All That Glitters (15 page)

She turns slowly towards me, and I’m just about to leave a terrified, Harriet-Manners-shaped hole in the wall when her face abruptly changes.

Muscle by muscle, Alexa relaxes.

Her shoulders lower, her eyes normalise, her nose wiggles, her mouth twitches and a small bubble of sound pops out of her mouth. My entire stomach twists into the shape of a fresh pretzel.

Worse than anger, more dangerous than vengeance.

Is Alexa actually …
laughing
?

“
Oh
,” she says, putting a hand over her eyes. “Oh, of
course
. I
get
it now. This is brilliant. How stupid
are
you? You actually think a bus stop is going to
change
things? That everything will be
different
now?”

“A bus stop?” I echo in confusion. “I’m not a bus stop.”

At least, I don’t
think
I am. I’m so discombobulated right now, though, I wouldn’t put any money on it.

But Alexa’s not even looking at me any more: she’s focused intently on Ananya and Liv. “She’s still
Harriet Manners
. The geek who once brought a woodlouse to school and tried to make us hold it.”

OK: I was six, his name was Malcolm and I thought he was cute.

“That was a really long time ago,” Ananya says, taking another step towards me. “People change.”

“
Yeah
,” Liv adds. “Maybe we actually
like
her.”

“Nobody actually
likes
Harriet,” Alexa laughs. “Even her creepy little stalker is nowhere to be seen any more. She’s on her own for a
reason.
”

My stomach pretzels a little bit further.

“That’s your opinion,” India says firmly. “We don’t agree.”

“Exactly.” Ananya takes another few steps until she’s right next to me. “And this is getting a bit boring, Lexi. It’s the same old thing, over and over again.”

“
Yeah,
” Liv says, standing on my other side. “Also, hanging out on the tennis courts is
so
Year Eleven. Move on, babe. Let it go.”

I’m staring at this exchange in bewildered silence.

I’d always seen the Underlings as faceless, voiceless henchmen: existing purely to provide background and visual support, but without identities of their own.

I was obviously very, very wrong.

I’m kind of expecting Alexa to break now the way I would – going red, possibly crying and hiding under a table – but she still looks intensely amused. I can’t help being slightly impressed, in spite of myself.

That is pretty majestic self-confidence.

“You’re right,” she says finally, shrugging. “Things
were
getting a bit boring, weren’t they? This way is
so
much more fun. Let’s shake it up a bit.”

I blink at her. What? What are we shaking?

Oh, God. I bet it’s me, isn’t it.

“See you around, Harriet Manners,” she continues as I stare at her in amazement. “
Enjoy
.”

And the girl who likes me least in the world blows a kiss in my direction and exits the room.

Leaving her three closest friends with me.

ere are some things I know:

Unfortunately,
what the hell is going on
is not on that list.

Call me deeply intuitive – although nobody ever does – but something is starting to tell me that this isn’t all about biscuits.

I wait until the bell for the end of school rings and the girls leave in a wave of enthusiastic kisses and hugs. Then I reach forward and break the tail off a
Camarasaurus
. Or it could be a
Giraffatitan:
honestly, they all just look like upside-down ferrets now.

It’s not great.

In fact, I’m going to be honest with you: on a scale of biscuits I’ve ever eaten (which is a lot) it’s pretty near the bottom. Plans to bolster my future palaeontology earnings with a bakery probably won’t be materialising.

Frowning, I pull my phone out of my satchel and my ears suddenly go numb with shock. There are ten missed calls from Nat and eight from Stephanie at Infinity Models.

RING ME NOW THIS IS INSANELY URGENT. Nat x

Hands starting to sweat, I hit 1 on Speed Dial. Nat picks up on the first ring, and that’s when I know it’s serious.

“Meet me in town,” she says. “Now.”

“But—”

“Seriously, Harriet. You need to see this.”

don’t even make it to the fountain.

Next to where a large proportion of my year hangs out after school, eating crisps, throwing the packets into the water and then being forced by passers-by to pick them back out again, is a bus stop.

It’s where most of the buses pass through on their way to school, on their way home from school, on their way to the shops, to the hospital, to rollerskating, to … anywhere, actually.

In other words: it’s right in the middle of everything.

As I slowly approach it, I see a girl I recognise.

Her face is very white and freckled, her eyes are wide and bright green, her nose and chin are slightly too pointy for comfort and her hair is pale red and unbrushed: hanging in a fluffy, knotted mass around her shoulders.

She’s sitting in a lake, surrounded by glitter.

Her white dress is sparkling with a thousand tiny flashes of light, the water is glowing and shimmering around her, and a purple sky is starred above. Behind her is an enormous, pointed mountain with a white tip and a few glowing clouds spiked on top of it. Her eyes are shining, and she’s enormous: at least fifteen foot tall, if she stood up.

And next to the sparkling girl is another, much smaller one I also recognise. This one is leaning against the bus stop, against the poster. Her brown eyes are narrowed and her eyebrows are drawn together in consternation.

I reach them both in silence.

“That’s not even everything,” Nat says after a few seconds, grabbing my hand. “Just wait ‘til you see the rest of it.”

I am literally
everywhere.

There’s a huge poster of me in the designer section of the local department store: this time floating in Lake Motosu, hair and lights swirling round me as if I’m the Lady of Shalott, except set on fire.

In the make-up department is another photo: me, locked in a glass box in Akihabara, with pale pink hair, gigantic green manga-eyes and bright pink, glossy lips.

The bus-stop photo where I’m crouched in front of Mount Fuji has been turned into shiny flyers and is now being distributed outside the shopping centre to anyone who walks past.

In the window of the local chemist’s is an extreme close-up of my face: eyes bright and burning and fixed slightly to the left, as if I’m staring at somebody important that the camera can’t see.

Which – obviously – I was.

Nick was standing slightly behind the photographer, and he had just kissed me in the middle of a lake at sunset: I was finding it quite hard to concentrate properly
.

With a shake of her head, Nat clicks on Facebook and holds her phone up in silence. I’m running in long adverts down the side of the page, wearing a gold tutu with gold paint all over my face (and tiny physics revision stickers – which I had all over my arms at the time – presumably Photoshopped out).

This doesn’t make any sense. At all.

The majority of these are shots I did for designer Yuka Ito’s new fashion line – clothes, accessories, make-up, the lot – in Tokyo last summer. Except that was cancelled: the whole campaign was shut down after fashion-house Baylee found out Yuka had broken her contract with them to set up her own label.

So what am I now doing all over everything?

With a sudden brain-click, yesterday’s text abruptly makes sense: as if I’ve just plugged it into Wilbur-Translate on Google.

The
Alvinella Pompejana
, commonly known as the Pompeii worm, grows a layer of bacteria around it that protects it from high temperatures, allowing it to survive at 80
^o
c. It is the most heat-tolerant animal on earth. Judging from the state of my cheeks right now, I may need to turn into one before I burst into flames completely.

Today’s conversations are starting to replay in my head, except now they suddenly sound slightly different.