Geek Girl (Geek Girl, #1)(52)

“But you said…”

“I know. I lied. I thought Annabel would be angry.”

“Oh.”

“It turns out she’s much, much angrier now.”

It feels like the whole world has tilted up on itself and everything is falling off the top of it. “Oh,” I say again.

“Yeah. Oh pretty much sums it up for me too,” Dad agrees and then he lies down on the carpet. “We’re not very good at this, are we, Harriet?” he says.

And he closes his eyes.



It’s only once I’ve helped him up and put him in front of the TV that I turn the yellow Post-it over.





y name is Harriet Manners and I am an idiot.

I know I’m an idiot because I’m lying in my bed, looking up other words to call myself. Ninny. Dunce. Blockhead. Twit. Ignoramus. Fool. Which is the origin of the word ‘geek’ so I think we’ve just come full circle.

I’ve made a mess of everything.

Alexa has won. Nat’s not talking to me. Annabel has gone. Dad’s unemployed. I owe ￡3,000. The entire population of England is laughing at me. My hair looks like a ball of orange fuzz.

I don’t know if I’ve been suspended or not, but only because I’m refusing to go to school to find out. For the first time in my life, I’ve decided I don’t care about my education. It hasn’t made me any smarter at all. I’ve actually managed to transform in the opposite direction. I’m like a caterpillar that’s gone back to being an egg, or an unemployed Cinderella without even a hearth to scrub.

One simple metamorphosis story and I couldn’t even get that right.



Dad and I spend the entire night trying to fix things. I haven’t told him about the back of the note, though. I think about telling him, but Annabel asked me not to. I’ve betrayed her quite enough already without adding that to the list as well.

“We’ve got to do something dramatic,” Dad tells me sternly after staring at the wall for half an hour. “We have to prove to Nat and Annabel how sorry we are.”

So we make ‘sorry’ cakes, we make cards, we film ourselves singing an apologetic song. I take Nat a mix CD, a little silver necklace that splits in half and a box of chocolates. Then a barely used bottle of perfume, then flowers with a cunningly amended poem on the card. She trashes everything apart from the chocolates, which she eats without offering me any.

Dad goes to Annabel’s law firm and stands outside with a bunch of flowers and a sandwich board that says (and on the back says ). He stands there until the security guard comes down with a note saying:





Dad says he’s not good at maths, but that’s not a number he wants to calculate.

Finally, totally defeated and unsuccessful, we give up and sit on the sofa for the rest of the evening. Then we get up the next morning and sit on the sofa for the rest of the next day. I have no idea what we watch on television because I’m not really watching it.

All I’m thinking, over and over and over again, is: How? How do I make everything go back to exactly the way it was? Because I’ll go through everything again – the bullying, the ugliness, the unpopularity – just to have my old life back. I’ve traded the only things that mattered to me for a whole load of stuff that doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. And I did it on purpose. Out of choice.

My IQ is clearly nowhere near as high as I thought it was.

“My little Tadpole,” Wilbur gasps when I eventually pick up my phone. “Where have you been?”

“On the sofa.”

“Jelly-bean, we have things to do. Everyone wants a piece of you, my little Ginger-cake. Journalists, television shows, designers, big brands. My phone hasn’t stopped, Sugar-plum, apart from when I turned it off so I could drink a coffee. The genius that is Yuka Ito has turned your little sit-down-athon into a PR coup. She’s telling everyone you’ve inspired her. You’re her new muse.”

“Uh-huh,” I say without really listening.

“You know what that means, my little Frog?”

I continue staring impassively at the television. “No.”

“It means you’re hot, darling. You’re at boiling point. Your saucepan simmereth over.”

There’s a silence. Modelling is how I got into this mess in the first place. OK, technically lying is how I got into it. But I wouldn’t have had to lie if the modelling had never happened. Nothing’s going to get better if I keep going down this path.

“I don’t care,” I say. “Sorry, Wilbur.”

Wilbur laughs. “That almost sounded like I don’t care,” he says, giggling. “But obviously I misheard you. This is… this is… the stuff of dreams.”

“Not of mine.”

And I put down the phone.



I’m not sure what my next plan should be. But it’s going to start with Annabel.





he best way to make amends for lying is probably not by lying, but I can’t really see an alternative. Not after the way Annabel responded to Dad.

Luckily the receptionist is new, which makes the process significantly easier. As long as there isn’t a little warning photo of me taped behind the desk: you know, like the photos they have of terrorists and people who steal penny sweets from newsagents.