Geek Drama

I then spent the next four minutes doing the following:

1. Prodding a painful spot on my cheek.

2. Washing the nervous sweat off my hands.

3. Realising that prodding a spot with sweaty hands was probably part of the problem.

4. Making goldfish faces at myself in the mirror.

5. Drying my hands on toilet paper because scientists have proven that hand dryers actually increase the bacteria levels on your hands by 255 per cent.

Finally, I glanced at my watch, tried to flatten my frizzy hair by smacking it against the sides of my head and then started slowly making my way back out into the hallway.

Where I abruptly stopped.

Both the blonde girl and the brunette were standing in the corridor, leaning against the wall.

“Umm, hello?”

“We’ve been sent down to the Brink casting early,” the blonde said, shrugging and pointing at a black door at the bottom of the stairs. “The receptionist wanted to make a private phone call.”

I stared at the door in surprise.

“It’s down there?” I’d only been to a handful of castings in my entire life, and they’d all been held in the back room of the agency upstairs. “Really?”

“Awwww, you haven’t been modelling very long, have you?” the brunette said, tilting her head sympathetically.

“N-n-no,” I admitted, feeling my cheeks get slightly red. Sugar cookies. How could they tell?

They both smiled.

“Well, Infinity always put their most important clients downstairs. This is their biggest room, it has the best lighting, and there’s a certain … What would you call it …?”

“Fragrance.” The blonde picked an invisible bit of fluff off her skinny jeans, then began strutting down the stairs with the brunette following her.

“Yeah. Fragrance.”

“Oh.” You see? This was exactly the kind of thing I’d know if I hadn’t annoyed the receptionist so quickly. “Thanks for letting me know.”

I walked down the stairs and stood awkwardly next to them.

“Erm,” I said after a few seconds of even more awkward silence. “I’m really sorry about what Wilbur said. Don’t worry, I’m not very good at this. As soon as Brink meet me they’ll change their minds and pick one of you instead.”

The models shrugged in unison.

I beamed at them. “So maybe we could start afresh?”

Oh yes, I thought with an excited lurch: this could be it. I could make friends with two beautiful models and join their modelling gang. We would become inseparable, and all our fashion adventures henceforth would be conducted as some kind of triumvirate: like in Harry Potter, but a fashion version.

I’m freckly and ginger, so I’d be Ron Weasley, obviously.

“You know what?” said the blonde, laughing.

I laughed. This was going so well already. We already had our own little in-jokes, even if I didn’t really understand them. “What?”

“I reckon this is the perfect place to start afresh. You’ll be so clean you won’t know what to do with yourself.”

And as my arms got grabbed and I found myself flung into a cleaning cupboard, all I could think was: a person who believes anything they’re told is called a gobemouche.

Sounds about right.

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o that’s where I am now.

Not just locked in a cupboard with no working light bulb, no phone reception and the intense smell of an abandoned swimming pool, but halfway through a window.

It became clear after about twenty minutes that I don’t like small, confined spaces and I am nowhere near as nimble or as athletic as I’d like to be.

And that it was quite unlikely anybody would be desperately looking for me.

Because that’s what happens when you correct other people’s spelling: they don’t tend to spend much time trying to see you again.

On the upside, I haven’t been entirely unproductive. In fact, in the last forty minutes I have managed to:

1. Complete sixteen games of noughts and crosses in the dust on the window ledge.

2. Study a pigeon in the alleyway.

3. Recite the periodic table backwards, forwards and then inside out.

4. Sing my favourite songs from at least seven Disney movies.

I’m just pondering if the eighth should be Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or A Whole New World when I hear the door open behind me.

“Oh, thank sugar cookies,” I breathe in relief, wiggling my toes slightly. “I’m so sorry, Wilbur. I’m such a gullible idiot.”

Two hands gently grab my waist.

“You know what’s ironic?” I say as my jeans belt is unhooked from where it’s twisted round the window catch and I’m lowered softly to the ground. “I’ve never seen anywhere quite as dirty as this place purporting to clean things.”

There’s a warm laugh, and my toes immediately stop wiggling.

The hottest observed place on earth is Furnace Creek in Death Valley: in 1913 it measured 56.7 degrees Celsius, or 134 degrees Fahrenheit. They might have to recalculate that because right now my cheeks are giving the Californian desert a run for its money.

I spin around slowly and stare into the dark, slanted eyes of the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. His hair is huge and black and curly, his skin is the colour of coffee, his bottom lip is slightly too large and his nose turns up at the end like a ski-slope. The corner of his mouth is twisted up a little, and I happen to know that when he smiles it breaks his whole face in two and the insides of everyone in a ten-mile radius simultaneously.

Of all the people I wanted to see me with my bottom stuck halfway through a window, the only boy I’ve ever kissed was pretty much at the end of the list.