Geek Girl (Geek Girl, #1)(59)

Anyway.

“You can do it,” Wilbur protests.

“No,” I say again as I start wheeling down the pavement. “Whatever it is, I can’t do it, Wilbur.”

“But you don’t underst—”

“I’m sure it’s great, I’m sure it’s amazing, I’m sure that every girl in the world wishes she had the same opportunity.” I wheel-hop over a double drain. “But I don’t, OK? This isn’t me, Wilbur. None of this is me. I’m not the swan. I’m the duckling. No, I’m the duck. I just want things to go back to how they were before I met you.”

Wilbur laughs. “You really do make me giggle, my little Darling-pudding,” he titters. “As if that makes any difference!”

I’m so busy calculating if I’ll get where I’m going faster if I start running rather than wheeling, but have to stop again in a few minutes – average speed versus immediate speed – that I’m hardly listening to him.

“Difference?” I say distractedly, skipping over a crack in the pavement.

“Kitten-ears, you’re under contract.”

I slam the stopper on the toes down and abruptly stop in the middle of the road, with the sound of the wheels still whizzing behind me. “I’m under what?”

“Contract, Sweet-bean. You know the pieces of paper you signed? That’s what they call them in the legal industry apparently. Visa-vee: Yuka owns you. Plumptious, she wants you to do this so you have to do it. Or she’ll just go right ahead and sue you.”

My stomach abruptly folds in half. Why do people keep trying to sue me?

“A contract?” I finally repeat in disbelief. Was I so blinded by the excitement of my own metamorphosis that I signed a contract without actually reading it first? Without making notes? Without looking at every single word of the small writing and then looking it up in a legal dictionary? I mean, of course Dad did. Dad would sell his soul for a pink marshmallow. But me?

Who have I been this week?

“I know! Isn’t a ‘contract’ just the least fun name for anything in the world ever? Annabel was furious that you did it, but it still stands: just one parental signature needed, my little Squeaky-kettle. So I’ll ring you with details about tomorrow later, OK? Toodle-pip, bella.”

I make a few confused mumbling sounds, say goodbye and hang up. I can’t believe I’m in trouble with the law again. For the second time this week. Doesn’t nine years living with a lawyer rub off at all?

I can’t think about this now. I’ll think about it later. There’s somewhere I need to be and it’s far more important.

And I abruptly click the button on my shoes so that the wheels disappear and start running.





was only here a couple of days ago, yet everything feels so different.

It even looks different. Everything is lit by a bright green light and there’s a little red flask on the ground. Somewhere in the background, I can hear the faint, tinny sound of Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky coming out of a wind-up, hand-held radio. Which was actually performed first at the Bolshoi Theatre in Russia, so everything seems to be fitting into place like a magical puzzle.

Or, you know. A normal one packed simply full of coincidences.

“Toby?” I say, crawling back into the bush outside my house.

He’s sitting inside it, just as I suspected he would be, reading a battered copy of Don Juan. He looks up, sniffs and then lifts the green torch he’s holding so that it shines directly in my face like a sort of Halloween-themed Gestapo. “Harriet!” he says in astonishment. “What an unexpected surprise! I didn’t expect you for – ” and he clicks the red light on his watch – “another twenty-eight minutes. Did you not get any laundry done? Or did I miscalculate the dryer times?”

OK, Toby is much, much better at this stalking malarkey than I thought he was.

“Aren’t you cold?” I ask, clambering in next to him.

“Not at all. This flask prevents the energy loss of the vibrating molecules of my soup and thus is still nice and toasty.” Toby sniffs again. “Sadly, I think I may need a flask for my nose, as it is suspiciously icy and may be about to fall off, if that is a physical possibility.”

I laugh. “Not at this temperature.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Toby looks around the inside of the bush with an embarrassed expression. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tidied up. Honestly, it’s not always like this.”

“It’s OK. Isn’t it my bush anyway?”

“Which makes me your tenant, I suppose.” Toby fiddles with the volume button on the radio, which is now playing Vivaldi. “I shall try and keep it down so as not to disturb the neighbours.”

“I’m your neighbour, Toby.” I laugh again and make myself a little bit more comfortable on the blanket. The entire time I was running/wheeling here, I knew I had to ask him something – something important – but I didn’t know quite what it was.

Suddenly I do.

I look at Toby’s skeleton gloves, and the hat with the little bear ears built into it, and the trainers with the laces that look like piano keys, and the battered copy of a book he’ll never have to read, not even for university. I look at his flask and his blanket and his face, with the slightly shiny, drippy, wet-looking nose. I look at his simple, transparent happiness that I’m here. And then I take a deep breath.