“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” Dad said. “I mean, Brainiacs! We watch it every year! You’re so good at it! And now you’ve got a shot at being on the show.”
I shrugged.
“Jemima, you can’t have forgotten!”
I fiddled with the plastic cover on my book. “I’m not taking the test, Dad,” I said quietly. “I don’t want to be on Brainiacs.”
“Jemima! The amount of times we’ve all sat on this sofa at Christmas with you answering those impossible questions—”
“It’s not that, Dad. I don’t want to go on TV. Not…the way I am.”
Dad looked at me, confused and disappointed, like I’d given the wrong answer. He sat on the sofa opposite me and rubbed his beard. “I can’t believe you feel like this,” he said gently. Like I hadn’t been telling him for ages.
I rolled my eyes, then put my hands over them in case I started crying.
“You never used to let it bother you. Remember the spelling bee you won! That was in the palladium in front of loads of people!”
“Dad, that was in primary school. And it wasn’t on national TV. Anyway, Miss Reed emotionally blackmailed me into doing it.”
“I’m just saying, it would be a shame not to enter Brainiacs simply because of your weight. Your weight doesn’t have anything to do with the competition!”
But Dad was wrong. My weight had everything to do with it. It had everything to do with everything. It was the reason people would probably laugh if I even showed up in the hall to take the test tomorrow. Competitions aren’t meant for people like me. Especially not televised ones.
“I don’t want to do it, Dad,” I said, which was almost a full lie. I would have entered Brainiacs in a heartbeat if I wasn’t Jemima Big. “Seriously, who’d want to see someone like me on TV?”
Dad took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “Okay, it’s up to you. I can’t force you, I suppose.” He glanced down at the piece of paper he’d printed out. “Probably for the best. I mean, those kids are seriously smart! You’d need to know things like it was Monet who painted The Persistence of Memory; and that Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Etna erupted; and that the cheetah’s the fastest creature on the planet; which metal is represented by Xe on the periodic table; and the answer to twenty-five squared divided by four. I mean, who on earth knows any of that stuff, right?”
“Oh my God, Dad,” I said, putting my hand on my forehead. “Salvador Dali painted The Persistence of Memory. Monet wasn’t even a surrealist! You should really know that, Dad, considering you went to art college. Pompeii wasn’t actually destroyed; it was covered in volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Mount Etna is on the island of Sicily! And everyone thinks the cheetah is the fastest creature in the world, but it’s only the fastest land animal. The peregrine falcon can go, like, three times faster. Xe is the symbol for xenon and it’s a noble gas, by the way, not a metal.” I rolled my eyes. “And twenty-five squared is…625. Then divided by four is…” I closed my eyes and worked it out. “156.25? I think.” I pulled out my phone and tapped the sum out on the calculator. “Yep,” I said and looked up.
Dad stood up, smiling ridiculously at me.
“What?”
He held up the piece of paper in his hand. It said: Could you be the next BRAINIACS champion?
“I printed this off their website. That’s where those questions are from. It says if you know the answers, then you should take the test.” He looked at me intently, like Luna did whenever she told my fortune. “Who’d want to see someone like you on TV? I would.”
My dad could actually be okay sometimes.
When I got to the hall at lunchtime the next day, there was a line of people standing by the entrance. Two women were sitting behind a desk wearing bright yellow T-shirts that said Brainiacs! in a spiky bubble like a comic book explosion. I joined the queue and watched them ticking off names on a clipboard, but I kept noticing my shadow on the wooden floor. I crossed my arms across my stomach and tried to angle my body so it didn’t look so big compared to the others.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” one of the women behind the desk asked when it was my turn.
“Jemima Small.” I scanned the upside-down list and watched her tick off my name, trying to ignore the bubble of embarrassment that burst in my brain every time I had to say my surname.
“Don’t be nervous, Jemima,” she said, handing me a lightning-bolt key chain and Brainiacs pen. “It doesn’t do your brain functioning any good!” She smiled and moved on to the person behind me.
I chose a desk at the back of the hall. It was one of the tiny single ones they used for exams and I couldn’t tuck myself in very comfortably. I watched people walking in. Every single one of them was smaller than me. My skin felt hot, like it was going through some kind of thermochemical reaction. I tried to think about what Dad had said about my weight not mattering. But sitting in the hall, watching all the normal-sized people take their seats, I couldn’t help feeling like I shouldn’t be here.
And that’s when the woman in the blue jumpsuit walked in. Her hair was shaved at both sides and she had thick black braids twisted into a plait that sat high on her head. She strode past the desks, jogged up the steps to the stage, flashed a smile at Mrs Savage and then stood up straight. Right at the front. Like she didn’t mind about people looking at her. Even though she was big like me.
Mrs Savage handed her a microphone and she didn’t put her arm across her stomach, or care that sunlight was streaming through the windows, illuminating her body. It was like she didn’t think about it. Didn’t notice. Didn’t want to hide. She reminded me of the High Priestess from Luna’s tarot cards. Massively powerful. Massively proud. And kind of the exact person I needed to see right now.
The High Priestess card means you should trust your gut instincts. I looked down at the paper in front of me. Brainiacs Qualifying Test: Brain Busters. My stomach lurched, but a tiny voice inside my gut seemed to say: Jemima Small, if there’s one thing in the entire universe you can do, it’s brain busters.
“Good afternoon, everyone!” the lady in the blue jumpsuit said. “I’m Yolanda, one of the producers of Brainiacs, and I’m very happy to see so many of you here today! Everyone applying this year is taking the qualifying test today. The questions are quite tricky, so don’t worry if you can’t answer all of them. Just do your best. Those of you with the highest scores will be invited to our Selection Day in London in just over five weeks’ time.” Yolanda nodded at Mrs Savage, who clicked a button. A timer appeared on the screen behind them. “You have thirty minutes to answer fifty questions.” The women at the desk stood up and closed the hall doors. Yolanda smiled. “May your brains be with you!”
The timer began counting down. The hall filled with the sound of people opening their test papers, but all I could hear was every second ticking away. Fifty questions. My hands were shaking as I turned the page and read the first question. A quadratic sequence.
Maybe it was because I loved quadratic sequences. Or maybe it was the sunlight pouring through the windows onto my skin. But suddenly, I felt like I had a fireball in my stomach. Fifty brain busters in thirty minutes. I looked up at the timer. Twenty-nine minutes and fourteen seconds, to be exact. I took a deep breath and picked up my pen.
After the maths questions, there were puzzles made up of crosses and circles and triangles. There were anagrams; 3D shapes you had to match up; questions where you had to pick the right spelling out of a list; periodic table calculations. The last section took me the longest. Not because the questions were hard. Because of the way they were worded: What’s one fifth of one tenth of one half of 600? The kind of questions that Miki would say give you brain ache.
Once I’d double-checked all my answers, I put my pen down and looked up. Most people were still writing. There were four minutes left on the clock. The time had gone so quickly. For those minutes I was answering the questions, it was like being in the Very Overweight range d
idn’t matter. As though that red cross on the graph representing me was completely irrelevant. Like it didn’t even exist.
Mrs Savage caught my eye and smiled. She nudged Yolanda, pointed to something on her clipboard and said something I couldn’t make out. Then they both smiled at me. Mrs Savage’s smile looked less sinister than usual. I didn’t have psychic powers, but somehow I knew what Mrs Savage was thinking. She thought I had a chance of getting through.
As I closed my test paper and wrote my name on the front, I felt happy and terrified at exactly the same time. A bit like when I was younger, when I used to go on the rollercoaster by the pier. You’d hear the slow clack-clack-clack of the cars on the tracks as it took you to the highest point. Well, sitting in the hall after completing the Brainiacs test was like sitting in that rollercoaster car. Knowing I’d answered every single question. Almost certain I’d answered them correctly. Feeling like I was on the precipice of being hurtled into the unknown and there was no way of getting off. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling, actually.
Luna texted me on the way home from school asking me to see her urgently. She wanted to tell my fortune. I knew because she’d used the crystal ball emoji. I’d just taken the Brainiacs test and it was the first Fat Club tomorrow, so maybe Luna telling my fortune was exactly what I needed. A break from reality.
The curtains were closed, and Luna’s whole cabin glowed with fairy lights.
“Jemima,” she said as I went in. Swirls of gold eyeliner framed her eyes, and coloured jewels were stuck along the tops of her eyebrows. It was like a kind of fortune-teller’s uniform. “I can feel a change coming. A feminine energy! I’ve had a premonition.”
Luna had premonitions occasionally. It meant she could see the future. Not like when meteorologists predict the weather, or seismologists predict earthquakes. Those are based on actual science. Luna’s predictions were based on her communicating with Earth goddesses. Which is why I only half-believed them.
A pack of emerald-green tarot cards seemed to appear from nowhere, and Luna began shuffling them. She spread them out in a semicircle on the table and told me to pick five.
I knew the cards couldn’t predict my future, or see inside my head or my heart. But that’s the thing about Auntie Luna. Sometimes she makes you forget the stuff you’ve learned in science lessons. I chose my cards and Luna slowly placed them face down in a criss-cross shape, then picked up the card on my left.
“This card is how you see yourself,” Luna said, turning it over. “The Ten of Wands.”
It had a picture of a woman trapped underneath a stack of wooden sticks, and a dead sheep on the grass next to her.
“Great,” I said.
Luna smiled. “This is a great card!”
“Luna, it’s got a dead sheep on it.”
“I mean, it’s great that we’re seeing it now. This card tells me you’ve got a lot of worries, you’re feeling burdened, and it’s hard to see a way forward.” She tutted a few times. “It also tells me now is not a good time to do the healing ritual I’d planned for you this weekend.”
I shook my head. “Shame.”
Luna smiled and turned over the next card. “This represents your potential. The Tower.”
Maybe the Tower sounds like good potential to you, but this tower had a bolt of lightning striking it, a huge crown falling out of the top window and the whole thing was engulfed in flames.
Luna’s steely-blue eyes flashed. “So, this card means your life is—”
“A total disaster?”
“No!” Luna laughed. “This card may look a little…frightening, but it signifies a sudden change – see this bolt of lightning here as a flash of inspiration. The foundations of the tower give way to a new truth. A new knowledge…”
“Right,” I said, and stopped listening.
Whichever card you picked, Luna always made it sound good. It’s probably why she was so popular at the psychic fairs she went to. I sat up and looked over at my reflection in Luna’s dressing-table mirror. No wonder my fortune was a burning tower of disaster and a dead sheep. I looked at Luna’s sparkling bracelets and crystals, and little pots of glittery make-up. I wished I could look like her. But if I ever said anything to Luna about feeling ugly or fat, she’d force me to listen to her chime music for hours and put healing stones in my pockets.
She was saying something about order and harmony, when I noticed her gold eyeliner pencil on the floor. It was exactly what I needed. Even if it made me look one per cent better for Fat Club tomorrow, it would be a start. I checked Luna wasn’t looking, then slowly reached down and put the eyeliner into my pocket, wondering if Dad would notice if I wore make-up to school. And that’s when Luna turned over the next card.
It was a woman sitting in a forest, wearing a long white dress with a crown of gold stars on her head. Her hair was super luminous honey blonde.
“What does it mean?” I asked, but I already knew it was good. An empress with a crown of stars and super luminous honey blonde hair could not, in any way, be bad.
“The Empress.” Luna smiled at me. Being smiled at by Luna was a bit like seeing a rainbow. You know it’s just a normal thing, but it still feels magical. “The daughter of heaven and earth!” Luna cried, raising her arms and almost knocking over a giant crystal. “The symbol of feminine power!”
I thought, This has to be good news for eyeliner!
Luna held my hands tightly in hers. “This card is a good omen, Jemstone. A message from Mother Earth!”
I hoped this didn’t mean I’d have to rub scented oils into my skin again. Luna gazed intensely at me, like she could see into my soul. As though she knew how worried I was about starting Gina’s class tomorrow, and like she could see the Mum-shaped hole in my heart. As though she understood how badly I wanted to get on Brainiacs, and how much I wanted to look like someone else entirely. It was like she could see every brainwave, feel every heartbeat.
“Jemima,” she said, keeping her eyes on mine. “A powerful goddess lives within you.”
But Luna always said that. I looked down at the Empress card, then back at my reflection in the mirror. If that’s true, I thought, then she sure is good at hiding.
The next morning, it was exactly seventy-three days until NASA would be sending its latest spacecraft through the Martian atmosphere; forty-five days until the “hypothermia is fun!” camping trip; thirty days before I turned thirteen, and zero days until my first Fat Club.
As I got dressed, I pictured crowds of people gathering outside the sports hall at lunchtime, hurling rotten vegetables at us, like they did to criminals in medieval times. Mrs Savage had said Gina’s class wasn’t a punishment, but getting ready for school that day, it definitely felt like one. And I had to leave the house without Dad seeing my face.
“You feeling okay this morning, Jem?” Dad asked.
“Yep,” I said, putting my head as far inside my rucksack as it would go.
“It’ll be fine,” Dad said, leaning against the banister and slurping his coffee. “Don’t worry.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I closed my bag and noticed a list of equipment I’d need for the school camping trip in Dad’s handwriting on the cabinet. I looked closer. I’d be sleeping in a muddy field in the freezing cold in close proximity to Lottie Freeman needing…an emergency survival whistle? My life could not get any worse right now. I kept my back to Dad as I pulled on my blazer.
“Jemima’s wearing eyeliner,” Jasper announced as he walked downstairs.
“Thanks, Jasper,” I said and accidentally knocked my rucksack into him as I put it on my shoulder.
“Jemima!” Dad said. “You know the school rules about make-up. You’d better go and wash it off. Quickly.”
I had no intention of washing it off. Everyone would be talking about Fat Club today. Everyone would be looking at me. I had to look a tiny bit better than normal. Or one per cent less grotesque. “Dad, everyone at school wears make-up.”
“I don’t,” Jasper said,
and Dad raised his eyebrows at me like he’d proved me wrong.
“Jemima, you’re only twelve. You don’t need to wear make-up. And certainly not to school.”
“Only twelve? I’m almost thirteen. Which is old enough to make decisions about my own face. Anyway, eyeliner is cheaper than facial surgery.”
Dad sighed. “Jemima, you don’t need facial surgery and you’re absolutely not wearing make-up to school. That’s the end of it. You look perfectly all right as you are.”
Parents are supposed to think their children are beautiful. My dad thought I looked “all right”. I examined my face in my phone camera and sighed until I didn’t have any air left in my lungs.
Jasper boasted about his latest magic trick as he did his shoes up. “It’s so cool, Dad. I can turn water into ice in front of your very eyes!” Jasper did his weird magic hand movement thing and Dad said, “Wow!” He made it so obvious Jasper was his favourite.
“Turning water into ice isn’t magic, Jasper,” I said. “It’s physics.”
“Right,” Jasper snorted. “And can physics transform water into ice in a matter of seconds?”
“Yes, if you use frozen carbon dioxide.”
Jasper rolled his eyes. “Well, can physics do this?”
Suddenly, my phone vanished out of my hand and reappeared in one of Dad’s trainers. It’s a magician thing. Or maybe it’s just a Jasper thing.
“Gross, Jasper,” I said, grabbing a tissue from the front pocket of my rucksack and wiping my phone. Tissues were an essential item around my brother. And antibacterial hand gel.
“If you’ve quite finished, you can wash that make-up off, please,” Dad said.
“Make-up is a form of self-expression, Dad. If you don’t let me fully express myself, you could do permanent damage to my identity.”
Jemima Small Versus the Universe Page 7