Model Misfit (5 page)

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 Time
^TM
?! 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?”

Yup. If you think that the prospect of creating a new human life has in any way forced my father to grow up even
slightly
over the last six months you’d be wrong.

There’s a jellyfish called the
Turritopsis nutricula
, which Marine Biologists say is the only animal in the world that renders itself immortal by reverting back to adolescence every time it starts to age too much. All I’m going to say is: they obviously haven’t met my dad yet.

Let’s just see how long
he
sticks around.

Throwing my satchel into the corner of the hallway, I start a slow, stompy climb up the stairs. Six months ago they were pretty, white-painted wood; they are now covered in horrible beige, hard-wearing carpet with fiddly stair gates at either end. There used to be a space under the banister where the cat would climb the stairs and headbutt me from eye-level, as a kind of greeting. It’s been blocked up.

There are also fake plug-coverings in all of the plug sockets and padding around the edges of the tables and more gates in doorways, just in case we need to be herded safely from room to room like cattle.

I reach the newly safe and sanitised landing and stare at my parents. “What are you
doing
?”

“Hello, Harriet.” Annabel is wearing an enormous, elasticated, pin-stripe suit, and is calmly wiping one of my fossils with a cloth. “Sweetheart, why is your face gold? And what on earth happened to your jumper?” She looks down. “I know I’m full of pregnancy hormones, but I’m certain you were wearing two socks this morning.”

“Oh
amazeballs
!” Dad cries from the study. “You coloured yourself gold! To win an exam! That is creative
genius
!”

I think my head is about to explode. “I’m serious, what are you
doing
? You can’t
clean fossils,
Annabel. You are literally wiping away 230 million years of history!”

“I think this is a coating of dead skin cells and dust mites, actually. When was the last time you dusted these, Harriet?”

I grab the fossil from her. “This is an Asistoharpes! This is 395
million years old
! Why don’t you just stick it in the washing machine while you’re at it?”

My stepmother raises her eyebrows in silence.

“I think if it’s survived that long it can handle a bit of wet cloth, don’t you?”

I ignore her and turn to Dad, who is standing on the office chair, trying to get down my collection of books about the Tudors. Every time he reaches for one he swivels slightly and has to hang on to the shelf for balance. “What are
you
doing?”

“There’s a whole load of stuff here that’s yours, Harriet,” he explains, reaching for a biography of Anne Boleyn and swivelling again. “So we’ve built some more shelves in your bedroom. This is going to be the baby’s room.”

I grab a few of my books off the bed from where they’ve just been thrown, willy-nilly. “This room is called the
study
, Dad. If this was a room for a baby, it would be called something else!”

“It is, Harriet,” Dad says, laughing. “We just renamed it.”

I can feel every single cell in my body fizzing and bursting like those crackly sweets that pop on your tongue. First Alexa, then Nat, now this. Today isn’t even making an
effort
to go to plan
any more.

“There isn’t
room
in my bedroom for all my stuff!”

“Then throw some of it away,” Annabel suggests with a tiny smile. She’s cleaning another fossil. “Or we can put it in the attic. Or maybe in the garden. I imagine these rocks would probably be very happy there.”

My throat is getting tighter and tighter. “What do you mean
throw it away
?
You can’t just throw preserved evidence of natural evolution in the bin!”

Annabel puts her hand gently on her enormous straining belly. “Harriet, what’s going on, sweetheart? Did your last exam go badly? What’s the matter with you?”