Geek Girl and Model Misfit. Holly Smale
I stop coughing and look at her with my roundest, most confused eyes. “Hmmm?” I say innocently. And then I start coughing again.
“I mean it. Don’t even think about thinking about it.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. The fever must be making my brain swell.
“Nat,” I say feebly, closing my eyes and pressing my hand against my head. I’m a shell of the person I used to be. A husk. “I have bad news.” I open one eye and take a peek round the room. Nat still has her hands on her hips.
“Let me guess,” she says in a dry voice. “You’re sick.”
I give a weak but courageous smile: the sort Jane gives Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice when she’s bedridden with a really bad cold, but is being very brave about it. “You know me so well,” I say affectionately. “It’s like we have one mind, Nat.”
“And you’re out of it if you think I’m not about to drag you out of bed by your feet.” Nat takes a few steps towards me. “Also, I want my lipstick back,” she adds.
I clear my throat. “Lipstick?”
“The one you’ve dotted all over your face.”
I open my mouth and then shut it again. “It’s not lipstick,” I say in a small voice. “It’s a dangerous infection.”
“Then your dangerous infection is glittery, Harriet, and just so happens to match my new shoes perfectly.”
I shift a little bit further down the bed so that only my eyes are visible. “Infections are very advanced these days,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster. “They are sometimes extremely light-reflective.”
“Featuring small flecks of gold?”
I raise my chin defiantly. “Sometimes.”
Nat’s nose twitches and she rolls her eyes. “Right. And your face is producing white talcum powder, is it?”
I sniff quickly. Oh, sugar cookies. “It’s important to keep sick people dry,” I say as airily as I can. “Dampness can allow bacteria to develop.”
Nat sighs again. “Get out of bed, Harriet.”
“But—”
“Get out of bed.”
“Nat, I…”
“Out. Now.”
I look down at the duvets in a panic. “But I’m not ready! I’m in my pyjamas!” I’m going to give it one last desperate shot. “Nat,” I say, changing tack and using my most serious, profound voice. “You don’t understand. How will you feel if you’re wrong? How will you live with yourself? I might be dying.”
“Actually, you’re right,” Nat agrees, taking another two steps towards me. “You are. I’m literally seconds away from killing you, Harriet Manners. And if that happens, I’ll live with myself just fine. Now get out of bed, you little faker.”
And, before I can protect myself, Nat lunges suddenly towards me and tugs the covers away.
There’s a long silence.
“Oh, Harriet,” Nat eventually says in a sad and simultaneously triumphant voice.
Because I’m lying in bed, fully dressed, with my shoes on. And in one hand is a box of talcum powder; in the other is a bright red lipstick.
Twice, actually.
Nat and I are not in perfect harmony at all. We’re definitely close, and we definitely spend all of our time together, and we definitely adore each other very much, but there are moments now we’ve almost grown up where our interests and passions divide a teensy bit.
Or – you know – a lot.
It doesn’t stop us being inseparable, obviously. We’re Best Friends because we frequently make each other laugh, so much so that I once made orange juice come out of her nose (on to her mum’s white rug – we stopped laughing pretty shortly afterwards). And also because I remember when she peed on the ballet-room floor, aged six, and she is the only person in the entire world who knows I still have a dinosaur poster taped to the inside of my wardrobe.
But over the last few years, there have definitely been minuscule points where our desires and needs have… conflicted a little bit. Which is why I may have said I was a little bit sicker than I actually felt this morning, which was: not much.
Or at all, actually. I feel great.
And why Nat is a bit snappy with me as we run towards the school coach as fast as my legs will carry me.
“You know,” Nat sighs as she waits for me to catch up for the twelfth time. “I watched that stupid documentary on the Russian Revolution for you last week, and it was about four hundred hours long. The least you can do is participate in an Educational Opportunity to See Textiles from an Intimate and Consumer Perspective with me.”
“Shopping,” I puff, holding my sides together so they don’t fall apart. “It’s called shopping.”
“That’s not what’s written on the leaflet. It’s a school trip: there has to be something educational about it.”
“No,” I huff. “There isn’t.” Nat pauses again so that I can try and catch up. “It’s just shopping.”
To be fair, I think I have a point. We’re going to The Clothes Show Live, in Birmingham. So-called – presumably – because they show clothes to you. Live. In Birmingham. And let you buy them. And take them home with you afterwards.
Which is otherwise known as shopping.
“It’ll be fun,” Nat says from a few metres ahead of me. “They’ve got everything there, Harriet. Everything anyone could possibly ever want.”
“Really?” I say in the most sarcastic voice I can find, considering that I’m now running so fast that my breath is starting to squeak. “Do they have a triceratops skull?”
“…No.”
“Do they have a life-size model of the first airborne plane?”
“…Probably not.”
“And do they have a John Donne manuscript, with little white gloves so that you can actually touch it?”
Nat thinks about it. “I think it’s unlikely they have that,” she admits.
“Then they don’t have everything I want, do they?”
We reach the coach steps and I can barely breathe. I don’t understand it: we’ve both run the same distance, and we’ve both expended the same energy. I’m an entire centimetre shorter than Nat so I have less mass to move, at the same speed (on average). We both have exactly the same amount of PE lessons. And yet – despite the laws of physics – I’m huffing and purple, and Nat’s only slightly glowing and still capable of breathing out of her nose.
Sometimes science makes no sense at all.
Nat starts rapping in a panic on the bus door. We’re late – thanks to my excellent acting skills – and it looks like the class might be about to leave without us. “Harriet,” Nat snaps, turning to look at me as the doors start making sucking noises, as if they’re kissing. “Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by Lenin in 1917.”
I blink in surprise. “Yes,” I say. “He was.”
“And do you think I want to