Читать книгу Model Misfit - Holly Smale, Холли Смейл - Страница 13

spend the rest of my final exam looking like something actresses hold once a year and cry over. According to a test I did on the internet, I have 143 IQ points. Clearly I have no idea what to do with any of them.

Toby isn’t quite so sure.

“Harriet,” he says happily as I walk out of the hall and head outside to wait for Nat. “I am honoured to stalk you. I honestly cannot think of anyone I’d rather follow obsessively around.”

Somehow, Toby’s gotten even more thin and stretched-out looking: as if he’s a bit of melted cheese somebody’s just pulled off a pizza. His hair is fluffier, he has dark shadows around his eyes, and he’s bobbing along with his hands neatly by his sides, his little nose twitching slightly. He looks even more like a meerkat than he did last time you saw him.

Let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t be even vaguely surprised if a plane flew past and he bolted for cover.

“What are you talking about, Tobes?”

“Gold is traditionally the colour of success, achievement and triumph,” Toby explains in a voice brimming over with admiration. “You’re the perfect colour for the last exam. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before.”

I stare at him, and then burst into an explosion of laughter. Only Toby could possibly think I painted myself gold today on purpose.

Except … In love, Goldilocks? That explains a lot.

I abruptly stop laughing. Oh my God: the taxi driver did too. I clearly just look like the kind of girl who goes insane and colours herself in on a regular basis.

That’s not the impression I’m trying to give to the world at all.

As Toby starts chattering excitedly about exam questions and oscillations of light waves, I glaze over and listen to the sound of his chirpy words going up and down and round and round.

Every time I try to remember what it was like not having him around, I can’t do it. Toby’s like a fact: once you know him, you can’t unknow him. Over the last few months, he’s started spending a little more time where Nat and I don’t have to pretend we can’t see him. And we’ve…

Well, we’ve kind of let him.

He’s not so bad in small doses. As long as he doesn’t irritate Nat too much. She has limited interest in irrelevant facts, and I fill that quota already.

We finally get outside, blink a few times in the bright sunshine, then start wandering, half blind, towards a small patch of shade. Nat’s surname is near the beginning of the alphabet, so she always gets stuck at the back of an exam room: picking at her nail varnish and making impatient huffing sounds, like a pretty, swishy-haired dragon.

By the time we spot Alexa it’s too late.

She’s just outside the school gates with a big group of her friends: all clad in their cunningly edited school uniforms like a fashionable army. Rolled skirts and tucked tops and pink streaks and bra-straps showing. Sprawled menacingly across the grass, as if they own the school.

And how can I put this?

In a very non-literal way, they sort of do.