Diamond Star Girl

by Judy May

  To Uncle Paul, aka Dr Paul Doherty. The best uncle any girl could ever have.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  DAY ONE

  DAY TWO

  DAY THREE

  DAY FOUR

  DAY FIVE

  DAY SIX

  DAY SEVEN

  DAY EIGHT

  DAY NINE

  DAY TEN

  DAY ELEVEN

  DAY TWELVE

  DAY THIRTEEN

  DAY FOURTEEN

  DAY FIFTEEN

  DAY SIXTEEN

  DAY SEVENTEEN

  DAY EIGHTEEN

  DAY NINETEEN

  DAY TWENTY

  DAY TWENTY-ONE

  DAY TWENTY-TWO

  DAY TWENTY-THREE

  DAY TWENTY-FOUR

  DAY TWENTY-FIVE

  DAY TWENTY-SIX

  DAY TWENTY-SEVEN

  DAY TWENTY-EIGHT

  DAY TWENTY-NINE

  DAY THIRTY

  DAY THIRTY-ONE

  DAY THIRTY-TWO

  DAY THIRTY-THREE

  ONE WEEK LATER

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DAY ONE

  QUIZ!

  If you were almost fifteen, almost a genius, and almost pretty, what would you do with your almost life?

  a) Call everyone you know for a fun day of events like boys - against - girls football or a dress - up karaoke party?

  b) Start a new action group to combat all crime and poverty on the entire planet?

  c) Sit on your ass all afternoon doing a love - compatibility test on the internet?

  I tried typing in ‘Lemony and Nick,’ and it only had a 6 per cent chance of working out. So I put ‘Samantha and Nick’, and it was 43 per cent, but that wouldn’t work either because I would sooner go to town with a pillowcase on my head than have someone call me Samantha again.

  According to this precise scientific system, I, Lemony Smith, am perfect for boys called Augustus, Graham and Lucifer (an unbelievable 94 per cent). What’s more, I have now wasted five hours of my frankly ridiculous day figuring this out. And it still hasn’t stopped me from having eight different, new daydreams about and me and Nick Collins. Things had to stop when I started making him an Olympic marathon champion and dressed him in a sailor uniform to race in. However, I must admit to being rather fond of the one where he rescues me from the freak snowstorm on top of the community hall to where I have escaped following a freak fire caused by a freak misunderstanding with the freaky lady at the homemade-candle stall. The sad fact is that the only freak is me. I know this. I so need to get some reality going before I officially turn into a virtual person.

  Sometimes I daydream so much I think the house could get swept up in a tornado and I wouldn’t even notice. It’s like the world inside my head is more real than the one outside, and certainly more interesting. Maybe writing in this journal will keep me grounded, remind me that there is a world with things and real-live-actual people in it. And boys.

  DAY TWO

  PROOF OF MY INSANITY: Lorna and Alice asked me to go to this one-day song-writing workshop with their new friend Hanna and I pretended I had to help Mum and Dad with an imaginary leaf problem in the guttering. I do not even know what guttering is and am hoping they don’t either. How is anything going to happen if I just stay in with my books and posters creating a big bunch of crazy in my head?

  OK, I hereby vow to get OUT of my brain (brilliant though it may be) and INTO the world (dull and vacuous as that may be). At least the world has one thing going for it: it’s where Nick Collins hangs out.

  I will now ask Mum and Dad for summer spending money to fund my adventures.

  LATER

  Yay! Result!

  I got twice as much as I bargained for. The money was a ‘yes’, but now my parents have a new anxiety: that I am unhappy and dissatisfied. In the last ten minutes of the two-hour conversation (for ‘conversation’ read ‘onslaught of friendly-fire and concerned interrogation’) they offered to send me on a yoga retreat in India or on a ski-school vacation. I almost said ‘yes’ to the India thing before Paul piped up with a timely reminder about the last occasion I ate curry. The world may not have done me many favours yet, but it certainly doesn’t deserve a repeat of that particular interesting little incident. The ski-school thing will only work when snow stops being cold, and anyway can you ski anywhere in summer?

  I love how, as long as I phrase it as a ‘learning experience’, I can pretty much get anything from Mum and Dad. The girls still can’t believe that my kick-ass wardrobe is thanks to an article I mentioned (several times) about a fascinating report from MIT and Harvard that I found in one of my recent editions of Scientific American. It was about the lifelong damage done to teenage girls when their self-esteem suffers due to lack of ability to fit in clothes-wise (or ‘conform sartorially’ as the report put it). The folks instantly knew this would mean future therapy bills if I didn’t get the skirts, tops, jeans, boots and sneakers I wanted. I guess they did the maths and decided that at least buying me new clothes was a controllable expense; therapy can last forever.

  Trouble is, now I just look like a geek in great clothes. It doesn’t help that I never know what to do with my hair so it hangs there long and straight, adding to my unkempt-librarian look.

  Sadly, the ‘academic evidence’ thing works both ways with my folks, so I am still not allowed to get contact lenses or get my eyes lasered because of the medical write-ups that my darling brother put under their noses about dry-eye syndrome and infections leading to blindness. What super-bites is that the main article came from one of my own copies of Time magazine. In all honesty, having eyes like shrivelled raisins or dripping with gungy bits would be heaven compared to wearing old-lady glasses with frames thick enough to fit french doors into. I chose them last year thinking that if I went for the geekiest, ugliest, frumpiest pair, they’d look ironic, the way rock stars sometimes carry it off, but sadly they just look geeky, ugly and wronger than wrongness itself.

  I’m just ranting now.

  I should use this journal to plan exact things and carry them out and report back. Righty-ho! Task number one in the Reality Game – go into town and talk to five new teenagers from the regulars who hang out there, but who I don’t know properly. These will be five who do not either a) say that they have to get out of this town or they will go mad or b) look like they might have rickets or scurvy or too much pink stuff in their wardrobe (especially true of males).

  Good luck, Lemony, and Godspeed!

  STILL LATER

  OK, not so easy. It gets to that moment where there’s someone new and roughly your age looking at you, and you are smiling at them trying not to look like you just had dental work done. But then what do you do next? With one girl I muttered ‘nice bag’ and she muttered ‘thanks’, and that was it. I mean, what could I do after that, say, ‘nice jacket’ or something? I’d have sounded like a simpleton. And as for guys, if you even hold eye contact for too long you feel like a stalker. And if you say anything nice then they say something sly about you to their friends and suddenly you have become their afternoon’s entertainment. And I have heard every comment there is about ‘four-eyes’, and ‘what’s the weather like up there?’ and I need to protect myself from that.

  And then there was Nick hanging out by the fountain, looking like God himself, and all he did was say, ‘Where’s your twin?’ (meaning Ro, of course). I can’t believe he hasn’t got tired of saying that and still hasn’t bothered remembering our names. I think he thinks it’s hilarious because although we do spend a ridiculous amount of time together, with my height and her lack of it, and my boring, long, brown hair and her stunning, black dreads, we are abo
ut as twin-like as a giraffe and a grizzly bear. I am now convinced that the love-test thing with the names is wrong (scientifically as well as morally) because it’s feeling like my odds with the Nick-man are sitting way below 6 per cent.

  I wonder what else they eat in India?

  I just love him so much that it hurts. What also hurts is when people presume that because I’m so cheery and brainy that I simply don’t care about stuff like that. Not that I cry much. I wonder why I do that, just stuff it down inside and put a smile on my face and think of something witty to say. I think that if I cried then I would feel worse and somehow they would have made me less.

  Why does he only go for the stunningly glamorous girls? Has he got something against personality and brains? Really and truly, does a girl have to be a celebrity or get crowned Miss Northern Hemisphere to get a bit of attention round here?

  I think the group from town would be amazed if they knew how often I get dressed to go out to a party or dance and then sit on the edge of my bed, too scared in case I’m all wrong. That’s why they think I prefer doing schoolwork and science projects to hanging out. Nothing could be less true (except maybe the 6 per cent thing).

  One very cool aspect to this summer is that there is no science camp this year because they blew up one of the labs with an acid/alkali experiment that they’d been planning for the eight-year-olds to do. And seeing as my suggestion of going to a modelling and deportment seminar was laughed out of the inner atmosphere by my loving family, I need to make my own fun this summer. They think they know me so well, my family, but how do they know for definite that I’ll never need to get out of a sports car without flashing my underwear, or need to know how to apply mascara in seven thin coats? It might just save us all one day! I think Paul should go to it so at least he’ll stop snorting milk out of his nose when he laughs at me.

  This is the problem with being an imaginative trail-blazer, a self-improver: by the time anyone gets your brilliance you’ve already moved on to greater greatnesses.

  My brilliance? Yeah, right, I guess I must be thinking about those health-shoes I designed and made with the ventilation holes that also let rain in, or the spy-boots with the secret compartment in the right heel that made me walk with a limp, or the time I made my own board game called ‘Mess’, like chess, but with more pieces and fewer rules. At this point Paul would say it’s no wonder I don’t have more friends and Ro would hit him.

  Face it. I am nothing but a bundle of potential with a large vocabulary and larger glasses.

  DAY THREE

  Emergency! Is there a social worker in the house?

  Mum and Dad are having another of their University Professors’ gatherings, where they scrape together all the most boring, dusty people on campus and ask them to bring along their kids to torture me and Paul further. I do not deserve torture so they should let me be anywhere else on the planet that night and leave Paul to drown in talk about grants, publications and advanced placements.

  They broke the news to us over breakfast and told us that we had to wear our nice clothes (their version of nice), and that we would have to prepare finger food and interesting bits of ‘cocktail conversation’.

  Paul put on his fake-serious face and said,

  ‘Mum, Dad, what have we EVER done to you?’

  But then Dad had a list for that one ready in his head.

  I asked Ro about what I could use for cocktail conversation and she said that when her mother has a cocktail or two she starts to talk about her cellulite and how she missed the opportunity to be a backing singer for a man who once made it to number 23 in the charts because of her own mother’s triple-bypass. Not sure if that’s what the folks have in mind, but I’m now tempted to sneak Ro’s mum in through the back door on the night.

  As usual, instead of having a direct and civilised conversation about the things that are bothering them, the folks are worrying about me in a sideways fashion. Dad has been asking me how my ‘premature midlife crisis’ is coming along and Mum put this old book on my bed from the 1920s, called The Game Of Life And How To Play It by Florence Scovel-Shinn. I could just tell them that I’m fine, but on a practical note I might soon need more money! No really, I like it when they check up on me; it makes a change from the way they disappear into piles of research papers and dissertations for days on end.

  I just finished the book and it’s all about how if you expect great things to happen and visualise and ‘speak the word’ then the universe will deliver you what you want. Sort of like casting spells or making wishes, or like a cool, scientific experiment! According to the book, the human mind can affect things at a subatomic level just by thinking or looking at a particle. Anyway, this book is much lighter than any of the popular science books I’ve read before now, not ‘lab-based’ at all. There’s a story in it about throwing your lucky monkeys down a coal hole, which I didn’t really get (probably because I have neither). But there was a cool one about this lady who had almost no money who went out and bought a really expensive lunch and because she did it (showing she knew that riches were on the way) then big money arrived just in time. Interesting! Maybe I’ll do some more research and see if any modern studies have been done on this …

  If the book is right, then I’ve been confusing the universe so much – first wanting Nick to rescue me from a roof, then from a burning bus shelter, then wanting him to be a prince in a small European state … that the universe has given up on me entirely!

  All I need to do is learn how to hold one idea steadily enough for it to come about. If this stuff actually works then I need never feel frustrated again.

  OK, now for the real science bit – I need to set up a way of finding out if it’s true, if all you have to do is say those phrases and conjure up the right pictures to make stuff happen the way you want it to.

  From now on I will imagine myself as a movie star and say ‘Thank you for making me a movie star’. Not that I actually want to be one, it’s just that it would be a good, clear test for this subject and heaven knows I need the attention. If it works I can then ditch the whole film star gig, start using my new-found powers for more important stuff like going out with Nick, and getting a chinchilla for my birthday. It is the only thing close to daydreaming that I am going to allow, that way I won’t be sending out muddy orders and getting muddy results.

  LATER

  Ro came over and liked the book too (it doesn’t take long to read). She has decided to focus on selling one of her paintings in a big art gallery. I told her to make it a larger, tougher goal as her art is already amazing and she is so good at getting things done that it wouldn’t test the theory of the thing, but she was adamant. We decided not to include Paul on this one because he’d only choose something disgusting to gross us out like making all the flesh fall away from his right forearm without touching it, or becoming best friends with a tarantula trainer.

  Granted, magic circles are a bit like something we used to do back when we played with Barbies, but we made a space with scarves and in the middle lit a cinnamon candle, which must have been left over from Christmas. Next we put tokens of our goals into a small box – a tube of paint for Ro and a photo of me with a tiara and false eye-lashes from Lorna’s last pj-party along with some little gold confetti stars. While I was in the kitchen fetching matches and a timer I found this meditation music that Mum did Pilates exercises to that one single time (having bought the mat, the scary leotard and the whole set of music).

  Ro locked the door while I drew the curtains, then we put on the music, closed our eyes and spent ten minutes imagining ourselves with the dreams-come-true in progress. I saw myself under bright lights with a make-up girl fussing over me, and then I was checking over my lines in a script. Then just as I was walking over to the crowd to sign autographs the kitchen timer buzzed so loudly that I knocked over the candle and wax went everywhere. Ro thinks this is a good omen. I think it is a good sign that we are both bored beyond belief.

  I thanked Mum for
the book at dinner and Dad and Paul were too afraid to ask, ‘What book?’ in case it was some girl thing.

  DAY FOUR

  I am now officially not speaking to anyone. The only problem is that no one has tried to speak to me so I haven’t been able to alert them to this turn of affairs.

  The Story Of Lemony Smith’s Heartbreaking Humiliation and Social Downfall (not that there was all that far to fall in the first place).

  I was in town with Mum because she is all excited about the party and felt a burning need to buy me the kind of outfit I wouldn’t even let myself be buried in (though I suppose it doesn’t matter what I wear for a house full of people who think Einstein had a ‘fun’ haircut). But that’s not the bad bit. The true horror started as we walked from the shoe shop on the corner (the big one, not the one that Ro likes) to the car park, and out of the habit of centuries she grabbed my hand to cross the road. Suddenly, there was pretty much everyone I know and who I care about whether they like me, sitting on the wall. All the cool people just sitting there like a Saturday morning wall club or something. It was as if they lined up there on purpose to both cause and witness my social destruction. ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. Nick, Suzette, Fintan, Hanna, Saul, Johnny L, Marty, Gussy, Amber, Jonty, Lara, Kristin, Dave, Alice, Bonnie, Dairne, Mark, Ed … all of them. And Nick, did I mention that Nick Collins was there? Of course if I’d have dressed up and gone into town with hope of finding them they’d have all stayed at home. And it’s not like they were mean or anything, they just sort of looked at me walking past with my mum and none of us said ‘hello’, in fact none of us said anything. That was so weird because we are always really loud with our ‘hellos’ and hugs even if we run out of stuff to say after that. I was dying. I can’t face any of them again. The worst part, and I don’t even want to write it down, was that I was carrying Mum’s huge plastic tartan bag, the really old one that you wouldn’t even house a stray puppy in. I will now never, ever have a social life, not even if I apply to Amnesty International. Even years from now the whole gang of them will be like,