet and rummages around in his pocket again. What he pulls out appears to be a tax form. More specifically a P45. “This was also on the table.”

I look at it in confusion.

“I’ve been lying too, Harriet. I didn’t get permission from work to come with you to Moscow.”

“But…”And when I look at him, I realise he’s been wearing the same clothes now for five days, he smells of vodka and he looks exhausted. In fact, he’s looked exhausted all week. I’ve just been too wrapped up in myself to notice.

“I don’t understand, Dad. Why not?”

“Because I didn’t need to, sweetheart. The agency lost their biggest client because of me and they fired me on Friday. On the spot.”

“But you said…”

“I know. I lied. I thought Annabel would be angry.”

“Oh.”

“It turns out she’s much,
much
angrier now.”

It feels like the whole world has tilted up on itself and everything is falling off the top of it. “Oh,” I say again.

“Yeah.
Oh
pretty much sums it up for me too,” Dad agrees and then he lies down on the carpet. “We’re not very good at this, are we, Harriet?” he says.

And he closes his eyes.

It’s only once I’ve helped him up and put him in front of the TV that I turn the yellow Post-it over.

y name is Harriet Manners and I am an idiot.

I know I’m an idiot because I’m lying in my bed, looking up other words to call myself. Ninny. Dunce. Blockhead. Twit. Ignoramus.
Fool
. Which is the origin of the word ‘geek’ so I think we’ve just come full circle.

I’ve made a mess of everything.

Alexa has won. Nat’s not talking to me. Annabel has gone. Dad’s unemployed. I owe £3,000. The entire population of England is laughing at me. My hair looks like a ball of orange fuzz.

I don’t know if I’ve been suspended or not, but only because I’m refusing to go to school to find out. For the first time in my life, I’ve decided I don’t care about my education. It hasn’t made me any smarter at all. I’ve actually managed to transform in the
opposite
direction. I’m like a caterpillar that’s gone back to being an egg, or an unemployed Cinderella without even a hearth to scrub.

One simple metamorphosis story and I couldn’t even get
that
right.

Dad and I spend the entire night trying to fix things. I haven’t told him about the back of the note, though. I
think
about telling him, but Annabel asked me not to. I’ve betrayed her quite enough already without adding that to the list as well.

“We’ve got to do something
dramatic
,” Dad tells me sternly after staring at the wall for half an hour. “We have to
prove
to Nat and Annabel how sorry we are.”

So we make ‘sorry’ cakes, we make cards, we film ourselves singing an apologetic song. I take Nat a mix CD, a little silver necklace that splits in half and a box of chocolates. Then a barely used bottle of perfume, then flowers with a cunningly amended poem on the card. She trashes everything apart from the chocolates, which she eats without offering me any.

Dad goes to Annabel’s law firm and stands outside with a bunch of flowers and a sandwich board that says
(and on the back says
). He stands there until the security guard comes down with a note saying:

Dad says he’s not good at maths, but that’s not a number he wants to calculate.

Finally, totally defeated and unsuccessful, we give up and sit on the sofa for the rest of the evening. Then we get up the next morning and sit on the sofa for the rest of the next day. I have no idea what we watch on television because I’m not really watching it.

All I’m thinking, over and over and over again, is:
How? How do I make everything go back to exactly the way it was?
Because I’ll go through everything again – the bullying, the ugliness, the unpopularity – just to have my old life back. I’ve traded the only things that mattered to me for a whole load of stuff that doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. And I did it on purpose. Out of choice.

My IQ is clearly nowhere
near
as high as I thought it was.

“My little Tadpole,” Wilbur gasps when I eventually pick up my phone. “Where have you been?”

“On the sofa.”

“Jelly-bean, we have things to do. Everyone wants a piece of you, my little Ginger-cake. Journalists, television shows, designers, big brands. My phone hasn’t stopped, Sugar-plum, apart from when I turned it off so I could drink a coffee. The genius that is Yuka Ito has turned your little sit-down-athon into a PR coup. She’s telling everyone you’ve inspired her. You’re her new muse.”

“Uh-huh,” I say without really listening.

“You know what that
means
, my little Frog?”

I continue staring impassively at the television. “No.”

“It means you’re
hot
, darling. You’re at
boiling point.
Your saucepan simmereth over.”

There’s a silence. Modelling is how I got into this mess in the first place. OK, technically
lying
is how I got into it. But I wouldn’t have had to lie if the modelling had never happened. Nothing’s going to get better if I keep going down this path.

“I don’t care,” I say. “Sorry, Wilbur.”

Wilbur laughs. “That almost sounded like
I don’t care
,” he says, giggling. “But obviously I misheard you. This is… this is… the stuff of dreams.”

“Not of mine.”

And I put down the phone.

I’m not sure what my next plan should be. But it’s going to start with Annabel.