by Holly Smale
And then he leaves. Like a circus master who has just bashed an angry tiger on the nose and then locked it in a cage with his assistant.
I turn slowly to face Alexa, and somewhere in the distance – outside of the terrified buzzing that has just started in my head – I can hear the sound of thirty fifteen-year-olds sucking in their breath at the same time.
“Well,” Alexa says eventually, turning to look at me, and I swear she sort of growls. “I guess now it’s just you and me, Harriet.”
ou know in romantic films, there’s always that moment where the love interest just can’t hold back how they feel any more and has a sudden need to declare themselves in public?
It’s always totally predictable, and always totally expected, yet the heroine is always shocked and surprised, as if it’s out of the blue. I’ve never understood that. I mean, how dense is she? Couldn’t she see it coming a mile off? Couldn’t she feel the gradual build-up of tension, like everyone else?
Now it all makes a little bit more sense. You don’t see things happening to you. Only when they’re happening to somebody else. Alexa’s passionate, inexplicable hatred for me has nowhere else to go. It has come to a big pulsing head and now it’s going to come bursting out.
I look at the door desperately. Should I try to escape? Or keep my head down and try to get through it? We’re at school. Just how bad could it be? And you know the scary bit? There’s still a part of me that’s about to correct her grammar. “You and I,” I’m tempted to reply. “Not you and me. Now it’s just you and I, Alexa.”
“Well,” Alexa says again and I can tell the whole class is still holding its breath. “Harriet Manners.”
I swallow and take one step towards my seat.
“Oh, no. No, no. You’re not going anywhere.” She grabs the back of my school jumper and pulls me to the front of the class. It’s not a violent tug; it’s gentle, almost like a mother trying to stop her child from walking across the road when a car is coming. I stop and stare at the floor, making myself as small as possible.
“Could you have made me look any more stupid?” Alexa asks, almost conversationally. “I mean, ostensibly? Did you actually use the word ostensibly?”
“It means ‘apparently’,” I explain in a whisper. “Or ‘supposedly’.”
Why didn’t I use ‘supposedly’?
This seems to make her even angrier. “I know what it means!” she shouts. “God, you really do think I’m thick, don’t you!”
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes, you do. You and your smart little comments and your crap little facts and your geeky little face.” She pulls that expression again: the one with the crossed eyes and protruding teeth. Which is really unfair: she knows I had my braces taken off years ago, and my left eye is only lazy when I’m tired. “You really think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I mumble again. The humiliated burn has spread to my neck and my ears and is creeping up my scalp. I can feel the entire class staring at me the way they stared at the monkey at the zoo with the red bottom. “I don’t.”
“I can’t hear you,” Alexa says more loudly. She walks closer – way past my personal space boundaries – and for a brief second I think she’s going to slap me. “I’ll rephrase. Do you think you’re better than everyone else, Harriet Manners?”
“No,” I say as loudly as I can.
“Yes, you do,” she hisses, getting even closer, and even in my shock I can’t believe the expression on her face: pure, almost shining, hatred. As if it’s burning on the inside of her and lighting her up like one of those little round candles with pictures of penguins on the outside. “You have no idea how much of a loser you really are.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper.
Because I totally do. I know exactly who I am. I’m Harriet Manners: A++ student, collector of semi-precious stones, builder of small and perfectly proportioned train sets, writer of lists, alphabetiser and genre-iser of books, user of made-up nouns, guardian of twenty-three woodlice under the rock at the bottom of her garden.
I’m Harriet Manners:
GEEK.
Alexa ignores me. “So I think it’s time we put it to the test,” she continues and then she looks around the room. I can feel my eyes filling up with water, but I’m totally frozen. Even my tongue feels numb. “Who in this room,” Alexa says slowly and loudly, “hates Harriet Manners? Put your hand up.”
I can’t really see anything because the whole room is wobbling.
“Toby,” Alexa adds. “Put your hand up or you’re going down the toilet every lunchtime for the next week.”
I close my eyes and two tears roll down my face. I think it’s really important that I don’t see this.
“Now open your eyes, geek,” Alexa says.
“No,” I say as firmly as I can.
“Open your eyes, geek.”
“No.”
“Open your eyes, geek. Or I will make this worse for you today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. And I will keep making it worse for you until you realise what you are and what you are not.”
So even though I know precisely what I am – and even though I’m not sure it’s even possible to make it worse – I open my eyes.
Every single hand in the classroom is up.
I wish she had just punched me.
And, with that final thought, I burst into tears, grab my satchel with GEEK written all over it and run out of the classroom.
y the time I get home, I’m crying so hard it sounds like somebody sawing wood.
I’m not really a crier, though, and there’s a good chance my parents won’t understand what I’m doing, so I scoot into the bush outside my house until I can be absolutely certain – without a shadow of a doubt – that I can breathe without either hiccuping or a bubble of snot coming out of my nose. Then I sit in the bush in the hole that Toby’s made for himself in four years of stalking and sob quietly into the sleeve of my school jumper.
I’m not sure how long I cry for: it’s like a never-ending circle of tears because every time I calm down and look up, I catch sight of the red letters on my satchel and it sets me off again. It even feels like they’re getting bigger and bigger, although rationally I know they must be staying the same size.
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
GEEK
And I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter any more because it does. Because they just won’t leave me alone.
I’m so tired of it all. I’m tired of not fitting in; of being left out; of being hated. I’m tired of having everything I am ripped up and strewn around the room the way a puppy wrecks an abandoned toilet roll. I’m tired of never doing anything right; of constantly being humiliated; of feeling like I’m just not good enough, no matter what I do.
I’m tired of feeling like this. And most of all, I’m tired of being a polar bear, wandering around the rainforest on my own.
When the letters are two metres high and flashing, I finally lose it completely. I give a little scream of frustration and attack the word with my belt buckle until the material’s so ripped you can’t read anything. And then – finally calmer – I curl out of a ball, climb out of the bush, wipe the mud off my uniform and try to pretend that I’m behaving in a totally rational way for 4pm on a Friday afternoon.
I sniff my way to the front door.
“Dad?” I say quietly as I open it, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “Annabel?” Then I stop, startled. Because Annabel, Dad and Hugo are all standing in the hallway.
And they all appear to be waiting for me.
K, are you kidding me?
Now that I just want to go straight to bed without being hassled my parents have finally started working on the house’s welcoming atmosphere?
“What’s going on?” I ask, embarrassed and quickly rubbing my eyes with my hand. Hugo jumps up at my trousers and starts experimentally licking at the mud. “Is everything
all right? Dad, did you have your meeting?”
Annabel frowns and peers at me. “What’s wrong, Harriet? Have you been…” And then she stops, confused. I can see her searching her mind for a word that matches my face. “Crying?” she finishes uncertainly.
“I have a cold,” I explain firmly, sniffing. “It started this morning.” And then I look at Dad, who has his mouth clamped shut. “Dad? Your important meeting? Did it go OK?”
“Huh?” Dad makes a face. “Yeah, no problem. They said I was a maverick like I predicted they would, but I asked for a pay rise and they said no.” Then he looks at Annabel and bounces up and down on his toes a couple of times. “Tell her, Annabel.” Dad nudges her with his elbow. “Tell her.”
“Tell me what?” I look at Annabel and she stares back in silence. “What?”
Annabel sighs. “They rang, Harriet,” she finally says in a reluctant voice. “The modelling agency. They rang. While you were at school.”
My mouth opens slightly in shock. “They rang? But…” I stop for a few seconds in total confusion. “I didn’t give them my number. How could they ring?”
“Well, they found it anyway and they rang!” Dad shouts, exploding and punching the air. Hugo responds by taking a few steps backwards and barking. “Infinity Models, Harriet! This is massive! This is more massive than massive! This is massiver! They rang and they said they love the photos and they want to see us all! Tomorrow, first thing! In the agency! With them! And us! And them again!”
“Massiver is not a word, Richard,” Annabel sighs. “Anyway, what they want is irrelevant. As we discussed, Harriet’s not doing it. She doesn’t even want to do it.” Then she looks at me. “Right?”
There’s a long silence.
“Right?” Annabel repeats in confusion.
I look at my parents – Annabel with her hands on her hips and Dad bobbing around like a happy little duck – and suddenly I can’t really see them. I can’t really see anything at all. It’s as if the whole world has just gone strangely dark and quiet and I’m standing in the middle, waiting for everything to start making light and noise again.
And then it hits me, like a metaphorical train or a hammer or a fist or something fast and heavy and absolutely inescapable. And it’s so clear I don’t know how I didn’t see it before, except that maybe I couldn’t because I didn’t need it like I need it now, at this exact moment.
This is it.
This is what I can do to change things.
This could be my metamorphosis story, like Ovid’s or Kafka’s, or Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling or even Cinderella (originally called Rhodopis and written in Greece in 1BC). I could go from proverbial caterpillar to butterfly; from tadpole to frog. From larva to dragonfly (which is actually only a half metamorphosis, but still – I think – worth mentioning).
MODELLING COULD TRANSFORM ME. And I’d no longer be Harriet Manners – hated, ignored, humiliated. I’d be… someone else. Someone different. Someone cool. Because if I don’t do something now, I’m going to be me forever. I’m going to be a geek forever. And people are just going to keep hating me and laughing at me and putting their hands up. Forever. And things will never, ever change.
Unless I do.
“I…I…” I start stammering, and then I stop and swallow because I can hardly believe what I’m about to say.
“Well?” Annabel and Dad say, except with totally different tones.
“I… think maybe I want to see them.”
There’s a stunned pause. “What?” Annabel finally gasps. “You want to what?”
“I want to see them,” I repeat, but this time my voice is clearer. For a few seconds, Nat’s face flicks into the back of my mind. My Best Friend’s tense, flushed, miserable, heartbroken face. And then Alexa’s flicks up next to it like a double slide show and I switch them both off. “I want to go and see the modelling agency,” I confirm.
Dad jumps up in the air. “You said, Annabel!” he crows. “Do you remember? We fought and I won and you said if she wanted to do it, we’d go and see them!”
“I didn’t think she’d actually want to,” Annabel huffs. “You tricked me, Richard. I can’t believe you tricked me.”
“Please?” I say, looking at her with my widest eyes. When I look to the side, Dad’s doing the same thing. “Just to see? Please, Annabel?”
Annabel opens her mouth and then shuts it again. She’s looking at my face as if it’s a maths sum and the answer is harder than she was expecting it to be. “You actually want this?” she asks in a totally shocked and slightly disgusted voice, as if I’ve just said I’d like to pick fleas from stray cats for the rest of my life, and possibly eat them. “Clothes, Harriet? Photographs? Fashion? Modelling?”
“Yes,” I say and I look her straight in the eye. “Maybe,” I clarify.
Annabel looks straight back for a few seconds and then sighs and puts her head in her hands. “Has the world gone topsy-turvy?”
“Definitely,” I confirm.
“Then…”And Annabel breathes out crossly. “Well, I’m sort of trapped by my own integrity, aren’t I?”
“Yesssss,” Dad shouts as if he’s just scored a goal, and – when Annabel gives him a short, sharp look – he clears his throat. “I meant, good decision, darling. Excellent. Very sensible.”
“Don’t get carried away, Richard,” Annabel snaps. “I said we’d see them. That is all. I’ve made no other promises. I’m not agreeing to anything right now.”
“But of course,” Dad says in an apparently insulted voice. “That’s also very sensible, darling.”
But as Dad winks at me and runs off into the kitchen to do a celebration dance, I realise I’m not really listening. Because all I know is – after ten years – I’m finally doing something to make things better.
And – frankly – it’s about time.
he first thing any good metamorphosis needs is a plan. A nice, well thought out, structured, considered and firm plan.
And if that plan happens to be in a bullet-pointed list, typed out and then printed from the computer in Dad’s ‘office’ (the spare room) then so much the better.
It goes like this:
Plan for Today
Wake up at 7am, and press the snooze button precisely three times.
Don’t think about Nat.
Find an outfit from my wardrobe suitable for a visit to a modelling agency.
Go downstairs wearing said outfit. My calm and supportive parents say things like ooh and aah and tell me they didn’t realise I had so much inherent style.
Blush prettily and agree because I probably do have inherent style.
Don’t think about Nat.
Leave the house at 8.34am on the dot, to catch the 9.02am train to London.
Arrive just in time to eat a pain au chocolat and drink a cappuccino in the local café because this is what models do every morning.
Get transformed into something amazing.
Admittedly, the last point on the list is a bit vague – because I’m not quite sure what they’re going to do, or how they’re going to do it – but it’s fine. As long as I have control over the rest of my plan, everything should go exactly as it’s supposed to.
Unfortunately, nobody else appears to have read it.
“Richard Manners,” Annabel is shouting as I come down the stairs. It’s already not going well: I pressed snooze fifteen times, and finally got out of bed to the calming, dulcet sounds of my parents trying to scratch each other’s eyes out. “I cannot believe you ate the last of the strawberry jam!”
“I didn’t!” Dad is shouting back. “Look! There’s some here!”
“What use is that much strawberry jam to anyone? Do I look like a fairy to you? With little tiny fairy pieces of toast? I’m five foot ten!”
“How do I answer that without accidentally calling you fat?”
“Be very careful what you say next, Richard Manners. Your life depends on the next sentence.”
“
Well… I… Harriet?” and Dad turns to me. I’m not sure how the argument’s turned to me when I’m barely in the room, but apparently it has. “What the hell are you wearing?”
I look down indignantly. “It’s a black all-in-one,” I say with my nose as high as I can get it. “I don’t expect you to understand because you’re old. It’s called fashion. Fash-ion.”
Now it’s Annabel’s turn to look confused. “Is that last year’s Halloween outfit, Harriet?” she says, scraping some of the jam off Dad’s toast and putting it on her own. “Are you dressed as a spider?”
I cough. “No.”
“Then why do you have a leg hanging off your shoulder?”
“It’s a special kind of bow.”
“And why are there seven remaining circles of Velcro down your back?”
“Style statement.”
“And the cobweb stuck to your bottom?”
Oh, for God’s sake.
“Fine,” I snap. It’s not that I’m unnecessarily emotional or worked up, but why won’t anyone just stick to the plan? “It’s my Halloween Spider outfit, OK? Happy now?”
“I’m not sure that’s the best choice for today,” Dad says dubiously as he starts stealing his jam back, and I can tell he’s trying not to laugh. “I mean, there are other trendier insects. Bees, I hear, are very big this season.”
“Well, tough,” I bark again. “Because it’s all I have, OK?”
“What about a wasp?” Dad offers, voice breaking.
“Everything else I own has a cartoon on the front.”
“Or a grasshopper?” Annabel suggests, winking at Dad. “I like grasshoppers.”
At which point I lose it completely. They’re not being calm or supportive at all. “Why are you such terrible parents?” I yell.
“I don’t know,” Dad yells back. “Why are you such a naughty little spider?” And then Annabel bursts out laughing.
“Aaaargh!” I scream in frustration. “I hate you I hate you I hate youihateyouihateyouihateyou.”
Then I run out of the room with as much dignity as I can muster.