Model Misfit (2 page)

Before I can move he grabs the shoe from my foot, turns it over and pulls a sticker from the heel. Then he pulls one from my inside elbow and four from the inside folds of the tutu netting.

He blinks at the stickers a couple of times while I stare at the floor and try to look as small as humanly possible. “Harriet,” he says in a slow and incredulous voice. “Harriet Manners, are you studying maths in the middle of my fashion shoot?”

I shake my head and look at the air behind the photographer’s left ear. You know the crocodile and the bird? I think one of us is about to get eaten.

“No,” I answer in my littlest voice. Because a) It’s physics, and b) I’ve been doing it all the way through.

K, so I
may
have stretched the truth a tiny bit.

Or – you know: a lot.

I haven’t changed. In fact, I’m even more of a geek than I used to be because:

1. the grey matter in my brain is still developing extra connections on a daily basis
   
2. I know even more facts than I did before
   
3. I’m just coming to the end of exams, which means my short-term cognitive abilities are on overdrive.
   

I’m also not graceful, elegant or stylish, but I guess you’ve already worked that out for yourself.

“Unbelievable,” Aiden mutters, clicking through the images as I slip behind a curtain at the back of the room to get changed into my school uniform.

“I’m so sorry, Mr Thomas,” I call out. “I honestly didn’t mean to disrespect you and the crocodi— erm, fashion industry. Did you get OK photos?”

“That’s not the point. Do you know how many other models wanted this job?”

Yes. Last time I was at Infinity Models, two of them locked me in a cupboard so I missed a really big casting. I had to wait until the cleaner came round to let me out again.

“I’m sorry, it’s just it’s my final GCSE today,” I try to explain as I tug off the massive tutu and smack an elbow painfully against the wall. “At 2pm, the British education system is going to decide whether I have any chance of ever becoming an award-winning physicist. My entire future is going to be shaped by today.”

I pull on my school jumper, which promptly gets caught in the gold wire still wrapped around my head. There’s silence while I hop in and out of the ‘changing room’ with my jumper over my face and my arms waving in the air like manic bunny ears.

“Hmm,” Aiden agrees still clicking through images. “You’re clearly a genius destined for a Nobel Prize.”

“GCSE physics is not about
literal
spatial awareness,” I puff, clutching blindly at my head and simultaneously smashing my knee against the wall. “It’s
conceptual
spatial awareness. Two very different things.”

Which is lucky, because the wire on my head now appears to be caught on everything in a two-metre radius. I have a detailed Get To School On Time Plan in my satchel, and nowhere at all does it say: Detach Myself From A Curtain Ring.

“It’s OK, Harriet,” I say, spinning helplessly in little circles. “You still have an hour and eleven minutes to get to school by train. Or an hour and sixteen minutes by taxi. You’ve got ages.”

“Erm … you know the clock on the back wall is slow. Right?”

I abruptly stop circling.

Oh my God. OH MY GOD. I
knew
there was a reason they made us study karma in religious education.

“
No
,” I squeak, ripping myself free from the wire at the cost of quite a few hairs, a scratch on my cheek, a curtain ring and half a school uniform. “
How
slow?”

“An hour,” Aiden says.

And – just like that – both my Get To School On Time Plan and entire life trajectory fly straight out the window.

his is so incredibly
typical
.

The
one
time my dad isn’t at the back of a photo shoot, trying to ‘liven things up a bit’ by stealing bits of mannequin and pretending he has three arms and four legs, is the one time I really need him here.

But Dad’s at a job interview and I now have less than fifty minutes to get to a destination over an hour away.

As the taxi driver points out cheerfully after I clamber into the back and beg him to hurry: “I can only go as fast as the traffic, Goldilocks. I’m part of it, ain’t I?”

Which I would probably look at as a kind of poignant universal truth if I wasn’t preoccupied by trying to make myself as light as possible, in the hope that the decreased weight would allow the car to accelerate faster.

And also with correcting his grammar.

There’s nothing else I can do. Thanks to the laws of physics – and irony – the factors dictating how fast I get to my exam apparently do not include a) crying, b) hyperventilating or c) repeating ‘sugar cookies’ until the taxi driver shuts the internal window and flicks the switch that stops him being able to hear me.

So I may as well use the remaining time constructively to update you on what’s been happening in the past six months.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

And that’s it. Everything else has stayed exactly the same.

My stalker, Toby, still orbits me like some kind of slightly snotty moon and my nemesis, Alexa, still inexplicably hates me.

My agent, Wilbur, still makes up words whenever he feels like it, and the fashion designer, Yuka Ito, is still totally terrifying.

My dog, Hugo, is still fond of sampling anything sticky he spots on the pavement and I still keep my textbooks lined up in alphabetical, chromatic and subject order.

Because that’s how real life is: people and situations and dogs don’t change that often, even when you have written
very
careful plans and tried to force them to.

And if I could leave my list there, I would. Because it’s a nice list, isn’t it? A lovely, positive list that looks forward to an entire summer with Nat, a brand-new graffiti-less satchel next term, and – quite soon – the legal ability to fly planes on my own whenever I feel like it.

But I can’t leave it there, because one more thing happened. And – for a little while, anyway – it made all the other points seem less important:

Reasons Not to Think About Nick

1. He told me not to.
   

on’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

I mean, in some ways it’s
exactly
as bad as it sounds. Four months after our first kiss, Nick told me we shouldn’t see each other any more and then he abruptly disappeared from my life. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Not a text. Not a phone call or a voicemail. Not an email. Not a tweet or a Facebook message. Not even a fax (even though I’m not sure who faxes these days, but the option is still sort of there, isn’t it?).

But it’s totally OK. You don’t spend nearly sixteen years reading novels about love and scanning poetry about love and listening to songs about love and watching films about love without coming away with a pretty good idea of how love stories go.

Everybody knows the dramatic ups and downs are what make the difference between a
real
love story – the kind that people make into films – and a boring one that nobody bothers writing or singing about.