Читать книгу Head Over Heels - Holly Smale, Холли Смейл - Страница 11

nyway.

A lot can happen in fifteen seconds.

In just fifteen seconds, 69,000 tweets are posted and eighteen hours of YouTube videos are uploaded.

Every fifteen seconds, 615,000 Facebook statuses are updated, 51 million emails are written and 600,000 texts are sent.

Basically, a lot of socialising goes on.

Over the next quarter of a minute, I do my best to single-handedly boost those statistics.

With my phone mere centimetres from my face, I type as fast as I can: sending a group message letting everyone know it’s unseasonably warm today so they probably don’t need coats, and another asking if I should get their drinks in for them so they don’t have to wait in line.

A text, asking where everyone is now.

Another, asking if they’d like a biscuit or slice of cake, then another just to let them know that I’m totally fine about the cancelled night-trip to the zoo last weekend.

A funny joke I just remembered about a duck.

Another about a whale.

An observation about an interesting squirrel I saw in a tree on the way here.

In fact, I’m texting so hard the only thing I don’t do over the next fifteen seconds is look up or glance around the room.

Which means I’m just sending everyone an interesting fact about biscuits – it comes from the old French word bescuit which means ‘twice cooked’ – when a laugh comes completely out of nowhere.

And it takes a lot longer than it probably should to realise that although it doesn’t belong to anyone in my friendship group, I still know it very well indeed.

Better than I’d like to.

“Well,” a tall blonde girl says as I glance up, finger still paused on SEND, “if it isn’t Harriet Manners.”

And there – looming over me with an extremely confusing statement – is the one part of my life I failed to update you on: the single bullet point I completely left off.

Alexa.