Picture Perfect (Geek Girl, Book 3) Read online

  And – trying to ignore my parents’ astonishment – I turn my back, grab Hugo out of his basket and quietly walk upstairs to my bedroom.

  K, I am never laminating anything again.

  Ever.

  The first thing I do is lie on my bed with my nose in Hugo’s fur and try to slow-breathe, the way Nick taught me to for times like this.

  i.e. when I’m about to throw a wobbler.

  Then I sit up, grab a pad off my desk and slowly write:

  Frankly, this should be the easiest list I’ve ever written.

  It’s the eighth-biggest city in the world. It has 8,336,697 people and 4,000 individual street-food vendors. It has been the setting for more than 20,000 films, and it has the lowest crime rate of the twenty-five largest cities in America. The rents are some of the highest in the world, and the wages totally insufficient.

  How do I know all this? Because I’m fascinated by the city, just like everyone else. And because every time I watch reruns of Friends I go online to try and work out how they all survive, financially.

  This could be an enormous adventure. Bigger than modelling. Bigger than Moscow. Bigger than Tokyo. In six months, I’d become a local. A resident. One of them.

  And I mean that quite literally. Thirty-five million Americans share DNA with at least one of the 102 pilgrims who arrived from England on the Mayflower in 1620. We’re pretty much blood relatives anyway.

  Plus I’d get my very own tutor, who I will refer to as my ‘governess’. I could learn to speak Latin and sing about whiskers on kittens or spoonfuls of sugar and be gently guided by the hand through my formative years, learning to embroider.

  But for some reason, I can’t make myself write any of that down.

  Instead, I chew on my pencil and scribble:

  My life is here.

  This is my home.

  Everything I love is here.

  Nat and Toby are here. Nick is here, albeit sporadically. My dog is here, my school is here, my bedroom is here. My memories are here: the corner of the garden where Nat and I used to build forts out of bed sheets, and the washing line I trained Hugo with when he was a puppy, and the area that used to be an expensive plant before I ran over it with my tricycle.

  My books are here, my fossils, my photo-montage wall, the cold dent in the wall I lie against when it’s hot in the middle of the night.

  The road where Nick and I ran through the rain.

  The bush outside where Toby waits for me.

  The bench where Nat waits for me at the end of my road, in exactly the same position.

  I love my life as it is, and I just want everything to stay exactly the same.

  I chew on my pencil and stare at the wall.

  Except … it’s not going to, is it?

  Alexa has my diary, and humiliation levels at school are about to reach unprecedented levels. For the first time ever, I’ll have to handle her alone.

  My modelling agency has already forgotten who I am.

  I haven’t heard a peep from my former agent, Wilbur, for weeks.

  Nick hasn’t called me.

  And then my stomach twists uncomfortably.

  Nat.

  Because it doesn’t matter how many schedules and lists I write to try and keep us together, things are about to change. As soon as term starts, Nat is going to make new college friends and she’s going to start a new college life.

  A life full of fashion people who know things about colour-coordination and handbag shapes; a grown-up life full of parties and shopping and coffee or something. A life where inventing codes and making choreographed dances in the living room just aren’t on the plans any more.

  A life without me.

  Pretty soon, the pigeon and the monkey are going to start wanting to fly and climb without each other, and the gap between us is going to get bigger and bigger.

  Until one of us falls straight through.

  Right now, I have a strong feeling that person is going to be me.

  Slowly, I take my pencil out of my mouth and spit out a few bits of yellow paint.

  And then – painfully, carefully – I write:

  hat are we going to do?” I hear Annabel say quietly as I slip back downstairs with Hugo chasing after me. “Did you see the way Harriet reacted?”

  Dad sighs.

  “She responded calmly, with thought and consideration. I’ve never been so frightened in my entire life.”

  You have got to be kidding me.

  Just once in fifteen years I respond to unexpected news in a mature fashion, and all I’ve successfully achieved is terrifying my parents.

  “Ahem,” I say at the door. Maybe I should slam it a few times, just to reassure them.

  They both look up.

  “Wait,” Dad says, looking me up and down. “Why isn’t Harriet wearing an appropriately themed costume, Annabel? Where’s the top hat and walking stick and monocle?”

  “Go on then,” Annabel says, nodding to the seat next to her. “Hit us with the Anti-American Powerpoint Presentation, Harriet. I’ve cleared a space on the table especially.”

  She’s even got the extension lead out so I can plug in my laptop.

  A little part of me wishes I’d given it a shot. Apparently twenty-seven per cent of Americans believe we never landed on the moon. That would have been a really excellent way to start.

  I stand in the middle of the room with Hugo sitting quietly by my feet and clench and unclench my fists. I’m about to say goodbye to everything I know. Every person. Every brick.

  Every piece of my life.

  “Let’s do it,” I say. “Let’s move to America.”

  “Oh,” Annabel says, dropping her head into her hands. “Oh, thank God.”

  “It’s a trick,” Dad says, squinting at me. “I want to know where my daughter is, Mature Stranger. I bet she’s locked upstairs in a wardrobe. I demand you let her back out again in three or four hours’ time once we’ve had a nice quiet cup of tea and some lunch.”

  I stick my tongue out at him.

  “Oh, there she is,” Dad grins. “Phew.”

  “Seriously?” Annabel says. “You’re not just saying that, Harriet? You really want to come?”

  “Yes,” I say firmly. “I do.”

  My parents both assess me with blank, surprised expressions. Then – in one seamless movement – they jump simultaneously off the sofa and tackle me into a hug with Tabitha tucked carefully between us.

  “YESSSS!!” Dad shouts, grabbing my sister’s little hand and punching the air with it. “In your face, boring old England! The Manners are taking over Ameeerrricaa!”

  I smile into my parents’ shoulders.

  I can change my plans. But I can’t change my family.

  And this way, I’ll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.

  Instead, I opt for the truth.

  The truth, and closing my eyes tightly.

  When Nat is hurt, she gets angry, and when she gets angry she throws things. There’s a pair of high heels in close proximity, and there’s a good chance they are about to get wedged into me permanently.

  Finally, I open one eye and peer cautiously through my eyelashes.

  Nat’s still sitting on her bedroom floor, surrounded by a heap of clothes. Her first words when I entered the room were: “According to Elle I need a capsule wardrobe, Harriet. Twelve items that can be mixed and matched to create a seamless and coordinated outfit choice for any occasion so as to achieve maximum sartorial efficiency.”

  There’s an endangered language in Peru called Chamicuro, and I think I’d have had more chance of understanding this greeting if Nat had just opted for using that instead.

  “Are you OK?” I ask, after the silence that follows my bombshell.

  “What do you mean you’re emigrating?”

  Pink splodges are starting to climb up Nat’s throat and on to her cheeks. She’s gripping the sleeve of a jumper so tightly it looks like it’s about to get rip
ped off. “Like a … woodpecker?”

  I don’t think Nat’s been paying attention to any of the recent documentaries we’ve been watching.

  “Woodpeckers tend to stay very much in the same place, Nat.” I sit carefully on the floor next to her. “You’re thinking of King Penguins.”

  “But … forever?”

  “Well …” I may have slightly over-egged the pudding. “Not exactly forever. Six months, if we’re being precise.”

  The pink flush climbs higher and higher until Nat’s ears look totally separate from the rest of her face, like Mr Potato Head.

  And then – in one sweeping motion – she jumps up and the entire pile of clothes falls over.

  “Oh my God,” she shouts, gripping her hands together. “Harriet, isn’t this just the best news ever? You’re so lucky!” Nat starts leaping around the room, picking things up and spinning dreamily around with them. “You’ll have your own doorman. You can eat hot dogs every day. You can find the grate where Marilyn Monroe’s dress blew up and copy her.”

  “You can go to the Museum of Modern Art and study The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali,” a voice says from outside the bedroom. “I’ve heard it’s disappointingly small.”

  I open Nat’s door.

  “Toby, how long have you been here?”

  “Long enough,” Toby says happily, wandering in. “Although this news does mean I’ll have to reorganise my stalking plans. Would you consider wearing a tracking device? That way I can just follow you online from the comfort of my own room.”

  I stare at them in dismay.

  Aren’t there supposed to be tears? Recriminations? How could you do this to me? and What is my life supposed to be like without you in it?

  “OOOH!” Nat shouts at the top of her voice. “You can see where Calvin Klein was born and Leo DiCaprio lives!”

  “You can visit the Museum of Math in Brooklyn.”

  “You can stand outside shop windows wearing lots of costume jewellery and eat pastries,” Nat sighs, her eyes lit up. “You can see celebrities buying sandwiches every day.”

  “Hopefully,” Toby adds, “you will not be one of the 419 murders that happen per 100,000 people in the city. Statistically, the odds are in your favour.”

  I blink.

  If I’d known the impact of me leaving the country would be so slight, I’d have started training to be an astronaut some time ago.

  “I’m glad you’re both so delighted.”

  “Harriet,” Nat laughs, putting an arm round me. “Six months is nothing. Although it does suck that you’re going before your birthday – maybe you can have second-round celebrations when you get back, like Kate Moss or the Queen. And you’ll be having so much fun it will just whizz past.”

  “It’s only 184 days,” Toby agrees, nodding enthusiastically. “4,416 hours. 264,960 minutes. I can invest the time wisely and think up a really excellent plan for when you get back.”

  As mature and supportive as they’re being, I can’t help wishing I was having a shoe thrown at my head. Or an eyeshadow compact.

  At least then I’d know they’d miss me.

  “Exactly,” I say in my fakest, sunniest voice. “It’s all very exciting. Anyway, I’ve got some packing to do and …”

  My phone starts ringing.

  Oh, thank goodness. My parents have finally got their interruptive timing spot on.

  “Oops,” I say loudly as I grab my phone out of my pocket. “I should probably take this outs—”

  There are five million hairs all over the human body, and suddenly every single one of mine is standing on end.

  Because it’s not my parents.

  It’s Nick.

  July 8th

  “Are you sure?” I said doubtfully. “I’m not really on the list.”

  Nick laughed.

  “You’re on my list,” he said, putting his arm around me. “Admittedly it’s a really short one and for the next few hours your name is –” he looked at the silver ticket in his hands – “Isobel Marigolden.”

  I stared at the enormous warehouse.

  It looked like it was still under construction. There were dark grey bars lining the ceiling, and blotches of white paint on the floor. Dirty plastic sheets were hanging in grimly lit sections at the back. Down the middle was a wide, shabbily painted silver strip and hard metal seats neatly lined the two longest sides of the room.

  I sat down nervously.

  “Can I come backstage with you?” I asked. “Maybe I can help you get ready.”

  Nick gently picked me up and moved me three seats along and two rows back.

  “You can’t just sit where you like at a Prada fashion show, Harriet,” he laughed. “And backstage there are going to be thirty boys in dirty underpants and mismatched socks. I’m not entirely sure you’d want to see that, even if the designer allowed it.”

  The boy’s PE changing room at school sounded eerily similar. “Good point.”

  “So can you wait here?”

  “I have this,” I said, waving Anna Karenina. “I can probably sit for three whole days happily.”

  “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content,” Nick said in a bizarre voice.

  My eyes widened. “OK, a) you’ve read Anna Karenina? and b) that was possibly the single worst attempt at a British accent I’ve ever heard.”

  “That’s because it was Russian,” Nick said, raising an eyebrow. “And yes, I’ve read it. Or, you know: looked at the pictures really hard. I am a model, after all.”

  He smiled and leant down to kiss my nose.

  “I’ll wait,” I said, flushing and opening the book, which I suddenly liked a billion times more because it now had Nick in every single line.

  “Thank you.” My boyfriend gave me another quick kiss on the lips. “I’ll see you later, my little geek.”

  Over the next two hours, the room filled with people; slowly at first, and then in great, noisy swarms.

  People in shiny black, people in red lace, people in white shirts with pointy collars. People who knew exactly where they were supposed to sit and were doing it without complaining about the hardness of the seats.

  Then the room got very quiet and very dark. Music started pumping and lights started flashing. The dirty plastic sheets parted.

  And out walked the boys, one by one.

  They slunk to the front of the room, stopped, stared, turned and slunk back out again like prowling, pointy-hipped wolves. Dozens of them: angular and floppy-haired and stern. In sharp silver shirts and grey suits; black jackets and blue ties.

  As the music vibrated, I could feel my stomach clenching.

  I miss this, I suddenly realised.

  I missed the music I didn’t recognise and the bright lights and the dark audience. I missed the bustle and panic and noise in a room somewhere behind us. I missed the excitement and the bright eyes and the rustle of papers as people made notes.

  I missed Wilbur and his ridiculous outfits and his made-up language. I missed Rin and Kylie Minogue, the sock-wearing cat who hated going for walks. I missed Tokyo and being transformed by stylists. I even slightly missed the terrifying Yuka Ito.

  But most of all I missed Nick.

  Suddenly, the plastic sheets parted and out walked another boy. A dark-haired, olive-skinned boy in a sharp black jacket with a bright silver collar. His face was set, his dark eyes were narrowed, his mouth was clenched. He strode towards us with firm, straight steps: purposeful. Furious.

  I blinked as this angry, tense stranger pounded down the catwalk. There wasn’t a single twinkle or slouch. Not a jot of laughter or crinkle around his eyes.

  Two hundred people watched keenly as my boyfriend got to the end of the catwalk, stopped and posed.

  The blue whale has a heart big enough for a human to crawl through its ventricles. For just a few seconds, my heart felt so big, a blue whale could have swum through mine.

  I waited for Nick to turn towards me. To notice me in the crowd. />
  Finally, just before he started back towards the curtains, he looked straight at me.

  He winked.

  And – just like that – I had my Lion Boy back.

  have never left a house as quickly as I leave Nat’s.

  Seriously.

  If it had been on fire, I doubt I could have moved faster.

  “Nick?” I say breathlessly as soon as I’ve shut the front door. “Nick? Are you there?”

  Then I try to rephrase it so I sound a bit less desperate. “I mean, hi, whatever, how are you?”

  “Hey,” he laughs warmly. “And whatever to you too.”

  Apparently butterflies need an ideal body temperature of between eighty-five and one hundred degrees to fly. I must be exactly the right habitat, because my entire body is suddenly full of them. Red ones, blue ones, green ones, white ones. Fluttering like a rainbow inside me.

  Then I remember the silence over the last few days.

  “How’s Africa?” I say, and the butterflies suddenly go very still.

  “Harriet, I’m so sorry. I’ve been out in the desert on a shoot, and there was zero reception. I even got the photographer to drive me to the nearest village, and there was still nothing. How did you do? I want to know everything.”

  A wave of relief hits me so strongly that I have to temporarily lean against a statue that Nat’s mum thinks is Andromeda but is actually Artemis just to get my breath back.

  Roughly forty-three per cent of Africa is desert, and it hadn’t occurred to me for a single second Nick might be stuck in any of it.

  “It went kind of brilliantly,” I say, giving him a brief update on my result.

  “I’m so proud of you.”

  I beam at the phone, and then at the sky, and then at a random passing squirrel. I’m so warm the butterflies have given up flying and have started sunbathing instead.

  “So,” and this time it’s a real, genuine question, “what is Africa like?”

  “Hot. Lots of weird-looking tall creatures that can’t run properly hanging around with long necks and eyelashes and horns coming out of their heads.”