Model Misfit

I nod hello at him, hurry past and put my little plastic bag of stationery carefully on the right-hand side of my desk. Then I sit down and close my eyes.

Only a minute left to gather my thoughts, summon The Knowledge of the Stickers and Zen my environment. Just a few precious moments to allow the stress hormones to dissipate, to regulate my breathing, stop working out what time it is in Australia and to get my mind back on physics.

Midnight. It’s midnight in Sydney right now.

Somebody snorts.

Focus, Harriet. There are two types of electron: negative and positive. Like charges repel. Opposite charges attract.

Somebody snorts again, and there’s a faint giggle from a few seats away.

When insulating materials are rubbed together, electrons are knocked off one atom and on to the other.

There’s another laugh, and suddenly I’m vaguely aware of eyes burrowing into my forehead.

Not just Toby’s, I know what they feel like.

Cautiously, I open mine and glance around the room. There are a hundred and fifty-two other students in the hall, and every single one of them is staring at me.

I have absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if nobody here has seen sweat before. Or a ripped jumper. Or a single sock and scratched face. That’s how a large chunk of my year end lunch break.

I look at Toby and see he’s inexplicably patting his cheeks. When I search the room for Nat and see her – a long way away – she’s trying to mouth something at me.

“Go,” she’s saying, subtly pointing at me. “Go.”

I love Nat. She’s my favourite person in the entire world (followed by my dad and Annabel). But I’m not going anywhere. I’ve only just got here.

“Go,” she mouths again, and then she rolls her eyes and smacks her head with her hand.

Now that gesture I’m familiar with.

“Everybody face this way,” Miss Johnson shouts furiously, and three hundred and two eyes suddenly snap away from my face. “Toby Pilgrim, that includes you,” Miss Johnson yells, and the final two revert to the front. “You have thirty seconds before your exam begins.”

The only person not focusing on our imminent exam is Alexa, who is sitting diagonally directly behind me. She’s got a standard smug expression on her face and she’s rolling something between her fingers. Before I can work out what’s going on, she subtly leans down and rolls a little paper ball forward so it’s positioned directly under my desk.

“Twenty seconds.”

I stare at the ball in confusion, then in a flash I know: Alexa’s trying to sabotage my exam. She’s trying to plant revision notes on me. Yet another round of her ultimate plan – Ruin Harriet’s Life.

Oh my God. If I pick it up and get caught, I’m going to be thrown out of this exam. If I don’t pick up it up and it gets found under my desk afterwards, I’ll get disqualified for cheating. What do I do?

“Ten seconds.”

Pick it up or don’t pick it up? Don’t pick it up or pick it up?

“Five seconds.”

I bend down swiftly and grab it. If I can destroy the evidence before the exam starts, I’m not cheating. I’m just … disposing of rubbish responsibly.

But, like Pandora, I need to know what’s in the box. I need to know what’s intended to destroy me. So I tuck the note under the desk and quietly open it:

GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.

Oh, I think.

Oh.

“Please turn your papers over,” Miss Johnson announces as I shrink into my seat with my hands over my face. “You may now start.”

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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?