Model Misfit

Midnight. It’s midnight in Sydney right now.

Somebody snorts.

Focus, Harriet. There are two types of electron: negative and positive. Like charges repel. Opposite charges attract.

Somebody snorts again, and there’s a faint giggle from a few seats away.

When insulating materials are rubbed together, electrons are knocked off one atom and on to the other.

There’s another laugh, and suddenly I’m vaguely aware of eyes burrowing into my forehead.

Not just Toby’s, I know what they feel like.

Cautiously, I open mine and glance around the room. There are a hundred and fifty-two other students in the hall, and every single one of them is staring at me.

I have absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if nobody here has seen sweat before. Or a ripped jumper. Or a single sock and scratched face. That’s how a large chunk of my year end lunch break.

I look at Toby and see he’s inexplicably patting his cheeks. When I search the room for Nat and see her – a long way away – she’s trying to mouth something at me.

“Go,” she’s saying, subtly pointing at me. “Go.”

I love Nat. She’s my favourite person in the entire world (followed by my dad and Annabel). But I’m not going anywhere. I’ve only just got here.

“Go,” she mouths again, and then she rolls her eyes and smacks her head with her hand.

Now that gesture I’m familiar with.

“Everybody face this way,” Miss Johnson shouts furiously, and three hundred and two eyes suddenly snap away from my face. “Toby Pilgrim, that includes you,” Miss Johnson yells, and the final two revert to the front. “You have thirty seconds before your exam begins.”

The only person not focusing on our imminent exam is Alexa, who is sitting diagonally directly behind me. She’s got a standard smug expression on her face and she’s rolling something between her fingers. Before I can work out what’s going on, she subtly leans down and rolls a little paper ball forward so it’s positioned directly under my desk.

“Twenty seconds.”

I stare at the ball in confusion, then in a flash I know: Alexa’s trying to sabotage my exam. She’s trying to plant revision notes on me. Yet another round of her ultimate plan – Ruin Harriet’s Life.

Oh my God. If I pick it up and get caught, I’m going to be thrown out of this exam. If I don’t pick up it up and it gets found under my desk afterwards, I’ll get disqualified for cheating. What do I do?

“Ten seconds.”

Pick it up or don’t pick it up? Don’t pick it up or pick it up?

“Five seconds.”

I bend down swiftly and grab it. If I can destroy the evidence before the exam starts, I’m not cheating. I’m just … disposing of rubbish responsibly.

But, like Pandora, I need to know what’s in the box. I need to know what’s intended to destroy me. So I tuck the note under the desk and quietly open it:

GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.

Oh, I think.

Oh.

“Please turn your papers over,” Miss Johnson announces as I shrink into my seat with my hands over my face. “You may now start.”

spend the rest of my final exam looking like something actresses hold once a year and cry over. According to a test I did on the internet, I have 143 IQ points. Clearly I have no idea what to do with any of them.

Toby isn’t quite so sure.

“Harriet,” he says happily as I walk out of the hall and head outside to wait for Nat. “I am honoured to stalk you. I honestly cannot think of anyone I’d rather follow obsessively around.”

Somehow, Toby’s gotten even more thin and stretched-out looking: as if he’s a bit of melted cheese somebody’s just pulled off a pizza. His hair is fluffier, he has dark shadows around his eyes, and he’s bobbing along with his hands neatly by his sides, his little nose twitching slightly. He looks even more like a meerkat than he did last time you saw him.

Let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t be even vaguely surprised if a plane flew past and he bolted for cover.

“What are you talking about, Tobes?”

“Gold is traditionally the colour of success, achievement and triumph,” Toby explains in a voice brimming over with admiration. “You’re the perfect colour for the last exam. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before.”

I stare at him, and then burst into an explosion of laughter. Only Toby could possibly think I painted myself gold today on purpose.

Except … In love, Goldilocks? That explains a lot.

I abruptly stop laughing. Oh my God: the taxi driver did too. I clearly just look like the kind of girl who goes insane and colours herself in on a regular basis.

That’s not the impression I’m trying to give to the world at all.

As Toby starts chattering excitedly about exam questions and oscillations of light waves, I glaze over and listen to the sound of his chirpy words going up and down and round and round.

Every time I try to remember what it was like not having him around, I can’t do it. Toby’s like a fact: once you know him, you can’t unknow him. Over the last few months, he’s started spending a little more time where Nat and I don’t have to pretend we can’t see him. And we’ve…

Well, we’ve kind of let him.

He’s not so bad in small doses. As long as he doesn’t irritate Nat too much. She has limited interest in irrelevant facts, and I fill that quota already.

We finally get outside, blink a few times in the bright sunshine, then start wandering, half blind, towards a small patch of shade. Nat’s surname is near the beginning of the alphabet, so she always gets stuck at the back of an exam room: picking at her nail varnish and making impatient huffing sounds, like a pretty, swishy-haired dragon.

By the time we spot Alexa it’s too late.

She’s just outside the school gates with a big group of her friends: all clad in their cunningly edited school uniforms like a fashionable army. Rolled skirts and tucked tops and pink streaks and bra-straps showing. Sprawled menacingly across the grass, as if they own the school.

And how can I put this?

In a very non-literal way, they sort of do.

o, by the way.

If you think a polite but firm conversation with my bully six months ago totally fixed everything between us, you’ve obviously never met Alexa. Or me.

Or any other teenage girl.

I want to pretend Alexa and her friends aren’t waiting for me, but a quick glance at her face tells me otherwise. She’s practically salivating. That’s the not-so-great thing about the last day of school: no repercussions.

“Hey,” she says sharply, taking a step towards me. “Manners.”

I instinctively look for another exit. But, short of using Toby to hurdle the fence, there’s no other way out of the school. So I duck my head and try my hardest to become completely invisible.

Thanks to not being a member of the Fantastic Four, this doesn’t work.

“HEY,” Alexa says again, blocking my path. She glances briefly at Toby. He scratches at the inside of his ear and then sniffs his finger. “Did you have fun in that exam, geek? Bet you did. I bet it was the best fun you’ve had in ages.”

I flush slightly. She’s absolutely right: it was awesome. When I got to the essay question about the life cycle of a star, I actually got a bit dizzy with excitement. “Maybe,” I say with the most non-committal shrug I can muster.

“Bet you knew all the answers, didn’t you, you total spod.”

I shake my head. “Only about ninety-three per cent of them.”

Everyone snickers – I don’t know why: that’s still a solid A* – and Alexa scowls at me. I try to walk away, but she blocks me again. “So you’ve heard about the massive house party I’m having tonight?”

The answer to this question is obviously: yes. There are Eskimos in Siberia who woke up this morning, fully aware of the house party Alexa is having tonight.

“No.”

“I’ve heard about it,” Toby interrupts eagerly. “You’re having tiny jellies, aren’t you? Alexa, they sound brilliant. I’ve always found normal-sized jellies unhygienic. All those different spoons. It’s much more sanitary to have lots of little ones each, isn’t it?”

Alexa ignores him. “A guy who used to be on TV is coming. So it’s technically a celebrity party.”

Toby nods sagely. “No green jelly then. Just awesome red and purple, right? My mum makes mine in the shape of a rocket with liquorice where the engines would be.”

Years from now, historians will look back at records of these days and wonder how Toby managed to get through them alive.

“That’s nice for you, Alexa,” I say, finally managing to dodge round her and start walking in the opposite direction.

“So, Manners” – and she clears her throat – “Want to come?”

I stop mid-stride. Apparently when people have their heads cut off there are five or six seconds when they can hear and see and blink, but they can’t move because they’ve already been severed in half.

That’s sort of how I feel now.

Slowly, I turn back round. “Pardon me?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nat come out of the school doors, pause and then start legging it towards us.

“Do you want to come to my party?” Alexa says, her face totally blank. “We’ve got a TV star, so you’d be the perfect celebrity addition. A model.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she says slowly, and the smirk appears again. “And if we fancy a dance, we can tie you to the ceiling by your feet and spin you round really fast. You can be our very own human disco ball.”

Then she points at my face and bursts into hysterical laughter, and a few nano-seconds later everyone starts snickering behind her.

It takes thirty minutes for a human body to produce enough heat to boil half a gallon of water. I think from the temperature of my cheeks right now I can probably cut that down to eleven or twelve, maximum.

Why didn’t I just keep walking? What’s wrong with me? Other than a gold face and an entire lack of survival instinct, obviously.

“Bite us, Hockey-legs,” Nat snaps, suddenly appearing next to me. “As if we’d want to go to your wannabe party.”

“As if I’d want you to want to. I’m still scrubbing the loserness off my doorstep from your last visit.” Alexa sneers. “Anyway, why the hell would I want her,” and she points at me like I’m a bit of toenail stuck in a carpet, “in my house, spreading her geekiness around? There’s no level of cool that can cure that. I’d have an epidemic on my hands.”

She spins round and adds, “Nobody wants that, right?” Then starts ceremoniously high-fiving her friends.

As if I’m not still standing there with my cheeks burning.

As if I don’t matter.

As if I never will.

As if nothing has changed at all.

count slowly to ten, and then I take a deep breath, reach into my pocket and pull out a small bit of crumpled-up paper.

I tap my still-triumphing nemesis on the back and hand it to her.

“What the hell is this?”

YOUR

GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.

“You-apostrophe-r-e is a contraction of you are, Alexa,” I say. “If you needed help with grammar, you should’ve asked.”

There’s a stunned silence followed by a couple of desperately suppressed snorts, and I suddenly wonder whether everyone likes Alexa as much as they pretend they do. Or whether some of them are only here for the ‘celebrity’ parties and tiny jellies.

Alexa’s smirk has finally gone. “I know the difference,” she hisses furiously. “It was a typo.”

She scrunches the distinctly handwritten note back up and throws it hard at my face. It hits my left ear with a small pop.

“What do I care, anyway?” she adds. “School’s over. Nobody in real life cares about that kind of rubbish.”

“I do,” I say quietly.

“So do I,” Nat says loudly, putting her arm around my waist and giving me a quick peck on the cheek.

“Me too,” Toby agrees. “Never underestimate the power of a well-placed apostrophe.”

We turn to leave and Alexa suddenly loses it, as if all her anger has just exploded in one bright firework of hatred. “Don’t walk away from me, geeks!” she screams, slamming her hand against a parking bollard. “We’re not done here! You just wait until next year! I’m going to … I’m going to – you – you – you’re …”

“Hey!” Toby says, “I think she’s finally getting it, Harriet!”

“We’ll look forward to hearing the rest of that sentence in sixth form, Alexa,” Nat calls back. “That should give you enough time to work out something really terrifying.”

We grin at each other and keep walking. Alexa’s shouting gets fainter and fainter until all I can hear is a harmless buzzing sound, like a tiny mosquito.

I look upwards.

The sky is bright blue, the trees have parted, and now there’s nothing but summer stretching endlessly in front of us.

e don’t even wait until we turn the corner to start dancing.

That’s the beauty of the summer holidays. It’s as if life is just a big Etch-A-Sketch, and once a year you get to shake it vigorously up and down and start again. By the time we go back to school, the whole year will be wiped clean.

Sort of.

Enough to ensure nobody remembers Toby breakdancing across the road with his satchel on his head, anyway.

“Did you see Alexa’s face?” Nat shouts, doing a little scissor kick and punching the air. “That was magic.”

I give a happy little hop, even though it does mean I may now have to apply to a different sixth form if I don’t want to spend the rest of my teens lodged down a toilet of Alexa’s choosing. (The Etch-A-Sketch isn’t that thorough.) “Do you think I did something horrendous to Alexa when we were little that I’ve forgotten about, Nat?”

“Who cares if you did?” Nat yells as she does a series of excited little spins, high-fiving me on every turn. “Alexa’s gone! Exams are over. Do you know what that means?! No more physics! No more chemistry! No more history! No more MATHS!”

My A Levels will be in physics, chemistry, history and maths and I fully intend to start studying for them before the week is over, but I high-five my best friend anyway.

Nat giddily grabs a calculator out of her bag and throws it on the floor. “I am never going to use you again,” she yells at it. “Do you understand? Me and you: we’re through!”

Toby bends down and picks it up. “Aren’t you going to study fashion design, Natalie?”

“Yup.” She tosses her shiny black hair and beams at him. “It’s going to be clothes, clothes, clothes for the rest of my life.”

“Then you’re going to need this,” Toby says, handing it back to her. “To calculate fabric measurements, body shapes, profit margins, manufacturing costs and loan repayments, not to mention pattern cutting and size differentiation.”

“What?” Nat’s face collapses. “Oh for the love of …” She looks at me. “I didn’t have to know that for months. Seriously. Does he have to be here? Can’t we send him back to wherever he came from?”

“Hemel Hempstead,” Toby says helpfully. “I can get the 303 bus.”

“We’ve got an entire summer ahead of us,” I remind Nat jubilantly, ignoring him. I feel a bit like Neil Armstrong immediately before he boarded the Apollo in 1969: as if we’ve just been handed all the space in the universe, and we can do whatever we want with it. “In fact, I’ve got it all mapped out.” I start rummaging in my satchel and then pull out a piece of paper with a flourish. “Ta-da!”

Nat takes it off me and frowns. “Nat and Harriet’s Summer of Fun Flow Chart?”

“Exactly!”

I do a little dance and then gesture at the coloured bubbles: yellow for me, purple for Nat, and – thanks to the nature of the colour wheel – an unfortunate poo brown for everything in between. “I’ve got every detail planned out for maximum fun and entertainment value,” I explain, pointing proudly. “Starting with Westminster Abbey, which is where Chaucer, Hardy, Tennyson and Kipling are buried, and then Highgate Cemetery to visit George Eliot, Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. We’re working our way through dead writers chronologically.”

I’ve focused our Summer of Fun Flow Chart on London because all there is locally is a roller-skate rink and a Mill museum, and as much as I love both wheels on my feet and bread we totally exhausted both of those options before we left primary school.

“The Charles Dickens Museum?” Nat reads slowly. “Glass-blowing in Leathermarket? The Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London?”

She’s impressed. I can tell from how quiet she is and the fact that she’s not making eye contact.

“Amazing, right? They’ve just discovered traces of ancient blue paint on the Parthenon statues at the British Museum, scientifically proving that ancient Greece looked like Disneyland. We can go and see the new exhibition!”

Nat nods a couple of times and scratches at her neck. “Uh-huh.”

I suddenly realise how selfish I sound. “Nat,” I say quickly, “there’s loads of stuff for you on here too. There’s an exhibition on ball gowns at the V&A, and the London College of Fashion are doing a graduate show that I’m sure Wilbur can get us tickets to.”

Toby nods knowingly. “Did you know the Victoria and Albert Museum employs a hawk every summer to discourage pigeons from the gardens?”

“And tonight … I thought we could celebrate together with these!” I pull DVDs of The Devil Wears Prada and David Attenborough’s African documentary from my satchel. “And these!” I pull out some sparkly purple nail varnish and toe-dividers and a pack of Game of Thrones playing cards. “And – wait for it – these!” I pull out a pack of no-calorie caramel popcorn and an enormous chocolate muffin.

Then I look at Toby. “I didn’t forget you,” I add fondly. I hand him a Lord of the Rings Lego set.

“Harriet Manners,” he says solemnly. “I shall begin constructing a YouTube stop-frame video sensation immediately.”

“What do you think, Nat?” I squeak, bouncing up and down on my toes. “Are you ready to start the Most Incredible Summer Of All TimeTM?! I’m calling it MISOAT for short, by the way.”

“Umm,” Nat says, and glances at me then back into the middle distance. All signs of laughter or twirling have completely disappeared. “Toby, can you leave us alone for a second?”

“Girl stuff?” he says wisely. “Natalie, I know all about menstruation. We studied it in biology.”

“Toby.”

“Ah. Not menstruation then.” Toby cocks his head to the side. “Perhaps bras?”

Nat scowls so hard her forehead looks like something out of Star Trek.

“Kittens?”

Just as Nat reaches out a hand to physically throttle him Toby ducks behind a tree.

I guess old stalker habits die hard.

“What’s going on?” I ask nervously. “Have you already seen The Devil Wears Prada?”

Nat’s lips twitch. “Of course I have. It’s not that … I’m so sorry, Harriet. I only found out two days ago. I didn’t want to upset you during exams.”

My stomach tightens into a hard ball. I can already feel our trips to the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum shutting down, like tiny little lights being turned off. “What’s going on?”

“I’m …” and she takes a deep breath. “I’m going to France.”

A couple more bulbs break. “What? For how long?”

“A whole month,” Nat says miserably. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

And – just like that – my entire summer goes completely dark.

rance? What has France got that my Summer of Fun Flow Chart doesn’t have?

A French Home-stay Programme, apparently.

Nat’s mum is making her go, as punishment for catching Nat in Boots when she should have been doing her French GCSE. Nat quickly explains this as her mum pulls up at the kerb alongside us and makes the universal gesture for Get In This Car Right Now, Young Lady.

Then she waves miserably goodbye at us from the back windscreen.

“Harriet,” Toby says, when he comes out from behind the tree two minutes later. “Do you know what this means?”

“No,” I say curtly, because obviously I do.

Don’t say it, Toby, I will him silently. Please. Just don’t say it.

But as always Toby’s ability to read minds, verbal inflections or really-quite-obvious facial expressions remains non-existent.

“It means,” he says – staring at me with eyes like lava lamps, all liquid and glowing – “you’re going to be spending the whole of summer with me.”

OK, I’m going to bed for the next month.

I’ll just spend the next six weeks under my duvet, learning how to embroider hieroglyphics by torchlight. I’ll get Annabel and Dad to whizz up all my food so I can drink it through a straw from under my duvet, like an old lady’s budgerigar. By the time I start A Levels I’ll be the same shape as a mattress, covered in fungus and shrivelled into an even smaller and even more muscle-less mass than normal.

As Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley” and the same can obviously be said for teenage girls. My plans are aft-agleying all over the shop.

“Harriet?” Annabel shouts downstairs as I slam the front door as hard as I can behind me. “If you’re trying to break all the windows in the house simultaneously, that is an incredibly efficient way to do it.”

“Hey!” I hear my dad say indignantly. “How come Harriet gets complimented for slamming doors when I get in trouble? I demand a retrial.”

“There hasn’t been a trial, Richard,” Annabel laughs, “so we can’t technically ‘re’ anything.”

“Oh, fine, you win again. It’s a good thing you’re about to pop out a mini-me or I wouldn’t be letting you triumph so easily.”

“Thank you, darling. Your gallantry is, as ever, much appreciated.”

I hear a loud cheerful kiss, echoing down the stairs.

“You know,” Dad muses afterwards, “I am pretty gallant. I’m a bit like a modern-day Lancelot. Except with no horse. Why don’t I have a horse, Annabel? How are we expected to be real men these days without horses?”