by Jo Cotterill
“Hi, Chris,” I say, and then look back down at my homework.
Chris comes in (uninvited, naturally) and stands on my rug, hands in his pockets, looking around. The room suddenly feels a whole lot smaller. “You still have a poster of My Little Pony on your wall?” he says. “At your age?”
My face flames red. That poster has been there for about four years. It’s got a lot of good memories for me.
“You should be into boy bands and short shorts and all that stuff,” he says, his gaze sweeping my room.
I don’t know what to say to him. He’s standing in between me and the door, and it feels like I’m trapped.
“Maybe not short shorts,” he adds, glancing at my legs. “Not got your mom’s figure.”
To my utter relief at this moment, Mom comes back. “Hey!” she says brightly, standing in my doorway. “Rosie’s on her way right now.”
There are more footsteps on the stairs and I hear the faint sound of music from Rosie’s earphones. She turns the volume up way further than you’re supposed to.
“About time,” says Chris, and he turns and goes, leaving my door wide open. The tinny music heads into the living room.
Mom comes in and gives me a hug. “Don’t stay up too late,” she says. “School night.”
I hug her back tightly. For a moment I don’t think I can let go, but then she pulls away and I nod and smile like I always do. Option Two: smile.
The door to the apartment clicks shut, and Option Two slides off my face, leaving a frown in its place.
Chapter 4
I try to get back to my homework, but there’s a kind of hole inside me, like when something is taken away and you miss it and so you want to fill it up with something else.
I wish I did have a secret power. But even after writing the poem, I still feel like there’s something missing, so I wander out to the living room. Rosie is where I expected her to be, on the sofa, eyes glued to her phone, swiping the screen this way and that. She still has her earphones in, so I go over and tap her on the shoulder. She jumps a mile and swears.
“Don’t do that! You nearly gave me a heart attack!” She pulls out an earbud.
“Sorry,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“Beautifying myself,” she says. “Look.”
I sit next to her on the sofa and she shows me her screen. It’s a photo of a really pretty girl. “Who’s that?” I ask.
Rosie giggles. “It’s me.”
“What?”
“It’s an app. I’ll show you.” She flips through the options. You take a selfie, and then you can choose how to edit the photo. You can change eye color, make your cheeks slimmer, lips redder, eyes bigger. “Let’s do you,” she says, and snaps a photo of me before I’ve had a chance to think about it. “What shall we change?” she says, her fingers flying over the screen.
Before my eyes, my face is turned into something, someone . . . else. Rosie holds up the phone to me. “See?” she says, smiling. “You look gorgeous!”
I stare at the photo, mesmerized. The girl in the picture is thinner than me. Her face isn’t so round, and her muddy green eyes have been brightened. Her lips are a pale pink and her hair has been thickened to fall in a wave across her forehead. She—I—it—looks like a Disney princess. “Wow,” I manage to say.
“Now there’s a supermodel face,” says Rosie, admiring her own work. “There’s another app that’ll do your whole body. I’ll show you what I did to mine.”
Within seconds I’m looking at a picture of Rosie in a bikini, her legs long and tanned. She looks like those girls in perfume or magazine ads. “Stand up and I’ll do you,” she says enthusiastically.
“No!” I say, and it comes out more sharply than I intended. “No, I—that’s all right, I’m fine. Really. Do another one of you.”
She obliges, and I watch her turn her own image into something you might see on a bus stop ad or the side of a building. Smooth and thin and perfect, just like all the other smooth and thin and perfect women and girls I see everywhere. “Do you wish you looked like that?” I ask, but even as I say it, I know it’s a dumb question.
“Yeah, of course,” she says, not even glancing up. “Who wouldn’t?”
Later, in bed, I stare at the wall. I can’t stop seeing that image of my altered face, the one Rosie said was “gorgeous.” It was. It looked amazing. I do wish I looked like that, of course I do. Except—it’s not real. A computer changed my face into something I couldn’t ever look like. Something no one could ever look like.
Chapter 5
The next morning is Friday and Mom is puffy-eyed and yawning at breakfast.
“Did you have a good night?” I ask.
“Oh, it was all right. Just a bit . . . well, a bit . . . I dunno.” She shrugs.
“A bit what?” I ask, pouring out a helping of Cocoa Krispies.
She comes to sit with me, mug of green tea in hand. “It’s nothing really. We went down to the King’s Arms and there were some of Chris’s friends there. I mean, I didn’t mind that they were there, of course I didn’t. They were all talking about some trip they’d been on together years ago, and how their soccer teams were doing, and so Chris mostly talked to them. . . .” She stops for a moment. “There wasn’t much I could join in with, that’s all. But, you know, I was happy just to be there.”
She doesn’t sound that happy about it.
“I listened to the band mostly,” she goes on, looking a little more cheerful.
“Band?” I say.
“Yeah, they’ve started having live music. They played all kinds of things—a couple of covers, and some original stuff. It was nice.” She smiles. “There was this song about a dog—”
“A dog?” I ask. “In a pop song?”
Mom laughs. “No, it was more like a kind of ballad. It was about this dog who met a man and they became friends, and the dog trained the man to do everything he wanted. It was really clever.” Her face becomes more thoughtful. “And then there was this bit toward the end of the song where the man started to neglect the dog, and then one day he didn’t come back, and the dog was just left, waiting. . . .”
I stare at her. “Wow. That’s . . . really sad.” I don’t say it, but the song sounds completely weird to me, and not the kind of thing she’d usually go for at all. Mom likes songs about girls getting revenge after they’ve been dumped.
She stares over toward the sofa, as though seeing last night’s view. “It was so cleverly done, you know? Really subtle. Kind of drew you in and then—wham!—hit you with the sad bit.” She curls her hands around the mug. “I really liked it. And the singer’s voice . . . he drew you in too. And then I got a bit of a headache, so I came home.”
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I say. Chris’s voice usually wakes me up.
“I came back on my own. Chris went on to a club with his friends.”
I’m not an expert on boyfriends, but that doesn’t sound very nice to me. Taking your girlfriend out for the evening, then ignoring her and making her walk home by herself? I bite my lip so that I don’t say so out loud.
My mom deserves better.
Chapter 6
As I walk to school, I feel kind of sad inside. It’s not that I want a dad. My own dad walked out so many years ago that I don’t even remember him. But I wish Mom had a boyfriend who made her happy.
The playground is full of kids and their parents. It’s a great place to watch people. If you want to be good at impressions, you have to study how they walk, how they hold their heads while they talk, whether they wave their hands around. Some people have really expressive faces—they’re the best ones to copy. It’s almost impossible not to show something on your face. A person who talks without smiling or raising their eyebrows is really unusual—try it and you’ll see. Emma Ojobe’s dad is like that. I did an impression of him once to Emma and she said it was dead scary and I had to promise to never do it again.
“Jelly!” Kayma comes running up. “Hey, look
what I got.” She holds out a hand and I see tiny sparkly gems on each fingernail.
“Nice!” I say. I can see from one glance that they’re gel nails, professionally applied. I know because Mom has them too.
“I went to the manicurist with Fliss,” says Kayma. Fliss is her much older sister who works in a coffee shop. “You should come with us next time.”
Kayma’s fingers are long and slim. My fingers are wide and my nails are kind of square. I wiggle them at Kayma and say in a fake Southern accent, “Ain’t no nail product alive that can make these fingers look cute, baby!”
She laughs and drops into the same accent. “You just don’t think enough of yourself, honey. You trust the manicurist. The manicurist knows.”
We giggle. Her accent isn’t as good as mine, but that’s OK because it’s fun and silly and we’ve been doing fake accents for years, ever since we started watching My Little Pony. For the whole time we were in second grade, she was Rarity and I was Pinkie Pie. That’s when I got the poster on my wall.
Sanvi comes to join us and says, “Kayma, can we talk about The K Factor?”
“I’ve got loads of ideas!” says Kayma. “Like, we could do a song, or a mime, or write a sketch, or do some gymnastics—”
Sanvi looks horrified. “I can’t even do a cartwheel! What about dancing?” She does Indian dancing on Saturdays and she’s really good at it.
“Dancing, me?! You must be joking,” says Kayma. Sanvi’s face falls.
The sun is out today, and our classroom windows are big. As the morning hours pass, I can feel my skirt sticking to my legs. Lunch is macaroni and cheese, and I eat every last scrap. My tummy feels wobbly, not because of the food but because after lunch it’s PE.
I love PE. I love running around outside—I’m strong and fast and have good ball skills—but something has to happen before and after PE, and that’s the bit I hate.
Mr. Lenck finishes taking attendance, and then Ms. Jones comes in. She has a round face with widely spaced eyes and a very straight, quite long nose. She smells of something orangey and she always wears sneakers with neon laces. “Right, class!” she says, and her voice is slightly too high and slightly too loud all the time because she’s so used to shouting outside that she forgets to talk normally. “Let’s go!” Up until last year, we all had to change in the same classroom, boys and girls. I hated it. I felt as if everyone was looking at me, at the soft rolls that hang over my waistband. This year the boys change in the classroom but the girls go down to the end of the corridor. It’s better but I still hate it because the other girls . . . well, they don’t look like me. All those thin bodies, those skinny legs . . . they make me hot and humiliated, and even though the girls don’t say anything, I know—I just know—what they’re thinking when they see me: I’m glad I don’t look like that.
It’s soccer today. I’m good at soccer because I’m fast and I can control the ball. Verity Hughes picks me to be on her team, and we pull on the red pinnies while the opposing team takes the yellow. The pinnies have been used for years—everything at this school is falling apart—and the elastic at the bottom of mine has long since given up any stretchiness. “Look,” I say, sticking my thumbs under the hem and holding it out, “my elastic is dead!”
“Just as well!” Verity grins at me. “It would’ve cut you in half.”
I laugh with her. Verity is one of the whitest, skinniest, and smoothest girls in class.
Ms. Jones sends the red and yellow teams to the far corner of the field. Will Matsunaga is wearing yellow and calls out to me before we start, “Gonna take you down, Waters!”
“You wish!” I retort, and the game starts. Verity is terrible at soccer, she kicks hard but has no direction control, so quite often we lose a throw-in to the other team, which makes me really annoyed. It’s not long before we’re down three–nil, and Will is crowing like a big fat crow that’s found roadkill to chomp on. “Told you, Waters!”
I boot the ball over his head toward the goal—too high. You shouldn’t kick in anger, you lose your technique. The ball flies about nine feet over the crossbar and plops down into another match, causing shouts of protest. “Sorry!” I yell. “Don’t know my own strength!”
Will shakes his head, teasing. “You’re like the Hulk, Jelly. He lets his anger get the better of him too.”
“I’m not angry,” I say angrily. The ball comes flying back through the air without warning. I twist in surprise and fall, sitting awkwardly on my own foot and bruising my backside. Will bursts into raucous laughter.
“You OK?” Verity offers me a hand up, though I can see she’s laughing too.
“I’m fine,” I say, blinking back tears of pain. I get to my feet and take Option Two again. “Did you see that? I was like a hippo falling off a cliff!” I demonstrate the action and fall heavily, deliberately, on my own foot again. The others laugh, and something twinges painfully inside me, but I keep going because they’re laughing, and if they’re laughing then they like me, and that’s what I want.
Ms. Jones comes over to see what’s going on. “I might have known it was your team,” she says to me. “Angelica, you’re very funny, but this is supposed to be a game.”
“Oh, don’t worry, miss,” Will assures her. “We’re wiping the floor with them. Three–nil so far.”
Ms. Jones glances at Verity. “Are you remembering to use the passing techniques we practiced?”
“Yes, miss,” lies Verity, who hasn’t passed the ball to anyone yet.
“Well, we’ve only got five minutes left, so I’ll watch you. Who’s got the ball?”
For the last five minutes of the lesson there’s no messing about, and because Ms. Jones is watching, Verity focuses better. In a miraculous moment she passes the ball to me, and I boot it clear past Safira into the goal. “Yesss!” I do the airplane, running around the field.
The final score is three–two to Will’s team, but my header into the top-left corner of the net in the last seconds is a thing of beauty. “You should be on the school team,” Will says to me as Ms. Jones blows the whistle.
She hears him. “That’s a good point, Angelica—why haven’t you tried out for the under-twelves?”
For a moment, I am filled with pride. But . . . surely no one wants a Heffalump like me playing for the school. I imagine the snickers from opposing teams if I were to turn up on the team bus. . . . I am the girl who doesn’t fit into the elasticated pinnies after all.
“Well,” I say, “if you want someone to fall on their butt, I’m really good at that.”
Ms. Jones shakes her head. “If you took things a little more seriously, you could be an excellent player, Angelica.” She calls out to everyone, “Time to get changed!”
And then it’s the ordeal of getting back into school clothes, and this time it’s worse because I’m feeling all weird and self-conscious from the compliment a minute ago. As I change, I keep my red face turned toward the rows of pegs with their oversized PE bags and smelly lunch boxes piled up underneath.
Chapter 7
Getting home on a Friday always feels like such a relief. I did it! Another week is over and I made it through and people still like me! So despite the PE changing hell, I feel good as I walk home. I like weekends.
I’m humming when I run up the stairs to our door, but as soon as I go in I see a man’s jacket hanging on the rack, and I stop dead. Chris’s jacket has a very particular smell: dirt and engine oil, because he likes to do motocross, which is a really dangerous form of motorbike racing. The smell makes me feel queasy. I wasn’t expecting him to be here today, especially after he left Mom to walk home on her own last night, and a kind of cold fury rushes through me. I was feeling good, and now he’s spoiled it!
There are noises coming from my mom’s bedroom, and they are the kind of kissing noises I don’t want to hear. The door behind me is still open. Mom’s handbag is hanging from the coatrack.
Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m reaching into her bag, tak
ing out her purse, and removing a ten-dollar bill. Then I pull the door closed very gently so that no one will know I was ever here.
If I have to waste an hour in a coffee shop because of Mom’s stupid boyfriend, she can buy my milkshake and chocolate brownie.
Kayma’s sister Fliss is working in the coffee shop today. There are two coffee shops within walking distance of my apartment, but this one is nicer. It’s called Coffeetastic, which is a terrible name for a shop but it’s always busy because their coffee is cheaper than the big chains. Also, the owners did it up with all this red leather and chrome so it looks like an authentic diner, which makes it cool. There’s even a neon sign in the window where the name “Coffeetastic” glows green at night.
Fliss gives me a huge grin when I come in. She’s the spitting image of Kayma, only five years older. Their younger sister Hula looks identical too. It’s like the three of them are clones. “Jelly! So cool to see you! You on your own?”
“Yeah,” I say, and the word hurts but I smile.
“What can I get you?” Fliss asks. “We’ve got some squillionaire’s shortbread. It’s like millionaire’s, only it’s got extra layers of chocolate and toffee pieces.”
“Mmm.” I lick my lips. “That’ll ruin my diet.”
“You’re on a diet?” Fliss says, her eyes opening very wide. “You’re kidding me! You’re gorgeous!”
I break into a Southern accent. “Why, honey, ain’t that precious of you to say so! Ah don’t know what you mean. Ah only spend two hours getting ready every morning. Ah practically roll out of bed looking like this!”
Fliss laughs. “You’re so good at that. Straight out of those reality shows. You should be on TV.” She slides a large slice of the shortbread onto a shiny white plate. “What do you want to go with this? Iced choco-caramel whippy?”
“Iced who now?”
“Trust me.” She pours milk in a jug and starts adding various ingredients. “You try this—if you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back. It’ll blow your mind.”