Jemima Small Versus the Universe

by Tamsin Winter

  I looked in the mirror and scooped my hair to one side. I didn’t look like Tabitha Hendrix. Definitely not in grey leggings and the periodic table hoodie Jasper got me for my birthday last year. It uses the symbols for nitrogen, erbium, and dysprosium to spell out NErDy. I wore it to school on non-uniform day last year. Which was the day I figured out it’s not a good idea to wear clothes with science jokes on them to school. I spent the entire day explaining what it meant. And how you can’t spell the word fat using chemical symbols. Alina stopped hanging around with me after that. But I still like the hoodie. It’s the best thing Jasper has ever got me. Last Christmas he got me a phone case shaped like a giant cockroach. Taking that to school didn’t exactly boost my popularity either.

  I didn’t look like a YouTuber. And I definitely didn’t want half a million people seeing me in my swimsuit. But when I looked in the mirror that night, something felt different. Because for the first time in the entire history of the universe, I didn’t see just the bad stuff.

  I took Luna’s eyeliner from my desk drawer and started writing straight onto my mirror. Mr Nelson told us ages ago about a Roman army that had used copper alloy to strengthen their shields before they went into battle. It has a high resistance to corrosion.

  Well, when I looked at myself in the mirror next to the quote from Mr Nelson, it felt like I’d just made my first piece of copper alloy.

  It was the first week in October and I stayed behind after school for some extra maths practice with Mrs Lee, because the Brainiacs Selection Day was only three weeks away. It would have been okay, if Lottie hadn’t been there too. Any time Mrs Lee was explaining something, she filled one of her cheeks with air, and moved it from one side of her mouth to the other, like a lopsided guinea pig. It made it really hard not to smile when she messed up easy questions like 189 x 48.

  It wasn’t cold, but it started raining on the way home and I didn’t have my coat, so I was soaked by the time I got to my house. When I walked in, I shook the rain off my blazer and noticed Jasper standing in the living room wearing a cape.

  “Doesn’t he look fantastic?” Luna beamed. “It’s Grandad’s old cape!” She snipped a thread from the hem and stood back to take a look. “There. Good as new.”

  Luna is amazing at making clothes. She doesn’t like shopping on the internet and the only clothes that shops in Clifton-on-Sea sell are old-lady clothes. Even my nana doesn’t want to dress like an old lady and she is one.

  “Thanks, Luna!” Jasper said, admiring himself in the mirror. He balanced on one foot, practising his levitating trick, and almost knocked Dad over as he came in.

  Luna spotted me trying not to laugh. “Jasper’s following in the long line of magicians and psychics in our family. Your brother is bravely following his destiny.”

  I will always feel grateful it wasn’t my destiny to wear our dead grandad’s cape.

  Luna looked like she had read my mind.

  “It looks great, Jasper, very…mystical,” I said quickly and sat on the sofa. Luna sat next to me and linked her arm through mine.

  “Okay, I’m ready.” Jasper tapped his phone and his magic music blasted out of the speakers. “Dad!”

  “Right!” Dad cupped his hands around his mouth so his words amplified around the living room. “May I welcome to the stage, the UNBELIEVABLE—”

  “Incredible!” Jasper whispered.

  “Right, sorry. The INCREDIBLE illusionist, Jaspeeeeeer Smaaaaaall!”

  “Diamond!”

  “What?” Dad’s hands fell away. “Diamond?”

  I felt Luna squirm. Her surname’s Diamond. It’s Uncle Alfie’s name. She didn’t want to change it back to Small even though Alfie left her broken-hearted and emptied her bank account. That’s how bad our surname is.

  “Sorry, Luna,” Jasper said. “Jasper Diamond just sounds better. I’ll change it if you want.”

  “No, don’t be silly! It’s fine.” Luna caught Dad’s eye. For a second they looked like they were communicating telepathically. “It’s fine. Jasper Diamond sounds…incredible! Let’s see some magic, shall we?” She patted the sofa and Dad sat down.

  Jasper spun round and the purple cape flew out behind him. He wasn’t the Amazing Apollo, but it did look kind of incredible. He slowly pulled a gold handkerchief out of his pocket. I leaned back in my seat. I’d seen this trick a million times. Jasper wove the handkerchief between his fingers and threw it up into the air. I waited for it to disappear. But suddenly, it transformed into a ball of flames. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Jasper’s trick was actually good. He must have been doing a lot of practising.

  “JASPER!” Dad shouted, springing from the sofa. He started wafting out the flames with his bare hands, but they had already disappeared. Then the smoke alarm went off. “What on EARTH were you thinking?” Dad shouted, opening the living room windows and waving a tea towel under the smoke alarm.

  Jasper stopped the music and laughed. “It’s magic, Dad! See? It turns into this.” He held out a shiny gold ball.

  “Burning the house down is not magic, Jasper!”

  I pressed my lips together to stop laughing. Jasper tried to explain to Dad that the giant ball of flames we’d all just witnessed was not a fire hazard. It did not go well.

  “Right. Show’s over!” Dad said.

  Jasper pulled off Grandad’s cape and started putting away his equipment.

  “And if you’ve got that blasted tarantula down here, take it upstairs! Now!”

  “Oh, lighten up, Rion!” Luna said. “There’s no harm done. That trick was genius! Jasper needs some encouragement.” She fixed her steely eyes on Dad. “If he wants his own show one day, then he has to practise!”

  “Thanks, Luna,” Jasper said, putting a large axe into a box.

  I suddenly felt relieved he’d started with the ball of flames.

  “He doesn’t want his own magic show!” Dad turned to Jasper. “Do you? In the palladium? Like your grandad?”

  “No, Dad.” Jasper said. “I want my own YouTube channel.”

  Luna squealed and kissed Jasper’s face, leaving a glittery kiss mark. “That is a brilliant idea.”

  Dad stood on a chair and checked the ceiling for singe marks. “Great! So it will all be under my roof. Wonderful. I suppose I’d better invest in a fire extinguisher.” He got down and noticed the axe poking out of Jasper’s box. “And a more comprehensive first-aid kit.”

  “Next time, maybe do your show in the garden,” Luna said, patting Dad’s shoulder. “To keep your dad’s stress levels under control.”

  Dad let out a long breath. “Okay, well, we won’t need to wrap up warm, what with Jasper setting fire to us!”

  Jasper laughed really loudly. Clearly on a code-red level suck-up after getting told off.

  Luna tapped an app on her phone. “Oh, perfect! Look, it’s a full moon next Sunday. Your birthday, Jemima! Jasper could do his show.”

  “Okay,” Jasper said. “I’ve got loads of tricks even more impressive than that.”

  “Great,” Dad said. “I’ll notify the ambulance crews.”

  “We could go to that pizza place by the lighthouse,” Luna said. “Your treat, right, Rion?”

  Dad sighed. “Fine. You only get to be thirteen once, I suppose.”

  “Thanks, Dad!” I grabbed my phone. “Okay if Miki comes?”

  “Yes, why not? It can also be a celebration of you being super brainy. It’s only a week after that we’ll be in London!” He ruffled my hair, then Jasper’s. “If Jasper doesn’t incinerate us.”

  “I’ll make you a new dress for your birthday, if you like?” Luna took my hand, pulled me through the bead curtain into the kitchen and picked up Dad’s iPad. “Show me the kind of thing you like and I’ll make one to fit you perfectly.”

  And that’s why having a psychic auntie who lives in your garden could sometimes be one hundred per cent amazing.

  The next day at school, Miki brought his Mary Poppins script to the canteen at luncht
ime so I could help him learn his lines. I didn’t like going to the canteen when it was busy. People looked at my tray to see what I’d chosen to eat, even some of the dinner ladies. Some people looked at me like I shouldn’t be eating at all. The whole canteen smelled of chips anyway. I probably gained calories just breathing the air.

  “Miss Nisha’s getting a screen for the back of the stage!” Miki said as we joined the queue. “She’s going to add some animated bits, like—”

  Suddenly, Dylan Taylor shouted, “Guard your food!” from a nearby table. “She’s hungry!” He laughed and made pig noises until one of his friends told him to shut up.

  Miki held onto my arm because he could sense I was about to walk out. “Ignore them. Everyone has to eat.” He gave me a serious look. “And I have to eat doughnuts.”

  We got our food and sat on a bench facing the windows. Miki took out his script and I started reading it with him in between forkfuls of pasta. But it was impossible. Not because of the pasta. Miki kept bursting into song or getting up to show me the dance steps.

  “Oh no,” I said, looking over his shoulder.

  “What? Did I say that bit wrong?” Miki asked.

  I shook my head and nodded to Lottie and Alina walking towards us.

  “Hi, Miki!” Lottie said.

  Alina smiled awkwardly at me.

  “Oh no,” Miki said. “I mean, hi, Lottie.”

  “Learning your lines?” she asked. “You’re so brilliant as Bert!” Lottie sang a perfect “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” It was only slightly rat-like.

  Miki looked at me cross-eyed. I tried not to laugh. Miki had been begging me to bring Jasper’s tarantula into school so he could scare Lottie in rehearsals. But I’d never do that. Not to an innocent tarantula.

  Lottie turned to me. “I’m playing Mary Poppins. It’s the star part.”

  “I know, Lottie,” I said. “You’ve told everyone a thousand times.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Anyway, some girls in Year Nine auditioned. But Miss Nisha chose me.” She elbowed Alina.

  “Lottie’s got the biggest part in the whole play,” Alina mumbled, as though she was reciting a line she’d had to learn. It didn’t take a genius to work out who was directing.

  Lottie laughed. “It’s going to be a really BIG production. The BIGGEST ever!”

  Miki sighed and picked up his bag. “You’re not funny, Lottie. Come on, Jemima. Let’s go and practise in the form room.”

  I tried to think of something to say back. But Lottie was standing there with her honey blonde hair, and perfect weight, and the star role in the Christmas production, and qualifying score for the selection round of Brainiacs, linking arms with my old best friend, and I couldn’t think of anything. Because there wasn’t anything to say. She was just like Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way.

  I picked up my bag, dumped my plate on the trolley and started walking towards the door. Then I stopped. There was something wrong with her. I told Miki to wait and went back to where Lottie was standing.

  “You’re right, Lottie,” I said. “You have got the biggest part in the play. But Mary Poppins is famous for being kind. So I hope you are REALLY good at acting.” I smiled. “Good luck revising for Brainiacs with all those lines to learn. And the extra ones you’re writing for Alina.”

  My hands were kind of trembling. But it was only my brain releasing adrenaline into my bloodstream. That’s probably why I didn’t care about asking people by the drinks machine to move, or having to squeeze past the pillars near the back tables, or that a couple of Year Sevens were gawping at me. I stood by the doorway and glanced back at Lottie. She was making Afzal and his friends move tables so she could sit by the window.

  “You know what, Miki?” I said. “I am going to obliterate Lottie Freeman at Brainiacs.”

  “I don’t know what obliterate means,” Miki said, “but I totally agree.” And he high-fived me on the way out.

  As we headed to our form room, I thought about all the words Lottie had said to me, and how their sound waves had run out of energy by now. I thought about all the things I’d recorded in my notebook, the pages I’d torn up and thrown in the bin. And I realized, walking in the fresh October sunshine with the first autumn leaves at my feet, those words were already beginning to decompose.

  After breakfast on Saturday, I went out in the garden. Luna was on her sun deck staring at her laptop.

  “Good morning, my beautiful niece!” she said, sunlight reflecting off her bracelets. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re up early.”

  “Yes, I wonder what woke me!” she said, just as Dad’s power drill started up again.

  “Can I do some yoga with you today? Gina said we have to exercise again for homework.”

  “Of course! We can do it now if you like.” Luna put her laptop on the table and tied her hair into a bun. “What a blissful idea! Although, let’s go in the house. Escape this racket. Oh, hang on – I got you something.” She disappeared inside her cabin and came out with a copy of Sweet magazine. “You can’t spend all weekend studying.”

  “Thanks!” The only magazines I usually read were Go Science! or Amazing History. Maybe it would be good to read a magazine that wasn’t in the school library. “Are you working on your website?” I asked, pointing to her laptop.

  “No, your dad found a box of my stuff in the garage. There were some photos on a memory stick; I was just having a look. There are some old ones of me and Uncle Alfie.” She moved the screen round so I could see. Alfie had his arm around Luna and the lights of Clifton Pier glowed in the background. “That was a few weeks before he left.”

  “He looks really happy.”

  Luna took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, a picture doesn’t tell the whole story.” She stared at the screen. “Alfie’s a Pisces. They love being close to the water.”

  “He should have stayed here then,” I said. “You can’t get closer to water than living in Clifton-on-Sea.”

  Luna smiled then turned to look at me. Her eyes glittered like a silvery-blue kaleidoscope. “I love you very much, Jemima,” she said, squeezing my hand so much it was kind of painful. “I’d never do anything to hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded. But, for some strange reason, I felt like I should only half-believe her.

  After contorting my body into strange positions called things like downward-facing dog, mountain pose, side plank and the tree, I collapsed into what Luna told me was “corpse pose”. It felt kind of appropriate. My legs were burning and I could feel sweat soaking into the back of my T-shirt.

  “My muscles hurt,” I said, stretching my arms. “All of them.”

  Luna rubbed something smelling of oranges into my temples. “Well, please don’t sue me.”

  “Sorry. It was good, thank you.” I examined my thighs. “It hasn’t made me look any thinner though.”

  Luna pulled me onto my feet and wrapped a pink, glittery blanket around my shoulders. “Jemima, yoga isn’t about looking a particular way. It’s about feeling content, feeling happy in your own skin.”

  But it was okay for Luna. Her legs were long and thin, and probably not even aching. I wondered how many yoga sessions I’d need to do to have legs like hers.

  “Luna, how long have you been doing yoga?”

  She thought for a moment. “About ten years now.”

  Ten years! If I got through to Brainiacs I’d be getting filmed next month! Maybe there was an extreme version I could do instead.

  When I went back upstairs, I could tell Jasper had been in my room. Some of the books on my desk had been moved.

  “Jasper!” I shouted. “Don’t touch my stuff!”

  “I was just helping you with your French homework!” he shouted back.

  I picked up my French book. We had to write two paragraphs describing our dream holiday for homework. Jasper had written a list of French words on a sticky note for me.

  “Oh, okay t
hanks!” I said. “Although obviously my dream holiday wouldn’t include dodgeball!”

  It wasn’t until later when I noticed what else Jasper had done. Next to where I’d put Jemima Small: difficult to defeat on my mirror, he’d drawn a fat person wearing sunglasses, and a speech bubble saying good luck in French. Even when Jasper was being nice, he was still really annoying.

  That afternoon, I went over to Miki’s house. His mum was making vegetable dumplings and sticky rice and the house smelled amazing. We watched the old Mary Poppins film as we ate and Miki made me join in with all the songs. Afterwards, he showed me some Japanese letters his mum had been teaching him and then tested me on them. He gave me a score using his own Mary-Poppins-style system which equated to: practically perfect in every way.

  “Arigatou gozaimasu, Niko,” I said to Miki’s mum, as I climbed into her car.

  It wasn’t that far to my house, but she always gave me a lift home, and I always said thank you to her in Japanese. It was about the only thing Miki had taught me to say. Apart from “a weasel’s last fart” which wasn’t exactly useful. He told me it was a famous saying in Japan, but I wasn’t sure if he was serious and I definitely wasn’t going to try it out on his mum. Even though he’d dared me about a million times.

  “You’re welcome, Jemima! And good luck at the Brainiacs audition! We’re so excited for you!”

  “Thanks,” I said. “There are only fifteen places on the show so…” I let my voice trail off.

  “But they all have the same chance as you, yes?” she said.

  “I guess,” I said. “So, pretty slim.” I felt my cheeks go red as soon as I said “slim” but Niko didn’t seem to notice.

  “She’s so going to get through,” Miki said as he did up his seat-belt. “Jemima is such a geek, I mean, genius.”

  “Ha! I wish I could say the same for you!” Niko said.

  I listened to Miki and his mum speaking to each other in Japanese on the way home. I had no idea what they were saying, but the words sounded kind of gentle and warm, like when it rains in the summer. It made me wonder how it would feel for my mum to pick me up and take me home. For her to ask about how my life is going. I shook the thought out of my mind and gazed up at the street lamps. The chances of that happening were even slimmer than my chances of appearing on Brainiacs. And suddenly, a question came into my mind so big that I didn’t even dare consider the answer.