Geek Girl (2 page)

K, so I lied a little bit.

Twice, actually.

Nat and I are not in perfect harmony at all. We’re definitely close, and we definitely spend all of our time together, and we definitely adore each other very much, but there are
moments
now we’ve almost grown up where our interests and passions divide a teensy bit.

Or – you know – a lot.

It doesn’t stop us being inseparable, obviously. We’re Best Friends because we frequently make each other laugh, so much so that I once made orange juice come out of her nose (on to her mum’s white rug – we stopped laughing pretty shortly afterwards). And also because I remember when she peed on the ballet-room floor, aged six, and she is the only person in the entire world who knows I still have a dinosaur poster taped to the inside of my wardrobe.

But over the last few years, there have definitely been
minuscule
points where our desires and needs have… conflicted a little bit. Which is why I
may
have said I was a little bit sicker than I actually felt this morning, which was: not much.

Or at all, actually. I feel great.

And why Nat is a bit snappy with me as we run towards the school coach as fast as my legs will carry me.

“You know,” Nat sighs as she waits for me to catch up for the twelfth time. “I watched that
stupid
documentary on the Russian Revolution for you last week, and it was about four hundred hours long. The least you can do is participate in an Educational Opportunity to See Textiles from an Intimate and Consumer Perspective with me.”

“
Shopping
,” I puff, holding my sides together so they don’t fall apart. “It’s called shopping.”

“That’s not what’s written on the leaflet. It’s a school trip: there has to be
something
educational about it.”

“No,” I huff. “There isn’t.” Nat pauses again so that I can try and catch up. “It’s just shopping.”

To be fair, I think I have a point
.
We’re going to The Clothes Show Live, in Birmingham. So-called – presumably – because they show clothes to you. Live. In Birmingham. And let you buy them. And take them home with you afterwards.

Which is otherwise known as
shopping
.

“It’ll be fun,” Nat says from a few metres ahead of me. “They’ve got everything there, Harriet. Everything anyone could possibly ever want.”

“Really?” I say in the most sarcastic voice I can find, considering that I’m now running so fast that my breath is starting to squeak. “Do they have a triceratops skull?”

“…No.”

“Do they have a life-size model of the first airborne plane?”

“…Probably not.”

“And do they have a John Donne manuscript, with little white gloves so that you can actually touch it?”

Nat thinks about it. “I think it’s unlikely they have that,” she admits.

“Then they don’t have
everything
I want, do they?”

We reach the coach steps and I can barely breathe. I don’t understand it: we’ve both run the same distance, and we’ve both expended the same energy. I’m an entire centimetre shorter than Nat so I have less mass to move, at the same speed (on average). We both have exactly the same amount of PE lessons. And yet – despite the laws of physics – I’m huffing and purple, and Nat’s only slightly glowing and still capable of breathing out of her nose.

Sometimes science makes no sense at all.

Nat starts rapping in a panic on the bus door. We’re late – thanks to my excellent acting skills – and it looks like the class might be about to leave without us. “Harriet,” Nat snaps, turning to look at me as the doors start making sucking noises, as if they’re kissing. “Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown by Lenin in 1917.”

I blink in surprise. “Yes,” I say. “He was.”

“And do you think I want to know that? It’s not even on our exam syllabus. I
never
had to know that. So now it’s your turn to pick up a few pairs of shoes and make
ooh
and
aah
sounds for me because Jo ate prawns and she’s allergic to prawns and she got sick and couldn’t come and I’m not sitting on a bus on my own for five hours. OK?”

Nat takes a deep breath and I look at my hands in shame. I am a selfish, selfish person. I am also a very sparkly person: my hands are covered in gold glitter.

“OK,” I say in a small voice. “I’m sorry, Nat.”

“You’re forgiven.” The coach doors finally slide open. “Now get on this bus and pretend for one little day that you have the teeniest, tiniest smidgen of interest in fashion.”

“All right,” I say, my voice getting even smaller.

Because – in case you haven’t worked this out by now – here’s the key thing that really divides Nat and me:

I don’t.

o, before we get on the bus, you might want to know a little more about me.

You might not, obviously. You might be thinking,
Just get on with it, Harriet, because I haven’t got all day
, which is what Annabel says all the time. Adults rarely have all day, from what I can tell. However, if – like me – you read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and shampoo bottles in the bath and bus timetables when you already know what bus you’re getting, here’s a little more information:

1. My mother is dead. That’s usually the bit where people look awkward and start talking about how rainy the sky looks, but she died when I was three days old so missing her is a bit like loving a character from a book. The only stories I have of her belong to other people.
   
2. I have a stepmother, Annabel. She married Dad when I was seven, she’s alive and she works as a lawyer. (You would not believe the amount of arguments my parents have over those two facts. “I am living,” Annabel will scream. “You’re a lawyer,” Dad will shout back. “Who are you kidding?”)
   
3. Dad’s In Advertising. (“Not in adverts,” Annabel always points out when they have dinner parties. “I write them,” Dad replies in frustration. “I’m as In Advertising as you can get.”
   “Apart from actors,” Annabel says under her breath, at which point Dad stomps off to the kitchen to get another bottle of beer.)
   
4. I’m an only child. Thanks to my parents, I am destined to a life of never having anyone to squabble with in the back seat of the car.
   
5. Nat isn’t just my Best Friend. She gave herself this title, even though I told her it was a bit unnecessary: she’s also my Only Friend. This might be because I have a tendency to correct people’s grammar and tell them facts they’re not interested in.
   
6. And put things in lists. Like this one.
   
7. Nat and I met ten years ago when we were five, which makes us fifteen. I know you could have worked that out by yourself, but I can’t assume people like doing equations in their heads just because I do.
   
8. Nat is beautiful. When we were young, adults would put a hand under her chin and say, “She’s going to break hearts, this one,” as if she couldn’t hear them and wasn’t deciding when would be the best time to start.
   
9. I am not. My impact on hearts is like an earthquake happening on the other side of the world: if I’m lucky, I can hope for a teacup tinkling in its saucer. And even then it’s a bit of a surprise and everybody talks about it for days afterwards.
   

Other things will probably filter through in stages – like the fact that I only eat toast in triangles because it means there are no soggy edges, and my favourite book is the first half of
Great Expectations
and the last half of
Wuthering Heights
– but you don’t need to know them right now. In fact, arguably, you never need to know them. The last book Dad bought me had a gun on the front cover.

Anyway, the final defining fact that I may already have mentioned in passing is:

10. I don’t like fashion.

I never really have, and I can’t imagine I ever will.

I got away with it until I was about ten. Under that age, non-uniform didn’t really exist: we were either in our school uniform, or our pyjamas, or our swimming costumes, or dressed like angels or sheep for the school nativity. We had to go and get an outfit especially for non-uniform days.

Then teenagehood hit like a big pink glittery sledgehammer. Suddenly there were rules and breaking them
mattered
. Skirt lengths and trouser shapes and eye-shadow shades and heel heights and knowing how long you could go without wearing mascara before people accused you of being a lesbian.

Suddenly the world was divided into the right and the horribly, horribly wrong. And the people stuck between, who for the life of them couldn’t tell the difference. People who wore white socks and black shoes; who liked having hair on their legs because it was fluffy at night-time. People who really missed the sheep outfit, and secretly wanted to wear it to school even when it wasn’t Christmas.

People like me.

If there had been
consistent
rules, I’d have done my best to keep up. Made some sort of pie chart or line graph and then resentfully applied the basics. But fashion’s not like that: it’s a slippery old fish. You try to grab it round the neck and it slides out of your grip and shoots off in another direction, and every desperate grab towards it makes you look even more stupid. Until you’re sliding around on the floor, everybody is laughing at you and the fish has shot under the table.

So – to put it simply – I gave up. Brains have only got so much they can absorb, so I decided I didn’t have space. I’d rather know that hummingbirds can’t walk, or that one teaspoon of a neutron star weighs billions of tonnes, or that bluebirds can’t see the colour blue.

Nat, however, went the other way. And suddenly the sheep and the angel – who hung out quite happily in the fields of Bethlehem together – didn’t have as much in common any more.

We’re still Best Friends. She’s still the girl who lost her first baby tooth in my apple, and I’m still the girl who stuck one of her sunflower seeds up my nose in primary school and couldn’t get it out again. But sometimes, every now and then, the gap between us gets so big it feels like one of us is going to slip through.

Something tells me that today that person is going to be me.

nyway.

What all this means is: I’m not thrilled to be here. I’ve stopped whining, but let’s just say I’m not spinning round and round in circles, farting at intervals, like my dog Hugo does when he’s excited. In fact, I did two years of doing woodwork
specifically
so I didn’t have to come on this textiles trip. Two years of accidentally sanding down my thumbs and cringing to the sound of metal on metal, purely to get out of today. And then Jo eats prawns and does a little vomiting and
BAM
: here I am.

The first step on to the coach is uneventful, just one step, directly behind Nat’s. The second step is slightly less successful. The coach starts before we’ve sat down and I’m thrown sideways, in the process kicking a nice fluffy green bag the way I’ve never, ever managed to kick a football in my entire life.

“Moron,” Chloe hisses as she retrieves it.

“I’m n-n-not,” I stutter, cheeks lighting up. “A moron only has an IQ of between 50 and 69. I think mine’s a little higher than that.”

And then it all goes wrong. On the third step, the driver sees a family of ducks on the road, hits the brakes and sends me flying towards the end of the bus. I instinctively grab whatever will protect me from slamming my face on the floor. A headrest, a shoulder, an armrest, a seat.

Somebody’s knee.

“Ugh,” a voice shouts in total disgust, “she’s
touching me
.”

And there – staring at me as if she just sicked me up – is Alexa.