Geek Girl (Geek Girl, #1)(38)

“Oh. OK.” Dad pokes his head round the door. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t stand up.”

“You’re paralysed? How did that happen?”

“No, I literally can’t stand up. The heels are too big, Dad. I can’t walk in them.” I try to stand up and my ankles buckle and I collapse back on to the toilet.

“Oh.” Dad frowns. “Why hasn’t Annabel been teaching you how to walk in heels? I thought we had an agreement: I teach you how to be cool and she trains you how to be a girl.”

I stare at him in silence. This explains so much. “I’ve never worn heels before. So what am I going to do?”

Dad thinks about it and then starts singing ‘Lean on Me’ by Al Green. He bends down and I take one wobbly step and hang on to his shoulder like a tipsy baby koala hanging on to a eucalyptus tree. Then Dad spins me round so I’m facing away from the door.

“What are you doing?” I snap crossly. I’m currently failing to be a girl, let alone a model. “The exit’s that way.”

“Before we go anywhere, I want you to see this,” Dad says and he points in the mirror.

Next to a reflection that looks exactly like my dad is a girl. She’s got white skin and sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin and green eyes. She has thin long legs and a long neck and she’s sort of graceful yet clumsy-looking, like a baby deer. It’s only when I lean forward a bit and see that her nose turns up at the end just like mine does that I fully register that it’s me.

That’s me? Wow. The beauty industry actually works. I look… I look… I look kind of OK.

“You can say what you like,” Dad says after a moment. “But I think me and your mum must have done something right.”

I make an embarrassed but pleased peeping sound.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m taking full credit for the hair. But she had all the beauty. She’d be so stoked right now.” Then Dad spins me round again so that my toes are on top of his feet and starts half-carrying, half-dancing me out of the bathroom. “Roar for me?” he demands.

“Rooooaaaar.”

“That’s the one. Now let’s go get ’em, Tiger.”

“I think this is leopard, actually,” I point out, looking at the coat. “Tigers have stripes.”

Dad gives me his widest grin. “Then let’s go get ’em, Leopard.”



It takes another four minutes to get out of the bathroom, and by the time I’m back in the hotel room, Dad has corrected the leopard analogy to “baby giraffe learning how to ice-skate”.

Which is extremely unkind. I’d like to see him try and walk with eight-inch spikes attached to his feet. Plus, giraffes never lie down and there are at least three points where I’m sort of horizontal.

“Well, this isn’t going to work, is it?” Wilbur points out eventually. “At this rate you’ll be way too old to model by the time we get down to the shoot, Angel-moo. You’ll probably be in your early twenties and what good is that to anyone?”

“I could put my trainers back on?” I suggest, getting them out of my bag.

Wilbur visibly flinches. “A next season, perfectly cut, limited edition Baylee coat worn with… are they supermarket own-brand trainers?” He swallows. “I think I just sicked up in my mouth. Fashion sacrilege. I can’t allow it. Not while there’s a breath left in this beautiful body of mine.” He frowns and looks around the room. “Luckily I’m brilliant as well as stunning,” he adds happily. “And I have an idea.”



Ten minutes later, I enter Red Square with my entourage behind me. It’s not exactly the entrance I was hoping for. In fact, I believe I’ve got my head in my hands for all of it.

Nick takes one look at the wheelchair, accurately guesses why I’m in it and gives a very uncool shout of laughter so loud that pigeons fly off the top of a nearby statue. Yuka isn’t quite as impressed.

“Would somebody like to tell me,” she hisses as she stalks towards where I’m sitting, glaring at the seven people standing behind me, “who broke my model?”





legant. Dignified. Graceful.



Three words that don’t describe me in the slightest. Five people have to pick me out of the wheelchair and carry me to where Nick is waiting in the snow, in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, and when they plop me down, it takes another few minutes to get me balanced enough to remain vertical on my own. Which I can just about manage. As long as I focus really hard, don’t move a muscle and scrunch my toes up into claws inside the shoes for leverage. And keep my hands out at the sides like a tightrope walker. None of which is aided by Dad’s continuous laughing.

Or – for that matter – Nick’s.

I’m briefly introduced to the photographer, Paul, who is a thin blond man without – as far as I can see – one single flamboyant tendency. He looks totally focused on the job, which is actually even more worrying. At least with Wilbur, it’s possible to forget that there’s a great deal riding on me.

It’s not a little metamorphosis experiment any more. It’s a job. It’s very expensive. It’s very important. And it matters to a lot of people.

“Look at me doing wheelies in the snow!” Wilbur screams in the background, spinning around in the wheelchair.