Model Misfit (23 page)

The quiver of my breath.

The entire crowd is completely silent.

n pretty much all of the romantic films I’ve ever seen, there’s always a moment when the hero and heroine meet and the rest of the world becomes a blur. It doesn’t matter where they are; the only thing they can see or hear is each other.

All I can say is: romantic films
lie.

There isn’t a convenient fog, misting out the audience. I see thousands and thousands of people: paused, silent and watching me intently.

Quickly, I do my best to wipe the terror from my face and walk like a model into the middle of the ring. I raise my chin and try to get my entirely rigid body to bend into a shape other than that of a stale pretzel.

None of my limbs are working properly. As I jerk awkwardly around the stage, with every movement Yuka’s eyes get narrower and angrier, and Haru’s hand gestures more demonstrative.

Swallowing hard, I turn away and try another pose. Then I move to the left and try again: curving forward with my hand on my hip and my right shoulder pushed back.

At which point I realise that Nick is following me.

OK, isn’t this hard enough without my ex-boyfriend chasing me around the stage? He’s supposed to be a
boy-shaped prop
. In the
background
.

Why is he winding me up
again
?

I flash him a dark look and hobble over to another corner of the stage. He follows, so I move again, but so does he. After a whole minute of being chased in a circle I finally accept defeat. Nick stands close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck, and every single hair on my body immediately stands up.

“What are you doing?” I hiss, bending into another pose. His hand touches my waist and an unwelcome thunderbolt shoots through the right side of my body.

“What are
you
doing?” Nick whispers. “What are you wearing on your feet?”

“Gloves,” I snap, changing my pose. “What do people normally wear on their feet?”

“This is a sumo ring. You’re not allowed to wear shoes. Especially not heels. The audience is furious.”

It’s as if the entire stadium suddenly goes dark. My brain shuts down in shock, and when I come back to my senses, I can suddenly feel where the eyes of twenty thousand people are focused: entirely on my shameful, painful, sparkling feet. “B-b-but I d-don’t—”

“Take them off,” Nick whispers urgently. “Now.”

I bend down but my hands are shaking too hard. The red straps are too tiny and there are too many of them. All I can do is paw desperately at the buckles while my eyes fill with water and blood rushes to my head.

Suddenly Nick bends down in front of me. “I’ll do it,” he says. “Stay still.”

He calmly takes my hand to balance me, and removes each shoe like Prince Charming in reverse, bows deeply to the crowd in every direction and dramatically throws the shoes off the stage.

“Now,” Nick says with a tiny nod. “Copy me.”

here’s an animal that lives at the bottom of the ocean called a Pacific Ocean Hagfish. When it feels threatened, it oozes a defensive slime from its pores that envelops its predator in a mass of fibrous goo. It then gets trapped in its own goo and dies.

I’m so embarrassed I can’t breathe properly. I can’t blink. I can’t move. I can’t pose. I definitely can’t model. Like the Hagfish, I am basically starting to suffocate on my own panic.

Rigid with humiliation, I watch Nick go back to his original starting mark on the stage, and then – to my absolute disbelief – turn around and cock his leg high in the air like a dog about to pee on an invisible lamp-post.

Before I can even blush for him – nobody is good-looking enough to get away with that kind of position – Nick looks me straight in the eye, slams his foot on the ground and yells at the top of his voice: “AAAAAARRRRRGH!!”

Then he waggles his elbows and blows a tiny raspberry, just like he did in the snow in Russia.

And I can’t help laughing, just like I did on my first ever photo shoot, and everything in me suddenly starts to relax.

Trying not to look at Yuka or the photographer, I obediently lift my leg as high in the air as I can, pause and then slam my foot down with an immense “AAAAAAAARGGH!!”

Nick does the same with the other leg and shouts: “AAARRRGH AAAARGH!”

I’ve never felt less dignified in my entire life and – frankly – that’s really saying something.

It’s only when Nick hitches up his trouser legs, kicks one leg slowly out to the side and leans into a deep crouch that I suddenly understand.

Sumo
. He’s doing sumo.

Slowly, I pick up the sides of my dress, compose my face and kick a leg out. I bend into a squat, lift on to my toes and hold it as long as I can.

Then Nick and I stand up straight, take a few slow steps towards each other and do it all over again. And again. And again.

As we get closer and closer – as we stamp and crouch and shout and pace – something amazing starts happening. The crowd really does begin to disappear. They fade and fade until it’s just the two of us.

Circling each other.

Stamping at each other.

Staring at each other, as if nothing else exists.

It’s only when Nick snarls at me – and I grin and snarl back – that I finally hear a noise from the audience. A gurgling sound that gets louder and louder and louder.

And it’s only when I look up that I realise the audience is laughing. When I glance at Haru and he inclines his head slightly, I know I’m going to be OK.

Which means Lion Boy has saved me.

Again.

ow, I have many skills.

I can recite the entire Periodic Table and six Shakespearean sonnets by heart. I can tell you every single King and Queen of England since Kenneth the Third in 997, and I can draw an almost perfect circle freehand as long as nobody’s watching.

Of my many useless and untransferable skills, however, accurately interpreting subtle facial expressions is not usually one of them. But I don’t think that’s something I need to worry about today.

Yuka Ito is livid.

“Explain,” she says quietly as we climb down the stairs and push through the stage doors. She looks like the White Witch of Narnia just after she finds the first snowdrop. “Now.”

Every drop of adrenaline evaporates, and I’m suddenly so scared I feel like I’m flashing colours like a human disco ball: white, then red, pink and green, then some kind of petrified purple colour. “I’m s-sorry,” I stammer quickly. “We were trying to … harness the Japanese culture creatively and—”

“I’m not talking about the poses.”

No. Of course she isn’t. “I …” I swallow. “It …”

“Where were you this morning?”

“I was … I set my … at least I thought I set my … my alarms didn’t …” I’m too scared to complete a sentence.

“You were three hours late.” Yuka doesn’t need to shout. Every quiet syllable is a pointed jag of ice. “The driver waited outside your building for two hours. He rang your doorbell thirteen times. Where did you stay last night?”

My eyes widen in surprise.
What?

“I was th … I was th …”
I was there. I was right there.

“I rang your mobile repeatedly. It went straight to voicemail. You do not turn your phone off while you are working for me.”

“I didn’t—”

“I explained very clearly that you are not here to party.”

My mouth opens in shock.
Party?
Has Yuka ever met me before?

“I wasn’t—”

“And when you decide to grace us with your presence, you accessorise my outfit with heels of your own. On a
sumo
stage. A stage reserved for men
.
”

“But—”

Yuka holds her hand up. “No,” she says. “I don’t want to hear it, Harriet. You have shown rudeness, disobedience and a total lack of respect, and you have done it in front of twenty thousand people.”

I’ve been called a lot of names in my life, but ‘rude’, ‘disobedient’ and ‘disrespectful’ are not three of them. The shock finally knocks the voice back into me. “Yuka, I was at the flat, I set three alarms, I don’t party –
ever –
I don’t own shoes like that, I wouldn’t even know where to buy any—”

“Do not compound errors with lying,” Yuka interrupts. “And don’t think that completing this shoot exonerates your behaviour. An ability to copy a professional is not what I have flown you halfway around the world for.”