by Holly Smale
Nick’s here Nick’s here Nick’s here …
“Babe.”
A hand grabs my arm, and without thinking I blink and twist in bewilderment towards it. With a soft, fluffy whallop, one of my big velvet bunny ears whacks the red squirrel next to me straight in the face.
“Oi,” a badger mutters under her breath as she starts to follow the rest of the forest, now clapping their hands and leaving the stage. “Watch it, Bunny.”
I whip back towards her in confusion and feel a sharp tug on my head.
Still disorientated, I tug again.
Every vein in my body still empty, I turn blankly to where I’m stuck. Somehow – and I will never understand how this happened – one of my velvet rabbit ears has got caught on Kenderall’s antlers.
“Get off,” Kenderall hisses, pulling her head back sharply. “Dude.”
As she’s pointed out more than once now, Kenderall is considerably bigger and stronger than me: before I know it I’m being effortlessly dragged three or four steps towards her, velvet bunny ear still attached to her head.
“I’m trying,” I say, tugging back as hard as I can.
Kenderall tugs me again. “Try harder.”
Lights are starting to flicker around us, and through the netted holes in my bunny headpiece I can see the other models are lurking at the back of the stage, unsure of whether to leave us mid-catwalk or not.
Somewhere in the midst of shock, my old friends Panic, Desperation and Humiliation are starting to rise like waves.
“Wait,” I whisper, pulling again. “Kenderall, if you just stop I can try and disentangle …”
But it’s too late.
With one more jerk of her head, the incredibly powerful Kenderall tugs backwards at exactly the same moment as I do.
For a fraction of a second, we both freeze in mid-air.
Exactly as the whole world did a moment ago.
Then there’s a loud ripping sound, a squeak and a roar of rage.
Followed by an almighty splash.
r more specifically, two almighty splashes.
I go straight into the deep end of the swimming pool first, followed closely by a loudly bellowing Kenderall.
And the chances that I’ll screw up four times in twenty-four hours?
All of them.
For a moment, I’m so humiliated and ashamed I strongly consider just swimming to the bottom of the pool and sitting down there for as long as I can.
Unfortunately, my costume makes that impossible.
Under the cosy velvet my papier-mâché-and-foam rabbit head is forming an ad-hoc buoyancy aid: dragging me to the surface and leaving me stuck there for all eternity.
Bobbing away, for everyone to stare at.
Through the little netted eyeholes, I can see that Kenderall is treading water with her antlers wobbling like a Disney out-take edit.
I guess it figures that I’m Thumper.
There’s a tense pause.
Then the crowd suddenly erupts in excitement and applause: lights flashing, people shouting, the music mixing with cheers and yells.
“BABE,” Kenderall shouts to me in the middle of the chaos as I wince and mentally prepare myself to have my head ripped off both verbally and physically, “you are a branding genius. You should have let me know this was your plan. I’d have been so behind it. Nobody will ever forget us again.”
Then, with a grin, she triumphantly yanks off her deer head and waves at the crowd like a dripping-wet homecoming queen.
“Go,” someone is shouting desperately from behind us on the stage. “Just get in too.”
With a loud splash, the badger jumps in.
Then the owl, followed by a fox.
A squirrel and bear.
Moose, wolf, mouse, hedgehog.
Splash, splash, splash, splash.
Until the majority of a deciduous forest is swimming in the water next to us. Somebody has obviously decided that it’s better to embrace the chaos than try to stop it: to make this look like the finale spectacle they had actually planned.
And I know I should feel guilty.
I should feel responsible for screwing up their original programme, or for forcing thirty-five models to go for an impromptu and freezing-cold winter swim.
But I don’t.
As the lights flash and the crowd shouts – as the rainbow confetti continues to shower down on our heads like bright rain – I can feel the warm grin start to spread across my face again.
Wider and wider, until it feels like it’s going to split me in two: as if maybe it already has.
Nick came back.
He was there, against all odds: he saw me and he knew me, the way he always has.
For those few seconds we were us again.
So it doesn’t matter that he’s gone now; it doesn’t matter that I can’t see him in the crowd any more, and I don’t know when I next will.
As I lie on my back in the water and stare at the stars, glowing steadily in the darkness, I’m suddenly surer than I’ve ever been that this isn’t the end.
It never really was.
Because the very last thing I saw before I fell in the water was Lion Boy looking straight at me.
And smiling.
A book takes an army, and I’m incredibly lucky to have the most amazing one behind me. Thank you, as always, to everyone at HarperCollins. Particularly to Kate, Lizzie, Ruth and Rachel: for having faith in me, and for encouraging me to have faith in myself. Thanks to Paul, Simon, Nicola, Sam and Hannah, for continuing to bring Harriet to readers in the UK, and to Carla and her team for spreading the word internationally. Thanks to Kate and Elisabetta and everyone on Team Geek who quietly slaves away behind the scenes: Brigid, JP, Victoria, Caroline and Amy, marshmallows with my face on them will never be enough.
And thanks to my family. You love me and you’ve never let me forget it.
Thank you. X
Read on to see Harriet through Nick’s eyes – the very first time they met …
really don’t want to be here.
In fact, I’ve spent the last six hours thinking about it carefully, and there are roughly a hundred other things I’d rather be doing on a cold Thursday morning in the middle of December.
Getting chased by a seagull the size of a tiger.
Slipping and smashing my head on a rock and waking up to find the seagull sitting directly on my chest, staring at me with one black, beady eye.
Looking round and seeing it’s part of a seagull gang.
And none of those hundred things involve sitting in an enormous exhibition centre in Birmingham, packed with clothes and lipsticks and necklaces.
At least the huge space can just about contain Wilbur.
“… and I said to her KABOOM!” he shouts loudly, exploding from his seat and throwing his hands into the air like a Jack-In-A-Box without a box. “Those shoes are turquoise not green, and I defy you to argue with my epic colour-wheel key-ring, Stephanie! I am a teapot of majesty and you are not! Put that in your log-burning stove and smoke it!”
I slump a bit further in my chair.
Today is sucking even harder than I thought it would, and the Suckiness Expectations were pretty high in the first place.
When I agreed to this, Wilbur promised me it would take half an hour, max. “Just pop in for thirty minutes, Nick,” were his precise words. “It will be the work of a moment, my unfairly handsome koala-bean.”
All I’m going to say is: I’ve known Wilbur Evans since I was eight years old, when he used to let me play my Game Boy under his agency desk while my aunt Yuka ‘babysat’ me (ignored me completely and bribed me not to tell my mum). And this is my fourth full day here, with no apparent end in sight.
Thirty-three dull-as-hell hours, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot.
Frankly, I should have known better.
Still way too overexcited, Wilbur spins in a circle with his bright yellow jacket flaring out. “Ooh!” he says on his third rotation, slamming to a stop and
grabbing my arm abruptly. “Peanut-button, I see a Potential!”
I reluctantly pivot my eyes slowly to the side without even bothering to move my head.
There’s a beautiful girl a few metres away: standing with one leg bent slightly in front of the other, one hand on her hip and her chin tipped upwards. She’s pouting and pretending to carefully assess a stall full of accessories without physically moving her eyeballs.
Every now and then – when she thinks we can’t see her – she flicks a glance in the direction of the Infinity stall.
She knows that nobody actually stands like that, right?
I mean, I’ve been a part of the fashion industry in one way or another my entire life and I can tell you with some confidence that nobody stands with a hip randomly jutted out and a face like a fish when they’re watching television.
“Nope,” I say tiredly, folding my arms.
“No?” Wilbur says anxiously, peering a bit closer. “Are you sure? Nicholas, my six-packed bunny of glory, do I need to remind you exactly what’s hanging on this? One more selection mistake and I’m out. My last choice of new girl turned out to be thirty-seven years old and it did not go down well.”
“I know,” I say, smiling a little. The agency went ape. “Trust me, Wil. That girl is not what Yuka’s looking for. For another modelling job, definitely, but I know my aunt and that one is far too …”
We both peer at her as subtly as possible.
Bright blue eyes: piercing, even from ten metres away. Smooth, glossy golden tendrils; flawless, porcelain skin. Legs so long she looks slightly out of proportion, like a very pretty ostrich.
“Beautiful?” Wilbur suggests. “Naturally graceful? Aesthetically blessed with symmetry, bone structure and culturally revered facial features?”
“Aware of all of the above.”
Wilbur laughs. “Go get her anyway, will you? Or I just know that Stephanie will get in there first, like a rabid terrier with a back-combed fringe.”
And that’s why I’m really here.
Wil’s pretending to ask for my advice, but there’s a bet on between him and his arch-nemesis – a particularly vicious strain of agent called Stephanie – to see who can find the new female face of Baylee first.
And he thinks I’m the Deciding Factor.
Partly because its creative director is my Aunty Yuka – famous for making ice queens look warm and cuddly – partly because she’s already roped me into being the male face (for free, I should add) and partly because …
Well. Ahem.
“Darling,” Wilbur explained when I finally realised what was going on: with horror, embarrassingly late. “Genetics gave you an unfair advantage on the rest of the human race that you neither deserved, earned, nor asked for. It’s only fair that you pay a bit of that luck forward. To me, ideally.”
“By smarming girls into signing with you first?”
“By leading them to me and away from Stephanie like a gorgeous, cheek-boned Pied Piper.”
I stared at him in consternation.
“Wilbur, you do realise in that fairytale the Pied Piper led the children into a cave and they were never seen again?”
“Crikey,” Wilbur said, looking bemused. “I don’t remember that ending. Well don’t kill them, Nick. Just give one of those fifteen-thousand-dollar grins, point them this way and let hormones and hope do the rest.”
So that’s what I’ve done.
For four days, I’ve been reluctantly and furiously thrown into a crowd of girls, repeatedly. And I’ve hated every single, cringing, morally dubious second of it.
I’m just pretending not to, for Wilbur’s sake.
And also because it’s kind of rude to show nice and totally faultless girls you’d rather be anywhere else on the planet but talking to them.
“Hey there,” I say every time I’m pointed towards another Potential, plastering on a broad, fake smile. “I’m Nick Hidaka, and I’m with Infinity Models. Would you like to come with me?”
Like some kind of slimy Australian creep.
And what’s worse: it works.
These sweet girls squeak in excitement, leave their friends behind and follow me without questions, without concern, without any deliberation or consideration or measures to check whether I’m actually telling the truth or not.
I don’t even need a magic flute.
“Please?” Wilbur says again as I continue to scowl at him, still slumped. He widens his eyes like an owl. “Pretty please, Nikolai? With a blueberry on top? Just one more time?”
I freaking hate my job.
Unfortunately, Wilbur’s helped me more than once over the last nine years and I kind of owe him this. Even when he makes my name Russian for no reason whatsoever.
“And then I can go home?”
“And then you can go home,” he confirms cheerfully. “Or to that model flat in London that Infinity is totally overcharging you for.”
“Fine,” I sigh, standing up and rubbing my neck. “But if this is the wrong girl again and Yuka blames me for it again and stops all my Christmas gifts for the next six years, you will replace them.”
“Done,” Wilbur agrees in delight, shoving me gently with his hand. “And stop grumping, Nickerbocker. Dark and broody is so passé.”
I laugh. “I’m not grumping, William. I’m responding to a horrible and awkward situation in an appropriately unimpressed manner.”
“Remember to tell her how pretty she is. They like to hear that. I’d do it myself but I’m in my twenties so I can’t without sounding scary.”
I look drily at Wilbur – he’s forty-six, for the record – and then at the gorgeous blonde, now surreptitiously gazing at her own reflection in her handbag clasp. “Something tells me she already knows.”
With a grimace, I slap my widest, most charming grin on.
And I try my very hardest to look like I mean it.
*
I know what you might think of me already, by the way: that I’m an arrogant, superficial idiot.
And, honestly – if you do – I really don’t blame you.
It kind of comes with the modelling territory.
Just so you know, I didn’t always look like this.
At primary school in Northern Australia, I was the kid who got hassled daily for being really small: for having a big mouth that didn’t fit his face and slanty eyes and yellow skin and a black frizz-ball for a head, and for having a mum who didn’t speak any English at parent–teacher evenings and instead chattered away in “Oriental” (it was Japanese, but five-year-olds don’t always care about silly little details like my racial and cultural background).
Then I hit thirteen and – like basically every other teenage boy who lives in a sun-kissed coastal town – I discovered a love of surfing.
I stretched out a bit (thanks, testosterone, and Dad’s genes).
And the next thing I knew, I was six-foot-three, my hair had finally chilled out, my mouth fit my face better and the designer aunt who had left me under desks all my life suddenly wanted me out in the spotlight to “do a few photos for her, here and there”.
Which led to a few more: a lot more there than here.
The next thing I knew, I was being dragged out of my life in Australia like I was on a riptide: swept away on a huge wave I didn’t see coming or want or know what to do with. And couldn’t seem to get off again.
Which for a surfer, is pretty ironic.
Cue: public recognition, money in the bank, and the general assumption that I must be an idiot, because I’m ‘that guy’ so why wouldn’t I be?
I’m a successful model because of who I’m related to.
Because of what I happen to look like.
Because I must be too thick to do anything more important or substantial, and honestly they may have a point on that one: I missed most of my exams in a three-year whirlwind of fashion shoots and shows, and I can’t take that back.
Which is exactly why I’ve decided the Baylee campaign is going t
o be my very last modelling job.
Ever.
I have no idea what I’m going to do next – apart from going home and getting straight back into the sea – but all I’m sure of is that there has to be more to being seventeen than this.
Now it’s just a few more steps to final freedom.
“OhmyGodohmyGod,” a girl squeaks loudly as I try to make a wide circle around a small group, like some kind of wary and dubious shark. “He’s coming this way …”
From behind me I feel a sharp tug at my T-shirt sleeve, and the sound of a slight rip. “I just touched him …”
Another prod. “I’m never washing my hand again.”
“Quickly, get a selfie of me with him in the background!”
Bring on the seagulls.
“Hey there,” I say, tapping the blonde girl on the shoulder and trying to feel a bit less like an automated Ken doll. “My name is—”
She spins round with a startlingly pretty, dimpled smile. “Nick Hidaka,” she says smoothly. “Oh, I know who you are and why you’re here.”
“Right,” I say, frowning a little despite myself.
“Gucci, summer season,” she continues, flicking her gold hair out of her eyes with a little head-toss. “Prada, winter campaign. You’re with Infinity, aren’t you. You want me to model, don’t you.”
There are no question marks at all. Her confidence is impressive, but also kind of alarming.
At least she’s done the hard work for me.
“Yep,” I say in relief, because that means – thank you thank you thank you – I’m finally done for the day. “Or at least talk to you about Infinity. Our stall’s over there. If you just want to come with—”
Then I abruptly stop.
My eyes have accidentally drifted over her shoulder and, without warning, suddenly stuck: held firmly, like magnets.
“With you?” she finishes, gently touching my arm. “Of course. I’m Poppy, by the way. I’m actually already modelling – that probably goes without saying – but I’d be very interested in switching agencies. I just don’t think I’m getting the high-grade campaigns I should be aiming for, you know?”
“I …” With an effort, I drag my eyes back to her. Did she just ask me a question? “You’re … I’m sorry, what did you say?”