Girl Online

by Zoe Sugg

  “Mmm,” I say. “It’s nice.”

  “Nice?” Mum looks at me like I’m crazy. “Nice? This dress isn’t just nice—it’s—it’s majestic—it’s divine.”

  “It’s a dress, dear,” my dad says, coming out into the hall. He grins at me and raises his eyebrows. I raise my eyebrows back. I might look more like Mum but personality-wise I am much more like Dad—way more down to earth! “Good day?” he asks, as he gives me a hug.

  “OK,” I say, suddenly wishing that I was five years old again and I could just curl up on his lap and ask him to read me a story.

  “OK?” Dad steps back and looks at me carefully. “Is that a good OK or a bad OK?”

  “Good,” I say, not wanting to create any more drama.

  He smiles. “Good.”

  “Will you be able to help out in the shop tomorrow, Pen?” Mum asks, looking at herself in the hall mirror.

  “Sure. What time?”

  “Just a couple of hours in the afternoon, while I’m at the wedding.”

  Mum and Dad own a wedding-planning business called To Have and to Hold and it’s based in a shop in town. Mum started the business after she gave up her acting career to have my brother, Tom, and me. She specializes in quirky themes. She also specializes in trying on all of the wedding dresses she stocks—I think she misses wearing costumes from her acting days.

  “How long till dinner?” I ask.

  “About an hour,” Dad says. “I’m making shepherd’s pie.”

  “Awesome.” I grin at him and start feeling a bit more human. Dad’s shepherd’s pie is amazing. “I’m just going upstairs for a bit.”

  “OK,” Mum and Dad say in unison.

  “Ha! Jinx!” Mum cries, kissing Dad on the cheek.

  I go up the first flight of stairs, and past my parents’ bedroom. As I reach Tom’s room I hear the thudding beat of hip-hop. I used to hate hearing his music all the time but now that he’s at uni I like it, because it means he’s home for the holidays. I’ve really missed him since he’s been away.

  “Hey, Tom-Tom,” I call as I walk past his door.

  “Hey, Pen-Pen,” he calls back.

  I go to the end of the landing and start climbing another flight of stairs. My room is at the very top of the house. Even though it’s a lot smaller than the other bedrooms, I love it. With its sloping ceilings and wooden beams, it’s really cozy and snug, and it’s so high up I’m actually able to see a dark blue line of sea on the horizon. Even when it’s dark out, just knowing the sea’s there makes me feel calmer inside. I light the string of fairy lights draped over my dressing-table mirror and a couple of vanilla-scented candles. Then I sit down on my bed and take a deep breath.

  Now that I’m back home it finally feels safe to think about what happened in the diner. It’s the third time something like this has happened to me now and I can feel a ball of dread growing in the pit of my stomach. The first time it happened, I’d hoped it was a one-off. The second time, I hoped it was just bad luck. But now it’s happened again . . . I shiver and wriggle under my duvet. As my body starts to warm up, I have a random flashback to when I was a little kid and Mum used to make me a tent out of blankets to play in. I’d lie inside the tent with a stash of books and my torch and read for hours. I loved having a little hideaway from the world. I’m about to close my eyes and snuggle deeper under the duvet when I hear three loud knocks on my bedroom wall. Elliot. I throw off the duvet and knock back twice.

  Elliot and I have been next-door neighbors our entire lives. And we’re not only next-door neighbors but next-door-bedroom neighbors, which is seriously cool. We invented our wall-knocking code years ago. Three knocks means, Can I come over? Two knocks means, Yes, come over right now.

  I get up and quickly scramble out of my school uniform and into my snow leopard onesie. Elliot hates onesies. He says the person who invented them ought to be hung upside down from Brighton Pier by their shoelaces, but then Elliot is seriously stylish. Not in a fashion slave way; he just has this knack of putting really random things together and making them look great. I love taking photos of his style.

  As I hear his front door slam, I quickly look in the dressing-table mirror and sigh. I pretty much sigh every time I look in the mirror. It’s like a reflex action. Look in the mirror—sigh. Look in the mirror—sigh. This time, I’m not sighing at my freckles and the way they cover my face like the speckles on a Mini Egg—I can’t really see them in the candlelight. This time, I’m sighing at my hair. How come when the sea breeze messes up Ollie’s hair it looks super-cute but when it messes up mine it looks as if I’ve stuck my fingers in a plug socket? I quickly pull a brush through my curls, but this only makes them go even frizzier. It’s bad enough that my hair is red—Elliot insists that it’s strawberry blond (it’s definitely more strawberry than blond)—but at least if it was permanently sleek like Megan’s that would be something. I give up with the brush. Elliot won’t care. He’s seen me when I had the flu and wasn’t able to wash my hair for a week.

  I hear the doorbell go and Mum and Elliot talking. Elliot will love the wedding dress. Elliot loves Mum. And Mum loves Elliot—my whole family does. He’s practically been adopted by us, to be honest. Elliot’s parents are both lawyers. They both work super-hard and even when they’re home they’re usually researching some case or other. Elliot’s convinced he was switched at birth and sent home with the wrong parents. They just don’t get him at all. When he came out to them, his dad actually said, “Don’t worry, son, I’m sure it’s just a phase.” Like being gay is something you can grow out of!

  I hear Elliot’s feet pounding up the stairs and the door flies open. “Lady Penelope!” he cries. He’s wearing a vintage pin-striped suit and braces and a bright red pair of Converse—this is him dressing down.

  “Lord Elliot!” I cry back. (We spent most of last weekend watching Downton Abbey box sets.)

  Elliot stares at me through his black-rimmed glasses. “OK, what’s up?”

  I shake my head and laugh. Sometimes I swear he can read my mind. “What do you mean?”

  “You look really pale. And you’re wearing that hideous onesie. You only wear that when you’re feeling depressed. Or you have physics homework.”

  “Same thing,” I say with a laugh, and sit down on the bed. Elliot sits next to me, looking concerned.

  “I—I had one of those weird panic things again.”

  Elliot puts his wiry arm around my shoulders. “No way. When? Where?”

  “JB’s.”

  Elliot gives a sarcastic snort. “Huh, I’m not surprised. The decor in there is vile! Seriously, though, what happened?”

  I explain, feeling more embarrassed with every word. It all sounds so trivial and silly now.

  “I don’t know why you hang out with Megan and Ollie,” Elliot says, when I reach the end of my tale of woe.

  “They’re not that bad,” I say lamely. “It’s me. Why do I keep getting so stressed about stuff? I mean, I could get it the first time, but today . . .”

  Elliot tilts his head to one side the way he always does when he’s thinking. “Maybe you should blog about it.”

  Elliot’s the only person who knows about my blog. I told him right from the start because (a) I can trust him with anything, and (b) he’s the one person I can totally be myself with, so there’s nothing on the blog that he wouldn’t already know about.

  I frown at him. “Do you think? Wouldn’t it be a bit heavy?”

  Elliot shakes his head. “Not at all. It might make you feel better to write about it. It might help you make sense of it. And you never know—maybe some of your followers have gone through the same thing. Remember that time you posted about your clumsiness?”

  I nod. About six months ago I blogged about falling head-first into the wheelie bin and my followers went up from 202 to just under 1,000 in a week. I’ve never had so many shares. Or comments. It turns out I’m definitely not the only teenage girl born with a clumsy gene. “I suppose so . . .�
��

  Elliot looks at me and grins. “Lady Penelope, I know so.”

  15 December

  Help!!

  Hey, guys!

  Thanks so much for all of your lovely comments about my pics from Snooper’s Paradise—I’m glad you love its quirkiness as much as I do.

  This week’s post is really difficult to write because it’s about something really scary that’s happened to me—is happening to me. When I first started this blog, I said I was always going to be completely honest here, but back then I had no idea Girl Online would take off the way it has. I can’t believe I now have 5,432 followers—thanks so much! Although the thought of opening up to you all about this is terrifying, Wiki reckons it might make me feel better, so here goes.

  Some time ago, I was in a car crash. It’s OK—no one died or anything. But it was still one of the worst experiences of my life.

  My parents and I were driving back home and it was one of those rainy nights when the water seems to be coming straight at you like a wave. Even when my dad had the windscreen wipers going at about 100 miles per hour it didn’t seem to make any difference. It was like driving through a tsunami. We’d just gotten onto a dual carriageway when a car cut right in front of us. I’m not exactly sure what happened next—I think Dad tried to brake and swerve—but the road was so wet and slippery we skidded into the central reservation. And then our car actually spun over!

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve only ever seen this happen in movies. And in the movies, right after the car turns over, it usually blows up or a lorry plows into it or something, so all I could think was: We’re going to die. I kept calling out to Mum and Dad, not knowing if they were OK, and they kept calling out to me, but I wasn’t able to get to them. I was trapped, on my own, upside down, in the back.

  Thankfully, we didn’t die. A really nice man saw what happened and stopped his car to help us. Then, when the emergency services got there, they were really lovely too. We were driven home in a police car and sat up drinking sugary tea under duvets on the sofa until the sun came up. And now everything is pretty much back to normal. My parents don’t really talk about the accident anymore, and we have a brand-new non-mangled car sitting in the driveway. Everyone keeps saying to me, “You’re so lucky you didn’t get hurt.” And I am. I know that. But the thing is, even though I didn’t get any cuts and bruises on the outside, it feels as if something inside of me has broken.

  I don’t even know if an accident like that can cause this, but I keep having these weird panicky moments. If something stresses me out and I feel like I can’t escape, I start feeling like I did when I was trapped in the car. I go all hot and shivery and I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s happened three times now—so I’m really scared that it’s going to keep on happening. And I don’t know what to do.

  I hope you don’t mind me writing about this. I promise I’ll get back to my usual self next week. I promise there’ll be loads of really yummy pics from Choccywoccydoodah! But if any of you have been through anything like I’ve just described, and you have any tips on how to make it stop, pleeeeease post them in the comments below. It’s bad enough being the Clumsiest Person in the Universe. I don’t want to be the panickiest too!!

  Thank you!

  Girl Online, going offline xxx

  Chapter Three

  The next morning I wake up to the usual chorus of seagulls squawking. Fingers of pale wintery light are creeping in through the gaps in the curtains. This is good. Recently I’ve been waking up so early it’s still been dark outside.

  Elliot was right—writing the blog post really did help. I wrote it after he went home last night. At first it felt a bit awkward and cringey, but after a couple of sentences, all the thoughts and feelings I’ve been bottling up about the accident just flowed out of me. Once I posted it, I didn’t do my usual thing of waiting to see if it got any comments or shares. I felt so sleepy I just closed my laptop and went to bed.

  As my body slowly adjusts itself to the fact that it has to wake up and deal with a whole new day, I rub my eyes and look around my bedroom. Mum and Dad joke that they didn’t really need to wallpaper my room because pretty much every inch of wall is covered with photos. When I ran out of space recently, I started clipping pictures onto a line and stringing it like bunting over my bed. Most of these photos are of Elliot messing around on the beach, playing dress-up in his vintage clothes. There’s also my favorite photograph of Mum, Dad, and Tom, all sitting around the tree last Christmas morning, with steaming mugs of coffee nestled in their hands. I love capturing these special little moments in time. This picture also reminds me of the moment just after: when Mum spied me hiding with my camera around the corner and called me over to join them on the sofa and we all started singing a really silly version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” This is one of the things I love the most about photos: the way they can help you capture and relive moments of happiness forever.

  I take my phone from my bedside table and turn it on. There’s a few seconds’ silence before it starts going crazy with email alerts. I go to my inbox and see that it’s crammed full of notifications from my blog. There have been loads of comments overnight. I pick my laptop up from the floor and open it, my heart pounding. Even though I’ve been running Girl Online for a year now, and even though my followers are really lovely and always post really positive things, I still have this crazy fear that one day it might all go wrong. What if they thought my post last night was too much—too heavy?

  But it’s fine—in fact, it’s way better than fine. As I quickly scroll through the comments, I see words like “thank you,” “brave,” “honesty,” and “love” popping up again and again. I take a deep breath and start reading them properly. And what I read brings tears to my eyes.

  Thank you for sharing this . . .

  It sounds as if you’re suffering from panic attacks. Don’t worry, I get them too . . .

  I thought I was the only one . . .

  Now I know I’m not alone . . .

  You’re bound to be shaken up after the accident . . .

  Thank you for your honesty . . .

  It will get better . . .

  Have you tried relaxation techniques?

  You’re so brave for sharing . . .

  On and on they go until I feel as if I’m wrapped up in a toasty-warm blanket of love. In a way, it’s nice to know that “panic attacks” are an actual thing and not just my mind going crazy. There are things I can do to help myself feel more in control. I make a mental note to look them up later.

  Downstairs, I hear my parents’ bedroom door opening and the soft thud of footsteps across the landing. I smile as I think of my dad on his way to make “Saturday Breakfast.” Elliot and I always give my dad’s “Saturday Breakfast” capital letters and speech marks because it is such a major event. I don’t think there’s a pan in the house that goes unused as he whips up bacon, three kinds of sausages, hash browns, and all kinds of eggs, with grilled herby tomatoes on the side and a stack of the fluffiest pancakes ever. My stomach starts rumbling just at the thought.

  I knock on the wall five times—code for Are you awake? Straight away, Elliot knocks back three times—Can I come over? I knock back twice to say that he can. Now my whole body feels as if it’s grinning. Everything’s going to be OK. My panic attacks will go once the shock of the accident wears off. I’ll feel back to normal again soon. And in the meantime it’s “Saturday Breakfast”!

  • • •

  “Poached eggs or scrambled, Elliot?” Dad looks at Elliot expectantly. He’s wearing his usual Saturday-morning chef-ing gear: grey hoodie and sweatpants and a blue-and-white stripy apron.

  “How are you scrambling them?” Elliot asks. In any other context this would be a pretty stupid question but not when it comes to my dad—he’s known for being able to scramble eggs in about two hundred different ways.

  “Wiv some finely diced onions and a sprinkling of ze chives,” Dad replies in a fake French acc
ent. He talks in a fake French accent a lot when he’s cooking—he thinks it makes him sound more chef-like.

  “High five!” Elliot says, holding his hand up. Dad high-fives him with a wooden spoon. “Scrambled please.”

  Elliot is wearing his pajamas and dressing gown. His dressing gown is silky and covered in a dark burgundy-and-green paisley pattern. He looks like he’s stepped straight out of an old black-and-white movie. All that’s missing is a pipe. I pour myself a glass of juice just as Tom trudges into the room. Further proof that Dad’s “Saturday Breakfast” is awesome—it actually gets Tom out of bed before 9 a.m. on a weekend day. Whether or not he is actually awake is another matter.

  “Morning,” Elliot says just a little too loudly—for Tom’s benefit.

  “Hmm,” Tom grunts, slumping into a chair and plonking his head on the table.

  “Caffeine for Mister Tom,” Elliot says, pouring him a mug of rich, dark coffee from the cafetière.

  Tom lifts his head just enough to take a sip. “Hmm,” he grunts again, his eyes shut tight.

  There’s the most gorgeous smell of sizzling bacon coming from the stove. I start buttering myself a slice of bread to take my mind off my hunger. I think I might actually be about to drool.

  “Hello! Hello!” Mum cries, wafting into the room.

  She’s the only one of us who’s actually dressed, as she’s going off to open the shop as soon as she’s finished eating. As always, she looks stunning. She’s wearing an emerald-green shift dress that goes perfectly with her auburn curls. Whenever I wear green, I have the horrible feeling that I might look just like a walking Christmas decoration, but Mum always manages to style it out. She walks around the table, kissing each of us on top of the head. “And how are we all this fine December morning?”

  “We are all just tickety-boo, thank you,” Elliot replies in his poshest voice.