Geek Girl (Geek Girl, #1)(43)

And I don’t care what documentaries on television say: it’s not.

I’ve climbed down the backstage stairs, beyond a screen, and now I’m standing by the doorway. Nobody has noticed I’m here; they’re just walking past me as if I’m on work experience. At school, Alexa is the Cool girl, Nat is the Beautiful girl and a girl called Jessica is the girl who insists upon stripping down to her underwear at any possible opportunity. I’m the hairy-legged geek in the corner with the white ankle socks. I think the scale has just shifted and I should be in a hole under the floor somewhere.

I start backing out of the door I just came through.

“My daughter needs me,” a voice yells from behind me. When I look round, Dad’s standing on his tiptoes by the door, trying to see over the screen. “She needs me, I tell you.”

“I don’t need you,” I call back.

“You see?” Dad says again, doing little jumps so that the top of his head bobs up and down. “I demand you let me into the room full of tall Russian models this minute.”

Oh, for the love of sugar cookies.

“Dad,” I hiss through the screen, “if you embarrass me any more, I’m sending you home. I mean it.”

There’s a pause and then Dad sighs dramatically. “Fine,” he snaps in a sulky voice. “I’ll just go and eat pickled cabbage at the back of the hall, shall I?”

“Yes, please.”

“Being a sidekick sucks,” he mutters and strops back into the theatre.

I look at the room again, which is getting more overwhelming by the minute. There’s commotion and chaos everywhere: mountains of clothes, dozens of people, the shine of bright lights, the smell of hairspray, the roar of hairdryers and girls. People taking off clothes and putting them back on again. Confidence oozing out of every pore in the room. I am totally and utterly out of my depth.

I reckon if I just tucked myself into a ball in one of the prop cupboards, nobody would notice I was missing. I mean, how important can I be?

“There she is!” somebody shouts, running forward and dragging me into the room by my arm. “The most important model of all!”

Oh.

I guess that’s my answer.





his is a new start, I keep reminding myself as I’m pulled through the crowd of girls. What’s the saying? You’ve got to fake it to make it. It’s time I start pretending to belong and then maybe I will.

This isn’t school after all. I can be someone else here. Someone cool. Someone different. I don’t have to be a geek any more. I look down at my satchel. The red words are still vaguely visible and I hastily put my hand over it. I have got to get a new bag.

“Hello,” I say confidently to the models who have all stopped what they’re doing and are now watching me with their eyes narrowed. “I’m Harriet Manners. It’s nice to meet you.”

It’s totally working. They’ve all stopped talking, and I can tell from the expressions on their faces that any minute now they’re going to stand up, envelop me in a warm group hug and start arguing over who will get to be my Russian penpal. I grin in relief and hold out my hand to an astonishingly beautiful brunette.

“Bite me,” she says in a strong accent, and then she turns round and continues putting on black stockings.

“Black with no sugar. Don’t forget the lemon,” another giggles and she high-fives her friend, who starts muttering darkly in Russian.

“I lost the Baylee campaign to her? Seriously? Has Yuka gone totally insane?”

“She looks like a little boy,” another one says in a perfectly audible whisper.

“Maybe she is. Let’s see what happens when she takes off her skirt.”

“I reckon she doesn’t have anything going on down there. Like Action Man.”

“Have you ever seen freckles like it?”

“Yeah. Definitely. On a, like, egg.”

“Or, like, a Dalmatian.”

I can literally feel my face collapsing. This is exactly like school. Except that they’ve all got a fewer clothes on, which somehow makes it even worse.

I’ve said nine words so far. How can it have gone so badly wrong already? How do they know all the same insults?

“Actually,” I say in the most reprimanding voice I can find, “there are no animals that have no reproductive organs at all. Even hermaphrodites have both sets, for instance the great majority of pulmonate snails, opisthobranch snails and slugs. So that is a physical impossibility.”

There’s a surprised silence and then the room erupts into nasty giggles. It’s probably not going to go down in history as one of my most incisive comebacks.

“And,” I add, looking at the girl with the stockings, “I’d rather not bite you. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

The giggling stops.

That’s better, Harriet. That’s the sort of thing Nat would have said.

The girl blinks at me a few times in shocked silence. “What did she just say to me?” she eventually snaps to the girl next to her and her forehead starts to get all scrunched up in the middle. “I’m the face of Gucci. I’m Shola. People don’t talk to me like that. I won’t be talked to like that.”

“Don’t get worked up, honey,” a blonde with huge blue eyes whispers back. “It’ll just make you ugly and we’re about to go on. Vogue’s out there. Stay pretty for Vogue.”