Holly Smale - Model Misfit

I stop mid-stride. Apparently when people have their heads cut off there are five or six seconds when they can hear and see and blink, but they can’t move because they’ve already been severed in half.

That’s sort of how I feel now.

Slowly, I turn back round. “ Pardon me? ”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nat come out of the school doors, pause and then start legging it towards us.

“Do you want to come to my party?” Alexa says, her face totally blank. “We’ve got a TV star, so you’d be the perfect celebrity addition. A model.”

“ Really? ”

“Yeah,” she says slowly, and the smirk appears again. “And if we fancy a dance, we can tie you to the ceiling by your feet and spin you round really fast. You can be our very own human disco ball.”

Then she points at my face and bursts into hysterical laughter, and a few nano-seconds later everyone starts snickering behind her.

It takes thirty minutes for a human body to produce enough heat to boil half a gallon of water. I think from the temperature of my cheeks right now I can probably cut that down to eleven or twelve, maximum.

Why didn’t I just keep walking? What’s wrong with me? Other than a gold face and an entire lack of survival instinct, obviously.

“Bite us, Hockey-legs,” Nat snaps, suddenly appearing next to me. “As if we’d want to go to your wannabe party.”

“As if I’d want you to want to. I’m still scrubbing the loserness off my doorstep from your last visit.” Alexa sneers. “Anyway, why the hell would I want her ,” and she points at me like I’m a bit of toenail stuck in a carpet, “in my house, spreading her geekiness around? There’s no level of cool that can cure that . I’d have an epidemic on my hands.”

She spins round and adds, “Nobody wants that, right?” Then starts ceremoniously high-fiving her friends.

As if I’m not still standing there with my cheeks burning.

As if I don’t matter.

As if I never will.

As if nothing has changed at all.

count slowly to ten, and then I take a deep breath, reach into my pocket and pull out a small bit of crumpled-up paper.

I tap my still-triumphing nemesis on the back and hand it to her.

“What the hell is this?”

YOUR

GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.

“ You-apostrophe-r-e is a contraction of you are , Alexa,” I say. “If you needed help with grammar, you should’ve asked.”

There’s a stunned silence followed by a couple of desperately suppressed snorts, and I suddenly wonder whether everyone likes Alexa as much as they pretend they do. Or whether some of them are only here for the ‘celebrity’ parties and tiny jellies.

Alexa’s smirk has finally gone. “I know the difference,” she hisses furiously. “It was a typo .”

She scrunches the distinctly handwritten note back up and throws it hard at my face. It hits my left ear with a small pop .

“What do I care, anyway?” she adds. “School’s over. Nobody in real life cares about that kind of rubbish.”

“I do,” I say quietly.

“So do I,” Nat says loudly, putting her arm around my waist and giving me a quick peck on the cheek.

“Me too,” Toby agrees. “Never underestimate the power of a well-placed apostrophe.”

We turn to leave and Alexa suddenly loses it, as if all her anger has just exploded in one bright firework of hatred. “ Don’t walk away from me , geeks!” she screams, slamming her hand against a parking bollard. “We’re not done here! You just wait until next year! I’m going to … I’m going to – you – you – you’re …”

“Hey!” Toby says, “I think she’s finally getting it, Harriet!”

“We’ll look forward to hearing the rest of that sentence in sixth form, Alexa,” Nat calls back. “That should give you enough time to work out something really terrifying.”

We grin at each other and keep walking. Alexa’s shouting gets fainter and fainter until all I can hear is a harmless buzzing sound, like a tiny mosquito.

I look upwards.

The sky is bright blue, the trees have parted, and now there’s nothing but summer stretching endlessly in front of us.

e don’t even wait until we turn the corner to start dancing.

That’s the beauty of the summer holidays. It’s as if life is just a big Etch-A-Sketch, and once a year you get to shake it vigorously up and down and start again. By the time we go back to school, the whole year will be wiped clean.

Sort of.

Enough to ensure nobody remembers Toby breakdancing across the road with his satchel on his head, anyway.

“Did you see Alexa’s face ?” Nat shouts, doing a little scissor kick and punching the air. “That was magic .”

I give a happy little hop, even though it does mean I may now have to apply to a different sixth form if I don’t want to spend the rest of my teens lodged down a toilet of Alexa’s choosing. (The Etch-A-Sketch isn’t that thorough.) “Do you think I did something horrendous to Alexa when we were little that I’ve forgotten about, Nat?”

“Who cares if you did?” Nat yells as she does a series of excited little spins, high-fiving me on every turn. “Alexa’s gone! Exams are over . Do you know what that means?! No more physics! No more chemistry! No more history! No more MATHS !”

My A Levels will be in physics, chemistry, history and maths and I fully intend to start studying for them before the week is over, but I high-five my best friend anyway.

Nat giddily grabs a calculator out of her bag and throws it on the floor. “I am never going to use you again ,” she yells at it. “Do you understand? Me and you: we’re through!”

Toby bends down and picks it up. “Aren’t you going to study fashion design, Natalie?”

“Yup.” She tosses her shiny black hair and beams at him. “It’s going to be clothes, clothes, clothes for the rest of my life.”

“Then you’re going to need this,” Toby says, handing it back to her. “To calculate fabric measurements, body shapes, profit margins, manufacturing costs and loan repayments, not to mention pattern cutting and size differentiation.”

“ What ?” Nat’s face collapses. “Oh for the love of …” She looks at me. “I didn’t have to know that for months. Seriously . Does he have to be here? Can’t we send him back to wherever he came from?”

“Hemel Hempstead,” Toby says helpfully. “I can get the 303 bus.”

“We’ve got an entire summer ahead of us,” I remind Nat jubilantly, ignoring him. I feel a bit like Neil Armstrong immediately before he boarded the Apollo in 1969: as if we’ve just been handed all the space in the universe, and we can do whatever we want with it. “In fact, I’ve got it all mapped out.” I start rummaging in my satchel and then pull out a piece of paper with a flourish. “Ta-da!”

Nat takes it off me and frowns. “Nat and Harriet’s Summer of Fun Flow Chart?”

“Exactly!”

I do a little dance and then gesture at the coloured bubbles: yellow for me, purple for Nat, and – thanks to the nature of the colour wheel – an unfortunate poo brown for everything in between. “I’ve got every detail planned out for maximum fun and entertainment value,” I explain, pointing proudly. “Starting with Westminster Abbey, which is where Chaucer, Hardy, Tennyson and Kipling are buried, and then Highgate Cemetery to visit George Eliot, Karl Marx and Douglas Adams. We’re working our way through dead writers chronologically.”