Читать книгу Model Misfit - Holly Smale, Холли Смейл - Страница 10

his is so incredibly typical.

The one time my dad isn’t at the back of a photo shoot, trying to ‘liven things up a bit’ by stealing bits of mannequin and pretending he has three arms and four legs, is the one time I really need him here.

But Dad’s at a job interview and I now have less than fifty minutes to get to a destination over an hour away.

As the taxi driver points out cheerfully after I clamber into the back and beg him to hurry: “I can only go as fast as the traffic, Goldilocks. I’m part of it, ain’t I?”

Which I would probably look at as a kind of poignant universal truth if I wasn’t preoccupied by trying to make myself as light as possible, in the hope that the decreased weight would allow the car to accelerate faster.

And also with correcting his grammar.

There’s nothing else I can do. Thanks to the laws of physics – and irony – the factors dictating how fast I get to my exam apparently do not include a) crying, b) hyperventilating or c) repeating ‘sugar cookies’ until the taxi driver shuts the internal window and flicks the switch that stops him being able to hear me.

So I may as well use the remaining time constructively to update you on what’s been happening in the past six months.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

1. I’ve become even less popular. Geek + Model = a whole new set of graffiti on your belongings.

2. I’m trying to cry less about it. We each expel an average of 121 litres of tears in a lifetime, and I can’t afford to dry up before I even hit sixth form.

3. My dad is still out of work, and Annabel is still working as a lawyer. This is worth noting, because my stepmother is now seven months pregnant, and Dad is definitely not.

4. Apparently the average person eats a ton of food a year: the weight of a fully grown elephant. Annabel is doing her best to single-handedly challenge this statistic. She is huge.

5. My best friend, Nat, has turned sixteen, and I have not. This means that Nat can now legally play pinball in Georgia, USA after 11pm and fly a plane solo in the UK, and I cannot.

6. I have modelled twice for Baylee, gone on a few go-sees (when not spending time productively locked in a cleaning cupboard) and that’s it.

7. I’ve finally reached the painful conclusion that my hair is not strawberry blonde.

8. It’s ginger.

And that’s it. Everything else has stayed exactly the same.

My stalker, Toby, still orbits me like some kind of slightly snotty moon and my nemesis, Alexa, still inexplicably hates me.

My agent, Wilbur, still makes up words whenever he feels like it, and the fashion designer, Yuka Ito, is still totally terrifying.

My dog, Hugo, is still fond of sampling anything sticky he spots on the pavement and I still keep my textbooks lined up in alphabetical, chromatic and subject order.

Because that’s how real life is: people and situations and dogs don’t change that often, even when you have written very careful plans and tried to force them to.

And if I could leave my list there, I would. Because it’s a nice list, isn’t it? A lovely, positive list that looks forward to an entire summer with Nat, a brand-new graffiti-less satchel next term, and – quite soon – the legal ability to fly planes on my own whenever I feel like it.

But I can’t leave it there, because one more thing happened. And – for a little while, anyway – it made all the other points seem less important:

9. Lion Boy dumped me.