Geek Girl and Model Misfit. Holly Smale
and she got sick and couldn’t come and I’m not sitting on a bus on my own for five hours. OK?”
Nat takes a deep breath and I look at my hands in shame. I am a selfish, selfish person. I am also a very sparkly person: my hands are covered in gold glitter.
“OK,” I say in a small voice. “I’m sorry, Nat.”
“You’re forgiven.” The coach doors finally slide open. “Now get on this bus and pretend for one little day that you have the teeniest, tiniest smidgen of interest in fashion.”
“All right,” I say, my voice getting even smaller.
Because – in case you haven’t worked this out by now – here’s the key thing that really divides Nat and me:
I don’t.
You might not, obviously. You might be thinking, Just get on with it, Harriet, because I haven’t got all day, which is what Annabel says all the time. Adults rarely have all day, from what I can tell. However, if – like me – you read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and shampoo bottles in the bath and bus timetables when you already know what bus you’re getting, here’s a little more information:
1 My mother is dead. That’s usually the bit where people look awkward and start talking about how rainy the sky looks, but she died when I was three days old so missing her is a bit like loving a character from a book. The only stories I have of her belong to other people.
2 I have a stepmother, Annabel. She married Dad when I was seven, she’s alive and she works as a lawyer. (You would not believe the amount of arguments my parents have over those two facts. “I am living,” Annabel will scream. “You’re a lawyer,” Dad will shout back. “Who are you kidding?”)
3 Dad’s In Advertising. (“Not in adverts,” Annabel always points out when they have dinner parties. “I write them,” Dad replies in frustration. “I’m as In Advertising as you can get.”“Apart from actors,” Annabel says under her breath, at which point Dad stomps off to the kitchen to get another bottle of beer.)
4 I’m an only child. Thanks to my parents, I am destined to a life of never having anyone to squabble with in the back seat of the car.
5 Nat isn’t just my Best Friend. She gave herself this title, even though I told her it was a bit unnecessary: she’s also my Only Friend. This might be because I have a tendency to correct people’s grammar and tell them facts they’re not interested in.
6 And put things in lists. Like this one.
7 Nat and I met ten years ago when we were five, which makes us fifteen. I know you could have worked that out by yourself, but I can’t assume people like doing equations in their heads just because I do.
8 Nat is beautiful. When we were young, adults would put a hand under her chin and say, “She’s going to break hearts, this one,” as if she couldn’t hear them and wasn’t deciding when would be the best time to start.
9 I am not. My impact on hearts is like an earthquake happening on the other side of the world: if I’m lucky, I can hope for a teacup tinkling in its saucer. And even then it’s a bit of a surprise and everybody talks about it for days afterwards.
Other things will probably filter through in stages – like the fact that I only eat toast in triangles because it means there are no soggy edges, and my favourite book is the first half of Great Expectations and the last half of Wuthering Heights – but you don’t need to know them right now. In fact, arguably, you never need to know them. The last book Dad bought me had a gun on the front cover.
Anyway, the final defining fact that I may already have mentioned in passing is:
10. I don’t like fashion.
I never really have, and I can’t imagine I ever will.
I got away with it until I was about ten. Under that age, non-uniform didn’t really exist: we were either in our school uniform, or our pyjamas, or our swimming costumes, or dressed like angels or sheep for the school nativity. We had to go and get an outfit especially for non-uniform days.
Then teenagehood hit like a big pink glittery sledgehammer. Suddenly there were rules and breaking them mattered. Skirt lengths and trouser shapes and eye-shadow shades and heel heights and knowing how long you could go without wearing mascara before people accused you of being a lesbian.
Suddenly the world was divided into the right and the horribly, horribly wrong. And the people stuck between, who for the life of them couldn’t tell the difference. People who wore white socks and black shoes; who liked having hair on their legs because it was fluffy at night-time. People who really missed the sheep outfit, and secretly wanted to wear it to school even when it wasn’t Christmas.
People like me.
If there had been consistent rules, I’d have done my best to keep up. Made some sort of pie chart or line graph and then resentfully applied the basics. But fashion’s not like that: it’s a slippery old fish. You try to grab it round the neck and it slides out of your grip and shoots off in another direction, and every desperate grab towards it makes you look even more stupid. Until you’re sliding around on the floor, everybody is laughing at you and the fish has shot under the table.
So – to put it simply – I gave up. Brains have only got so much they can absorb, so I decided I didn’t have space. I’d rather know that hummingbirds can’t walk, or that one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs billions of tonnes, or that bluebirds can’t see the colour blue.
Nat, however, went the other way. And suddenly the sheep and the angel – who hung out quite happily in the fields of Bethlehem together – didn’t have as much in common any more.
We’re still Best Friends. She’s still the girl who lost her first baby tooth in my apple, and I’m still the girl who stuck one of her sunflower seeds up my nose in primary school and couldn’t get it out again. But sometimes, every now and then, the gap between us gets so big it feels like one of us is going to slip through.
Something tells me that today that person is going to be me.
What all this means is: I’m not thrilled to be here. I’ve stopped whining, but let’s just say I’m not spinning round and round in circles, farting at intervals, like my dog Hugo does when he’s excited. In fact, I did two years of doing woodwork specifically so I didn’t have to come on this textiles trip. Two years of accidentally sanding down my thumbs and cringing to the sound of metal on metal, purely to get out of today. And then Jo eats prawns and does a little vomiting and BAM: here I am.
The first step on to the coach is uneventful, just one step, directly behind Nat’s. The second step is slightly less successful. The coach starts before we’ve sat down and I’m thrown sideways, in the process kicking a nice fluffy green bag the way I’ve never, ever managed to kick a football in my entire life.
“Moron,” Chloe hisses as she retrieves it.
“I’m n-n-not,” I stutter, cheeks lighting up. “A moron only has an IQ of between 50 and 69. I think mine’s a little higher than that.”
And then it all goes wrong. On the third step, the driver sees a family of ducks on the road, hits the brakes and sends me flying