Читать книгу Picture Perfect - Holly Smale, Холли Смейл - Страница 16

t takes a computer with 700,000 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM forty minutes to map just one second of human brain activity.

Forty minutes.

No computer in the entire world can do what we each do in our own heads every minute of the day. No computer is as complicated or as interesting.

I bet they don’t get into anywhere near as much trouble either.

Or write diaries and then drop them in the playground.

The first thing I do is pull my T-shirt over my head and slide down the back of my bedroom door. Then in the stuffy, deodorant-scented darkness I pull out my phone and stare at the blank screen.

No texts.

No missed calls.

No emails or Skype messages.

Not a single light flashing anywhere to say Nick has tried to reach me. I turn it upside down, just in case any incredibly romantic and supportive texts want to fall out.

They don’t.

This afternoon, for the record, was supposed to go like this:

Instead – on yet another pivotal day of my life – I’m hiding under a T-shirt on the floor of my bedroom.

I knew I shouldn’t have used my new calligraphy pen to write the list. All the curly Es took ages.

My phone beeps, and my stomach does a sudden unexpected backflip like a maverick seal on YouTube.

You have such a vivid imagination, weirdo.

Can’t wait for next week.

A

And it’s as if somebody has thrown a pebble straight into the middle of me: panic starts rippling from it in small waves.

They start in my chest, and then they spread outwards. They spread to my shoulders, then to my arms and fingers. They spread through my stomach, into my legs and knees and toes until I’m full of undulating, pulsing ripples.

The waves get bigger and stronger and the pebble gets heavier and harder until everything inside me is threatening to spill out.

Which in a way it already kind of has.

Apparently thirty-nine per cent of the world’s population uses the internet, and Alexa is on every social networking site available. With a few clicks of a button, she has access to everyone.

There’s a knock on my door.

“Harriet?” Annabel says gently. “I just downloaded a meerkat documentary narrated by David Attenborough. I thought you might quite like it.”

Meerkats have really thin fur on their bellies so they can lie flat like sunbathers and warm up in the sun, and I’m intrigued to see what David has to say about that.

But right now, I just don’t care.

So I do the only thing I can.

“Oh, Nick,” I shout as loudly as I can into my dead mobile. “The monkey did what? How funny! Tell me more about it! You are just so hilarious.”

“Say hi to Nick from me,” Annabel calls through my door.

I don’t know why parents always want to send greetings vicariously. I think it’s their way of making sure they’re still watching us.

“Annabel says hi,” I tell nobody. Then I wait a few seconds in horrible silence. “Nick says hi back.”

“Great. I’ll go prepare your father by explaining that a meerkat is not, in fact, a real cat.”

Annabel retreats down the stairs, and I grab a slice of the chocolate cake she’s thoughtfully left on my dresser.

Eating cake on my own on my bedroom floor is not exactly how I planned to spend one of the biggest afternoons of my life.

But it’s the only thing left on my list I can still tick off.