Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014

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Geek Girl: Picture Perfect

Text copyright © Holly Smale 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Cover typography © Mary Kate McDevitt

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Holly Smale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007489480

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007489497

Version: 2015-01-24

For my dad. My rock. My hero. My Richard.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Also by the Author

Exclusive Extract

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

model[mod-l] noun, adjective, verb

1A standard or example for imitation or comparison

2A representation, generally in miniature

3An image to be reproduced

4A person whose profession is posing for artists or photographers

5To fashion something to be like something else.

ORIGINfrom the Latin modulus : ‘absolute value’

y name is Harriet Manners, and I am a girlfriend.

I know I’m a girlfriend because I can’t stop beaming. Apparently the average girl smiles sixty-two times a day, so I must be statistically stealing somebody else’s happiness. I’m grinning every thirty or forty seconds, minimum.

I know I’m a girlfriend because I’m giggling at my own jokes, singing songs I don’t know the words to, hugging any animal within a hundred-metre radius and twirling round in circles with my hands stretched out every time I see a small patch of sunshine. Thanks to my brain drowning in the love chemicals phenylethylamine , dopamine and oxytocin , I’ve basically morphed into a cartoon princess.

Except one with an astronomically high phone bill and a tendency to look up ‘symptoms of being in love’ online when her boyfriend isn’t looking.

Anyway, the final reason I know I’m a girlfriend is this, written on the inside back page of my new bright purple diary:

I did it, obviously. It would be a really weird thing to doodle on someone else’s private stationery. There’s a sketch of me and it’s timed and dated to commemorate the precise moment – four weeks and two days ago – that Lion Boy and I became an official item.

That’s right: Nick and I are finally a proper duo.

A couplet. A twosome never to be divided, like salt and pepper or cheese and tomato. We are the human versions of seahorses, who swim snout to snout and change colour to demonstrate how much they like each other, or Great Hornbills, who sing in duets together to show the world how utterly in tune they are.

And it’s changed everything.

After the Most Romantic Summer Ever together (MRSE™), all that’s left are rainbows and sunsets and good-morning texts and good-night phone calls and somebody to tell me when I’ve got chewing gum stuck to the back of my hair and I’m gummed to the bus seat behind me.

For the first time in my entire life, I wouldn’t change a single thing. There are 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and I wouldn’t alter a jot of any of them. My life is exactly as I want it to be.

Everything is perfect.

nyway, the truly great thing about being so chipper all the time is that nothing can really upset you. Not an early-morning start when you’re used to a summer of lie-ins. Not your dog, Hugo, moulting all over your brand-new Special Outfit. Not the prospect of seeing your nemesis again after ten blissful weeks without her.

Not even the fact that it’s the single most important day of your life and nobody has remembered .

Nope. I am a paradigm of calmness and maturity.

Like Gandalf. Or Father Christmas.

“Good morning ,” I say as I float into the kitchen. That’s how I travel these days, by the way: in a magical, joy-filled bubble. “What an auspiciously lovely day, don’t you think? Almost propitiously sunny, you could say . A day for great things to happen.”

Then I stare optimistically at my snoring parents.

It looks like somebody tried to destroy the house overnight and then gave up and filled it with sleeping gas instead. The room is dark except for the glow from the open fridge door, and cups and plates are everywhere. Dad’s leaning back in a chair with a tea towel over his head, and my stepmother Annabel is slumped over the breakfast table with her cheek resting gently on a piece of buttered toast.

Tabitha is lying in her cot, making cute snuffling sounds as if she’s not the bomb that keeps going off.