All Wrapped Up Read online

  Some glittering reviews for the books:

  “Loved Geek Girl. Wise, funny and true, with a proper nerd heroine you’re laughing with as much as at. Almost”

  James Henry, writer of Smack the Pony and Green Wing

  “I would highly recommend Geek Girl to anyone who likes a good laugh and enjoys a one-of-a-kind story”

  Mia, Guardian Children’s Books website

  “Smart, sassy and very funny”

  Bookseller

  “Brilliantly funny and fresh … A feel-good satisfying gem”

  Books for Keeps

  “There’s laughter and tears in this hilarious roller-coaster story”

  Julia Eccleshare

  “Simultaneously hilarious and heart-warming. Everyone should read this book”

  We Love This Book

  “Pure fun”

  School Library Journal

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © Holly Smale 2015

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com;

  Cover typography © Mary Kate McDevitt;

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Holly Smale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008163440

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008165635

  Version: 2015-10-29

  For all my geek girls and boys,

  wherever you are.

  Merry Christmas.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Read on for more geekery …

  Read on for a bonus Geek Girl story …

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  celebrate [cel-e-brate] verb

  To observe or commemorate an event

  To mark with festivities

  To proclaim or make public

  To praise widely

  To perform appropriate rites and ceremonies

  ORIGIN from the Latin celebrare – to honour

  My name is Harriet Manners, and I love Christmas.

  You can tell I love Christmas because I start celebrating it in the middle of August.

  I do it subtly, obviously.

  A tinsel brooch here, a life-size plastic reindeer with flashing nose there.

  “Harriet,” my stepmother said this year when I wheeled it into the hallway.

  “Annabel,” I replied, making my face as angelic as possible. “Did you know that the majority of male reindeers lose their antlers in winter? That means that Rudolph was almost definitely a girl. Don’t you think we should be reminded of this every day of the year?”

  Annabel laughed and put the reindeer back in the garden shed, along with my ‘Jingle Cat – Meowy Christmas’ album and the cinnamon incense sticks I’d hidden behind the radiators.

  So I think the answer was no.

  In September I constructed a battle of pink versus white sugar mice on the living room carpet, and October was spent sticking thick wads of cotton wool along the edge of every external windowsill so it looked like it had just been snowing.

  “Harriet,” Annabel repeated, which means November was spent cleaning it all off again.

  Now it’s the middle of December and I’m finally allowed to start marking the occasion, I’m so excited I feel like a shaken can: except instead of soda, Christmas is fizzing straight out.

  I have made a neat list of my favourite Christmas animals, and my favourite Christmas foods, and my favourite Christmas songs, and my favourite Christmas lists.

  I’ve created a gift plan with associated shopping map, and a detailed Q and A to hand out on Christmas morning so I can accurately deduce how much people really like their presents.

  Together, my best friend and I found a traditional mince pie recipe from a Tudor recipe book written in 1543 and cooked them perfectly. (Then threw them all away, because there’s a reason mince pies are now vegetarian.)

  I’ve made Christmassy pie charts and PowerPoints, line graphs and crosswords.

  I’ve even had a couple of epic festive-themed fights with my parents, because laughing at a letter I wrote to Father Christmas when I was five years old is just not entering into the appropriate spirit of things.

  And – most importantly – I’ve decorated.

  In fact, thanks to school having just broken up for the Christmas holidays, my house is starting to look like something Santa would visit incognito out of sheer embarrassment.

  I have Christmasified everything.

  With barely contained happiness, I have glitterised and spangalised, frostificated and shimmerised. I have sparklificated and made up a whole range of festive verbs and written them in my notepad.

  But it doesn’t make much of a difference.

  Because four days ago, in a dark TV studio in the middle of London, a beautiful model boy held my hand.

  I had my First Ever Kiss.

  And now it doesn’t matter how much sparkle I spray, or glitter I drop: it feels like I’m decorating from the inside out.

  The shiniest thing here this Christmas is me.

  Here are some other important festive Firsts:

  Not that I’m trying to compare one kiss with significant festive moments that changed the entire course of human history.

  But I think I know how their inventors felt.

  It may have changed the course of mine.

  “And,” I tell Nat, happily bouncing up and down on the sofa with a tiny red frosted T-rex on a string clutched between my hands, “we spend an average of two weeks of our lives just kissing. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Mmm,” my best friend says, taking the dinosaur off me, frowning at it and putting it back in the decoration box.

  “Plus each kiss burns up to three calories,” I inform her, handing her a giraffe coated in green glitter. “That means it is twice as productive as sleeping.”

  “Wow,” Nat says, putting that away too.

  “And studies have shown that we remember ninety per cent of the details of our first kiss.” I bounce up and down a few more times with a tin-foil robot. “Although in my case, I think it might be even more.”

  Like, ninety-nine per cent at the very least.

  I remember everything.

  I remember the quietness after everyone abruptly left us a
lone in the television studio, and the unexpected flush in Nick’s cheeks when he told me he liked me.

  I remember the way he reminded me all over again of a lion: big, wild hair and cat-shaped eyes and a mouth that curved upwards at the corners.

  I remember the deep breath he took as he stepped forward.

  The way he looked at every part of my face.

  The way I studied every inch of his.

  I can still see the ski-slope shape of his nose; smell the faint lime-green scent of his breath; feel the tickle of a dark curl against my forehead and how his bottom lip was warm and dry.

  I can still feel the throb in my ears, and the heat in my cheeks, and the way my heart skittered around my chest like a deer on ice.

  Literally still feel it.

  Maybe I should work on not remembering quite so much. Kissing causes a sudden surge of dopamine and adrenaline through the system, and mine appears to have lasted three and a half whole days.

  “Gosh,” Nat says, handing me a boring gold bell and pointing firmly at the tree. “That. Is. Amazing.”

  “I know.” I beam at my best friend. Nat’s been camped out at my house pretty much constantly since The Kiss happened. She claims it’s to help me decorate, but I think I know the truth.

  It’s so I Don’t Do Anything Stupid.

  Which is totally unnecessary. I don’t even know what that would be.

  “And,” I continue breathlessly, gazing in rapture up at the beautiful, sparkling Christmas tree, “scientists say that five out of twelve cranial nerves in the brain light up when you kiss someone. You are literally connecting with your minds. Isn’t that just the most romantic thing you’ve ever h—”

  “OK,” Nat says calmly, throwing a piece of red tinsel on the floor. “Enough.”

  I stare at it in consternation, and then at her.

  “What are you talking about? You can never have enough tinsel, Natalie. Never. It is a physical impossibility.”

  Like time travel, or the ability to put a chocolate bar back in the fridge once the wrapper’s open.

  “No, I mean enough of this.” Nat points at me. “Enough about kissing. Enough about Nick. Enough hopping up and down while I do all the decorating. It’s time to stop now.”

  Huh. OK.

  My adrenaline and dopamine levels are so high they’ve actually managed to seep out and exhaust my best friend too.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, obediently hanging a silver bauble on a lower branch. Nat’s right: while I’ve been bouncing, she’s decorated pretty much the whole tree. “It’s just … It’s all so perfect, Nat. Christmas, romance, my momentous coming of age as a kissable human being.” I shake my head in wonder. “It really is the most magical time of the year.”

  There’s a long silence.

  The kind of silence you could wind round a fir tree, should you be interested in decorating with silences.

  Then Nat sits down next to me and puts her arm round my shoulder. “That’s not what I meant,” she says gently. “I meant … time’s up.”

  Because the main reason my best friend hasn’t left my side is it’s been nearly four whole days now since I had my first kiss.

  And Nick still hasn’t called.

  Obviously, I like rules.

  Rules stop people cheating in exams, and filling out official documentation in pencil, or just putting the king anywhere they like in a game of chess. Rules prevent running in school corridors and walking all over the grass at Cambridge University like total savages.

  Rules allow geeks like me to know what to do, and when to do it, and then to try and make other people do it too, even when they don’t really want to.

  Rules put the world in order.

  But as much as I like a good distinct rule, some are obviously more flexible and open to interpretation. More like – let’s be honest – suggestions.

  And I think the Three Day Rule is a guideline.

  “But he’s only six hours over the limit,” I remind her. “It’s been less than seventy-seven hours and fifty-three minutes since it happened.”

  I should know: I’ve programmed it into my stopwatch.

  “Harriet,” Nat sighs patiently, “if a boy doesn’t make contact within three days, they’re not going to. That’s the law.”

  I frown. “Chickens aren’t allowed to cross the road in Georgia: that’s a law. Not having a sleeping donkey in your bathtub after 7pm in Oklahoma: that’s a law. Using a phone is not actually a legal requirement.”

  Although frankly, of the three options, it’s the one I’d vote for.

  “Not a law law,” my best friend admits reluctantly. “But it’s the law of dating and everybody knows it.”

  “I didn’t know it.”

  She nods as if this goes without saying. “Everybody apart from you. And maybe some random Inuit girl who’s been buried under a pile of ice for the last twenty billion years and is still waiting for some idiot to ring her.”

  I laugh. “In fairness, the big bang only happened fourteen billion years ago, so the universe not existing yet is probably a legitimate excuse.”

  “It’s the only legitimate excuse,” she growls.

  “And maybe Nick doesn’t know the rules either,” I add, ignoring her. “Statistically, the average phone is broken within eleven weeks. There are many possible reasons why he’s not calling.”

  “Sure,” Nat says darkly. “Maybe his fingers have been snapped off and fed to a party of hungry Christmas elves.”

  I laugh. I love my best friend when she gets angry and protective. She starts staring into space and muttering threats like Batman.

  But it’s just not going to work.

  Nat can be as cynical as she likes – there are way too many love chemicals currently rushing through my body for me to feel anxious. I am bouncing on a fluffy Christmas marshmallow of my own biological optimism.

  It’s kind of funny, really.

  We both knew that eventually a boy would enter the equation for one of us first. It’s just that in ten years of friendship, we never guessed that he might be for me.

  “Have a little faith in romance,” I say reassuringly, jumping up and skipping to the switch in the wall. “Trust in the magic of the season, Nat. Nothing’s going to go wrong. It’s Christmas.”

  Grinning, I switch the tree lights on with a tiny pop.

  And – with a burst of ‘Joy to the World’ – my phone starts ringing.

  Seriously.

  My precognitive skills are totally wasted as a budding model. With my startling ability to see the future, I should at least be employed as some kind of psychic.

  Although statistically most give forty-eight-hours’ warning before something happens, so I’d definitely be one of the cheap ones.

  Sticking my tongue out at Nat, I grab my phone from where it’s been perched on the arm of the sofa. It’s a mysterious unrecognised number, and I’m so shiny now it’s hard to tell which is more twinkly: me or the T-rex.

  “Nick?” I beam into my phone.

  “Sadly not, my little Elf. Although you can bet your sparkle-chickens I’m working on it. I keep trying to curl my hair like his, and then I am forced to remember I don’t really have any.”

  Nat’s making a frantic who-is-it? face, so I mouth back Wilbur and try not to notice the I-told-you-so eye-roll. For a few seconds I can feel my supreme confidence wobble slightly.

  Four days is quite a long time.

  I could have done half of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the time it’s taken the first recipient of my lips not to contact me.

  “Wilbur, have you got a new number?”

  “No, this phone belongs to the agency, Baby-cinnamon-socks. I dropped mine down the toilet. Nearly went from being my number one form of communication to my number two, if you know what I mean.”

  Then my modelling agent breaks into peals of tiny bell-like giggles.

  “Anywho,” he continues, “I’m just calling to see if you got the new fashion contract from Yuka
Ito before the Christmas holidays start. That is not a designer who waits, even for little baby Jesus.”

  “Sure,” I say, making a cut-it-out face at Nat. She’s formed a gun with her hands and is pointing it angrily at a tiny cupid hanging on the tree. “My parents signed it, it’s all fine and it’s in the p—”

  I stop abruptly.

  Ooh. I’ve just had a brilliant idea. A brilliant, inspired, really quite obvious idea I’d have had ages ago if I wasn’t so busy having a happy festive meltdown.

  And also writing hilarious legal Clauses for Santa.

  “Wilbur, do you have Nick’s phone number? Could you maybe give it to me?”

  Nat stops shooting Cupid and her eyes go very round. In fairness, this is definitely, definitely not in the dating rules. She’s told me so about a billion times, vehemently.

  The girl must never contact the boy first. Ever.

  Especially if he disappeared so quickly he didn’t actually give her his number, so she couldn’t call him in the first place.

  “They’re not rules,” I hiss at Nat for the trillionth time, holding my hand over the phone. “They’re guidelines.”

  “Darling,” Wilbur laughs, “if I gave Nick’s number to every girl who rang asking for Nick’s number, I’d basically be a telephone directory. Also, as he’s one of our models, it’s data protected.”

  “Oh.” I can feel myself collapse slightly again. “Of course. Sorry. Well, Merry Christm—”

  “But as it’s you … I heard the most amusalazing story the other day. Do you want to hear it? Do you have a piece of paper and a pen handy?”

  I blink a few times.

  “Umm,” I say vaguely, watching Nat pick up a sugar mouse and then pointedly bite its head off. “Sure?”

  “Ready?” He clears his throat ostentatiously. “Oh, my dear, once upon a time seven little boys made seven little snowmen and oh can you believe each hand had nine fingers so—”

  “What were they made of?”

  “Sorry, Bunny?”

  “What were the snowmen’s fingers made of? Because it can’t be snow – I’ve tried that and they don’t stay on. And you can make arms out of sticks or brooms, but fingers are really tricky.”