by Holly Smale
“OK,” Mr Bott says, holding up his hand. “I think that will do. Thank you, Harriet. That was … illuminating.”
Alexa starts a slow, sarcastic clap.
“And that will do too, Alexa Roberts,” Mr Bott adds sharply.
“What, sir?” Alexa says innocently. “I was simply showing my enthusiasm for Harriet’s profound and inspiring performance.”
“I find that hard to believe,” my English teacher says fairly. “So let’s move on as fast as possible, shall we? Next.”
he next hour is like watching some kind of terribly amateur circus.
I slink to my position with Nat at the back of the hall and sit as quietly as I can while my cheeks return to their normal colour.
Luckily, there’s plenty to distract me on stage.
There are people doing cartwheels, people singing, people dancing, people pretending to ‘breathe fire’ with a lighter and a small aerosol (they get a detention). Somebody even brought their dog with them, except instead of jumping through a hoop it sits down on the stage and farts resplendently.
All of which would be a lot less surprising if there wasn’t a sign on the door saying:
Finally it’s Nat’s turn. She stands up and smoothes her hair down and I can feel myself starting to get genuinely excited.
Maybe she’s going to be good.
No: maybe she’s going to be great. Maybe this is the amazing future my best friend is destined for, and this will be the moment that changes everything. In ten years’ time I’ll be lying under a parasol by her Hollywood pool, applying SPF 50, because I don’t really have skin that tolerates Californian weather.
“Good luck,” I whisper as she squeezes my hand tightly.
And then – with great poise – Nat walks slowly on to the stage and stands very still for a few seconds, looking at us calmly.
I stare at her in astonishment.
All anxiety, all jitteriness, every bit of nerves has magically disappeared. In their place is total composure and dignity. Tranquility. A deep and unshakeable aura of confidence and self-belief.
A serenity falls over the room and we are all utterly under her spell. I have never been so proud in my entire life.
Then Nat opens her mouth.
“Now,” she says stiffly, running to one side of the stage and holding one hand to her forehead as if she’s got a debilitating fever, “is the winter of our discontent. Parting is such sweet sorrow I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.” She runs to the other side of the stage. “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and is this a dagger I see before me?”
She collapses on to the floor and starts pretend-wailing into her hands. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” She stares at the ceiling and wrings her hands. “If music be the food of love play on…”
I watch with increasing alarm as my best friend commences to fling herself around, punch the air, jump, hop, scream and flounce across the stage. One second she’s Macbeth, the next she’s Othello. Without a pause she’s rolling around on her back, wailing for Cordelia, and then – seamlessly – she’s Puck, then Beatrice, then Desdemona.
Finally – when she’s exhausted what feels like a disco-mash-up of the entire Shakespearean canon – Nat ends by crashing to her knees and doing what appears to be jazz-hands.
Maybe we should have gone over her audition strategy a little more closely before we got here.
Or – you know. At all.
“So am I in?” Nat finally asks eagerly, looking up as Mr Bott puts his head in his hands. “Can I be Hamlet?”
Miss Hammond glances at Mr Bott, and together they slowly stand up. “And that wraps up the auditions,” they say in unison. “Thanks for coming, everyone.”
“Well,” I hear Mr Bott mutter as they stalk quickly past on their way out of the hall, “it’s good to see that the last few years of my life have clearly been wasted.”
The door slams behind them.
Nat looks at me over the top of the assembled crowd and I smile a bit harder. There are forty-three muscles in the human face, and I now have such an unnatural expression I’m worried I may have strained a few of them.
I pinch my cheek experimentally.
“Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!” a voice says from behind me. “Can you see what I’m doing, Harriet? I’m being Romeo for you.”
I spin round crossly. “Why are you here, Toby? You didn’t even audition.”
“I’m not here to audition, Harriet,” he says in surprise. “Sometimes I really don’t think you understand the concept of stalking.”
I sigh in frustration. “Now would be quite a good time to leave me alone, Toby,” I say as politely as I can. “Seriously. Please.”
“Gotcha,” he says happily. “Disappearing.”
And he blithely scarpers out of the room with his undone shoelaces trailing behind him.
I grit my teeth and start walking as fast as I can towards the exit door, away from the madding crowds. I need some peace and quiet to reassemble again like a hydra, and I need it quickly.
Except I can’t have it.
As I turn to open the door to the outside world, a foot appears in front of me and jams it shut.
“Did you forget something, Manners?”
And there, physically blocking my path with my satchel in her arms, is Alexa.
o.
I have this theory that being a geek is a bit like being a polar bear in the middle of the rainforest.
You don’t fit in, and you never will.
And it doesn’t matter how many trees you try to hide behind, or how many times you get on your belly and crawl through the undergrowth, or how fervently you put your hand over your nose to try and camouflage yourself, you can’t hide.
Trust me. I’ve tried.
Nat, on the other hand, is a tiger.
We’ve been best friends for ten years, and she has never once apologised for being who she is or tried to change. She simply prowls through the chaos in her perfect make-up and her five-inch heels, growling at anyone who gets in the way.
Which means they never do, because nobody messes with a tiger.
But, in between all the flying squirrels and bright green frogs and monkeys and baboons, Alexa goes unnoticed until it is too late. She slips in quietly, and you never know when it’s going to be or where she’s going to come from.
Just what she’s going to do.
She’ll set her sights on you, hone in on the soft parts – the bits you can’t protect – and then she’ll insert her poison. She’ll irritate and prod and pick so that when the time comes it’s easier for her to digest you completely.
Then she’ll leave, taking a tiny piece of you with her.
In short: of all the animals in the world, my bully is by far the most dangerous. She contributes the least, she’s impossible to get rid of, and she spreads damage wherever she goes.
Alexa is the mosquito.
ontinuing our rainforest theme, there’s a frog that lives in Central Africa called the Trichobatrachus Robustus. In order to protect itself, it will painfully break its own bones until they pierce out of its toe pads like claws.
Like an amphibian version of Wolverine.
As I stare at Alexa’s deceptively pretty face, I can totally see where the frog’s coming from. I’m kind of tempted to break my own knuckles and give it a go.
“That’s my satchel,” I say in surprise, looking at it.
I must have left it on the floor in my urgency to get out of the room, like a total idiot.
“Well, obviously,” she says, pointing at the red letters spelling GEEK etched once more proudly and freshly on the front in red pen. My spirits sink: they took absolutely ages to scrub off last time. “I picked it up for you, Harriet. Aren’t you going to say thank you?”
Harriet? She’s called me a lot of names before, but never the one I’ve actually been legally registered with.
“Umm.” I swallow reluctant
ly. Thanks for vandalising my property yet again. “Mmm.”
“That’s OK. You know, I’m just so excited about this play,” she continues, smiling and leaning against the door slightly with my satchel still in her hands. “It’s a really unique opportunity.”
What?
I spent the entire hour with my hands clenched together, waiting for Alexa to get up on stage, but she didn’t. I even checked with a few people in our immediate vicinity, and apparently she didn’t audition before we got there, either. I’d assumed she was just there to intimidate other people.
Or, more specifically: me.
“You’re excited about the prospect of extra time at school?” I say doubtfully.
“Absolutely,” she beams at me. “I love a good bit of drama. It’s so cathartic, isn’t it?”
“Um, traditionally, yes.”
“So fingers crossed we both get parts, hey?” Alexa says as she hands me my newly destroyed satchel and opens the door politely.
I look anxiously at my satchel, and then at the door. Is she going to shut me in it like a Venus flytrap? Is my satchel going to explode like a leather, pencil-filled hand-grenade?
“OK.” Then I cautiously take a few steps forward.
Nothing happens.
“See you soon, Harriet Manners,” Alexa smiles sweetly as I manage to step outside. “Ooh.” She pauses. “What hotel do mice stay at?”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“It’s just a joke, Harriet,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “Let me know when you work out the punchline.”
And then she closes the hall door softly behind me.
eople can change, you know.
I firmly believe that humans can surprise you with unexpected kindness, previously untapped empathy and depths of niceness and compassion you never knew they had.
But Alexa is unlikely to be one of them.
She’s definitely got something unpleasant up her sleeve. I just don’t know what it is yet.
With limited enthusiasm, I sit on the wall on the other side of the road from the school gates while I tug the cells of my scattered head back together and try to change the word GEEK now scrawled on my bag to CREEK with the same shade of red pen.
I can pretend it’s a reference to my interest in the Antietam Creek in Pennsylvania, which was a key focal point of the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War.
That’ll work.
Then I see Nat approaching from a distance, and a ridiculous mental rerun of the last two hours starts tumbling through my head.
The wailing. The hand gestures. The rolling around on the floor. The stammering. Toby’s interruptions.
Between us, possibly two of the worst performances of Shakespeare ever witnessed, and that includes the guy who vomited on himself halfway through last year’s Othello.
By the time Nat actually reaches me, I’m giggling so hard I keep making little snorty noises like one of those miniature pigs celebrities keep in their handbags.
“Oh my goodness,” I say as she sits on the wall next to me. Snort. “Nat, that was …” Snort snort. “It was … haha … Just so …” Snort.
“Amazing, right?”
I abruptly stop oinking. “Huh?”
Nat drops her handbag down next to her, eyes glittering and cheeks bright pink. “This is it, Harriet. I’ve found my natural calling. It’s meant to be.”
My eyes open wide.
“I mean, obviously I need a bit of polishing here and there,” Nat continues, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “I’m not classically trained yet. But I really became someone else on stage, didn’t I? I transformed. It was …” She looks into the sky with a rapt expression. “Magic.”
I stare at my best friend.
Admittedly it looked like there was some kind of voodoo at work, but it felt slightly on the darker end of the enchantment scale.
“You were …” I start carefully. “Something else.”
Nat bites her lip proudly and goes a little pinker. “I know, right? There was a moment where I thought Miss Hammond was actually going to cry.”
“That’s quite possible,” I say honestly.
Then I look carefully at Nat. She’s lit up from the inside, like one of those environmentally damaging lanterns people let off at New Year. “Umm, Nat?”
“Mmm?” she says as we start walking home, trailing her handbag dreamily behind her.
“What … erm … part were you playing, exactly?”
“Don’t know.” Nat beams triumphantly. “I found the speech on the internet last night. It must have been Shakespeare’s most famous play though. I’d actually heard almost all the lines already.”
“Ah.” This is exactly why we are given set, governmentally approved texts at school. “Of course.”
“The cast list goes up on Monday,” Nat says, holding her hands together and spinning around. “And then … my life’s about to change forever. I can feel it. There’ll be an agent in the crowd, and they’ll spot me and it’ll be just like a Richard Curtis film. Just wait and see.”
She glances at me and her grin falters a bit.
“You were great as well,” she lies loyally. “Don’t worry, Harriet. They’ll give you a good role too, I’m sure of it.”
“That’s really not what I’m worried about.”
Nat puts her arm through mine. “Thanks for coming with me. You’re the best friend in the world, you know that?”
My insides ping with guilt.
“Mmmm,” I say, pulling at the sleeves of my jumper. “So … see you on Monday morning?”
“Definitely,” Nat says, already starting to focus on a chimney in the distance. “I’m going to start getting ready for my big day. I should probably wear all black and a beret so I look suitably arty for my new career.”
“Mmm,” I say again.
And then I peck her on the cheek and start trotting back to my house as fast as I possibly can.
There are less than forty-eight hours before that cast list goes up, and I need to work out exactly what to do before Nat sees it.
Thanks partly to me, she’s already had one dream destroyed in the last three months.
There is absolutely no way I’m letting it happen again.
ome.
At the end of a hard day, it’s really nice to return to a serene, calming, tidy place: one that makes you feel like the world makes sense.
One day, I’m going to work out exactly where that is.
“Annabel?” I say as I push open the front door and drop my satchel in the hallway. “Dad? Are you here?”
I’m not sure why I’m asking.
My stepmother, Annabel, is four months’ pregnant with my brand new sibling, so is rarely out in the evenings, and Dad is still unemployed. After he loudly told his biggest client to get lost in the reception of the advertising agency he worked at, nobody has given him an interview.
It’s a small industry, Dad says, and apparently they’re quite happy with it being that little bit smaller.
“No,” I hear Annabel say calmly through the doors of the kitchen. “Absolutely not.”
“No? Is that your final answer?”
“That is my final answer, Richard. Hercules is not a responsible name to give a baby.”
“I don’t see why not. It worked out quite well for Hercules, didn’t it? He could lift wheelbarrows before he was out of nappies.”
“He was the son of Zeus, Richard. What if our baby isn’t half mortal, half god?”
There’s a pause.
“Well, of course it will be,” Dad says indignantly. “It’s genetically related to me, isn’t it?”
I roll my eyes and walk into the kitchen.
My father is in his multicoloured, stripy dressing gown – the one that makes him look like he’s the star in a West End show – and my stepmother is in a plain black suit, now bulging at quite a few different seams.
Annabel’s a barrister, and she loves that suit so much I’m pretty sure she sl
eeps in it.
“Oh, look,” Dad says as I take a seat next to them and pick out a chocolate biscuit from the multi-pack on the table. “We’ve got a teenager. Did you know that?”
“I knew I’d put one somewhere,” Annabel says serenely, spreading green pesto on a KitKat. “I thought she might have fallen down the crack in the sofa or got wedged behind the curtains.”
I stick my tongue out at them.
“Haha,” I say, cramming a biscuit in my mouth. “You’re both hilarious.”
Annabel smiles at me. “You’re home late, sweetheart. We were starting to worry.”
“I wasn’t,” Dad says, ruffling my hair fondly. “I’d already started working out how to turn her bedroom into a yoga studio and impromptu Batman dungeon.”
Annabel laughs and leans over to kiss him.
My parents have been married for eleven years and yet they still seem to quite like each other. It’s very uncomfortable on Sport’s Day. Nobody else has parents that fist-bump every time the whistle blows.
“So what did you do today? How was the casting? And the audition?” Annabel asks. “Update us on the adventures of being a modern-day teenager.”
I think about the answer to that question.
What did I do today?
Annoyed a receptionist and two models, got locked in a cleaning cupboard, stuck in a window, kissed one boy and shouted at another, was told off by a teacher, humiliated myself on stage and discovered my best friend is a terrible, terrible actress.
Oh, and had my accessories vandalised. Again.