Picture Perfect

The boy’s PE changing room at school sounded eerily similar. “Good point.”

“So can you wait here?”

“I have this,” I said, waving Anna Karenina. “I can probably sit for three whole days happily.”

“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content,” Nick said in a bizarre voice.

My eyes widened. “OK, a) you’ve read Anna Karenina? and b) that was possibly the single worst attempt at a British accent I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s because it was Russian,” Nick said, raising an eyebrow. “And yes, I’ve read it. Or, you know: looked at the pictures really hard. I am a model, after all.”

He smiled and leant down to kiss my nose.

“I’ll wait,” I said, flushing and opening the book, which I suddenly liked a billion times more because it now had Nick in every single line.

“Thank you.” My boyfriend gave me another quick kiss on the lips. “I’ll see you later, my little geek.”

Over the next two hours, the room filled with people; slowly at first, and then in great, noisy swarms.

People in shiny black, people in red lace, people in white shirts with pointy collars. People who knew exactly where they were supposed to sit and were doing it without complaining about the hardness of the seats.

Then the room got very quiet and very dark. Music started pumping and lights started flashing. The dirty plastic sheets parted.

And out walked the boys, one by one.

They slunk to the front of the room, stopped, stared, turned and slunk back out again like prowling, pointy-hipped wolves. Dozens of them: angular and floppy-haired and stern. In sharp silver shirts and grey suits; black jackets and blue ties.

As the music vibrated, I could feel my stomach clenching.

I miss this, I suddenly realised.

I missed the music I didn’t recognise and the bright lights and the dark audience. I missed the bustle and panic and noise in a room somewhere behind us. I missed the excitement and the bright eyes and the rustle of papers as people made notes.

I missed Wilbur and his ridiculous outfits and his made-up language. I missed Rin and Kylie Minogue, the sock-wearing cat who hated going for walks. I missed Tokyo and being transformed by stylists. I even slightly missed the terrifying Yuka Ito.

But most of all I missed Nick.

Suddenly, the plastic sheets parted and out walked another boy. A dark-haired, olive-skinned boy in a sharp black jacket with a bright silver collar. His face was set, his dark eyes were narrowed, his mouth was clenched. He strode towards us with firm, straight steps: purposeful. Furious.

I blinked as this angry, tense stranger pounded down the catwalk. There wasn’t a single twinkle or slouch. Not a jot of laughter or crinkle around his eyes.

Two hundred people watched keenly as my boyfriend got to the end of the catwalk, stopped and posed.

The blue whale has a heart big enough for a human to crawl through its ventricles. For just a few seconds, my heart felt so big, a blue whale could have swum through mine.

I waited for Nick to turn towards me. To notice me in the crowd.

Finally, just before he started back towards the curtains, he looked straight at me.

He winked.

And – just like that – I had my Lion Boy back.

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have never left a house as quickly as I leave Nat’s.

Seriously.

If it had been on fire, I doubt I could have moved faster.

“Nick?” I say breathlessly as soon as I’ve shut the front door. “Nick? Are you there?”

Then I try to rephrase it so I sound a bit less desperate. “I mean, hi, whatever, how are you?”

“Hey,” he laughs warmly. “And whatever to you too.”

Apparently butterflies need an ideal body temperature of between eighty-five and one hundred degrees to fly. I must be exactly the right habitat, because my entire body is suddenly full of them. Red ones, blue ones, green ones, white ones. Fluttering like a rainbow inside me.

Then I remember the silence over the last few days.

“How’s Africa?” I say, and the butterflies suddenly go very still.

“Harriet, I’m so sorry. I’ve been out in the desert on a shoot, and there was zero reception. I even got the photographer to drive me to the nearest village, and there was still nothing. How did you do? I want to know everything.”

A wave of relief hits me so strongly that I have to temporarily lean against a statue that Nat’s mum thinks is Andromeda but is actually Artemis just to get my breath back.

Roughly forty-three per cent of Africa is desert, and it hadn’t occurred to me for a single second Nick might be stuck in any of it.

“It went kind of brilliantly,” I say, giving him a brief update on my result.

“I’m so proud of you.”

I beam at the phone, and then at the sky, and then at a random passing squirrel. I’m so warm the butterflies have given up flying and have started sunbathing instead.

“So,” and this time it’s a real, genuine question, “what is Africa like?”

“Hot. Lots of weird-looking tall creatures that can’t run properly hanging around with long necks and eyelashes and horns coming out of their heads.”

“Giraffes?”

“I was aiming for ‘models’,” Nick laughs. “But yeah, there’s some of them wandering about too.”

I giggle like an idiot.

Normally this would be the point where I’d break into an array of interesting facts. For instance, did you know that giraffes have four stomachs, and their spots are like fingerprints and no two giraffes have the same pattern?

Or that their necks are too short for their heads to reach the ground so they have to drink water by squatting?