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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Holly Smale

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

About the Author

Also by Holly Smale

About the Publisher

Drama [drah-muh] noun

1 A composition in prose or verse presenting in dialogue or pantomime a story involving conflict or contrast of character, especially one intended to be acted on the stage; a play.

2 The branch of literature having such compositions as its subject; dramatic art or representation.

3 Any situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting or striking interest or results.

4 The quality of being dramatic.

ORIGIN 1510s, from Greek dran, meaning ‘to do, act or perform’.

y name is Harriet Manners, and I am an idiot.

I know I’m an idiot because:

1. One half of me is inside a cupboard, and the other is not.

2. I can’t move more than two centimetres either backwards or forwards.

3. My feet aren’t touching the ground.

4. The shelf I used to climb up to this windowsill collapsed at least forty minutes ago.

5. I keep saying, “Help, help, I’m stuck,” even though nobody can hear me.

Clearly my spatial awareness is every bit as terrible as my dance teacher said it was after the Year 10 performance where I accidentally kicked another student in the face during an enthusiastic but badly executed can-can.

I don’t fit through this window.

At all.

Frankly, the fact that I even thought I might is a cause for serious concern. Recent studies have revealed that domesticated chickens have finely honed sensory capacities and an ability to think, draw inferences, apply logic and plan ahead in more advanced ways than those of a young child.

So, as I’ve been wedged firmly into the semi-open window of a cleaning cupboard in Infinity Models for forty minutes now, I can’t help thinking something, somewhere has gone very badly wrong.

It doesn’t say much for your IQ levels when you’re a fifteen-year-old girl with less common sense than poultry.

nyway, as it looks like I might be here for some time, I might as well tell you how I got here, right?

That’s what you want to know.

How a person with over 6,000 days of life experience and an IQ of 135 ended up stuck in a hole like Pooh Bear after a particularly enthusiastic honey session.

And, frankly, I don’t blame you.

I’m still kind of trying to work that out myself.

Two hours ago, I was exactly where I was supposed to be: waiting quietly in the reception of Infinity Models.

“Hello,” I said as I approached the front desk and tugged at the too-long arms of my stripy jumper. “I’m Harriet Manners. It’s nice to meet you. I’m here for a casting.”

There was a silence.

“For Brink magazine.”

Another silence.

“I’m an … erm … model?” I cleared my throat. “A fashion one.” In case they thought I meant a small paper aeroplane.

Then I held out my hand.

I’ve only been in the modelling industry for three months and last time I did this the receptionist assumed I was the work-experience girl. I’d made twelve coffees, six teas and some headway into cleaning the floor of the photocopying room before anybody had ascertained otherwise.

This time, she didn’t even look up.

“Just take a seat, yeah?” she said, waving her hand at the room. I could see from the reflection in the window that she was on a social-networking site.

“Oooh,” I said enthusiastically, leaning forwards. “Did you know that particular website contains 140 billion photos, which is four per cent of the number of photos ever taken?”

She looked up and scowled. “Excuse me?”

“And you’ve spelt depressing wrong,” I said helpfully, pointing at her status update. “This job is so depressing. It only has one p. You’ve got two.”

She quickly closed the screen and glared at me.

“I think I’ll sit down now,” I said, flushing. She was still glaring. “I’ll be just over here if you need any more help.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have convinced Dad to let me do this casting alone after all. It was looking like I’d need armed protection.

I abruptly took a seat in between a beautiful, tanned brunette girl with cropped hair and a blonde with incredibly pale skin and black eyebrows. Then I gripped my hands together tightly so nobody would see they were starting to get clammy.

I hadn’t learnt much about fashion, but I knew you had to pretend you belonged there or somebody would immediately realise you didn’t and throw you back out again.

So I plastered on my brightest smile.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Harriet Manners. Are you both here to see Brink too?”

“Uh-huh.” The blonde looked me up and down. “What are you wearing?”

I looked down in confusion. Just how literal did she want me to be?

“A striped jumper,” I said anxiously. “And a pair of striped leggings.” I paused. “And underwear, obviously, and two socks. And green trainers.”

“Uh-huh,” she said again.

Quick, Harriet. Change the subject.

“Is that you?” I said, pointing at the open folder in the brunette’s lap. There was a stunning black and white photo of a very beautiful girl in a bikini, with an enormous cat wrapped around her neck.

She lifted her chin slightly. “Obviously.”

“Cats are so interesting, aren’t they? Apparently they have a brain the same size as a great white shark’s, and jaws with the same strength as a Komodo dragon.”

Yup. It’s this kind of conversational dynamite that makes not many people want to sit next to me at lunchtime.

The brunette looked at me, and I was saved from my third “uh-huh” by a door swinging abruptly open.

“Baby-baby koala!” my agent, Wilbur, shouted, holding his hands out wide so that the pink sequinned poncho he was wearing made him look like some kind of disco bat. “Come and give me a big cuddle! Not literally, obviously. This is Versace,” he said, indicating his outfit, “and it would totally crush my sparkles.”

“Hi, Wilbur,” I mumbled as he dragged me off my seat and started trying to spin me around in circles as if we were at some kind of shiny country dance.

“Munchkin, I’m so glad you’re here. This photographer is just a desperationist to see you.”

I flushed with surprise. “Really?”

“For shizzlenizzle,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. “They love themselves a good bit of ginger frog now and then. And, oh my holy chicken-unicorns, what are you wearing?”

I grimaced. “It was the first thing that fell out of my wardrobe. Sorry.”

“Genius! I’ve always wondered what a human zebra would look like, and now I know!” Wilbur gave me an air-kiss. “We’ll be ready for you in four minutes, bunnycakes. Frankly, everyone else might as well go home now. Brink are absolutely set on you, my little peach drop. The job is pretty much yours.”

And then my agent spread his glittery pink wings and disappeared as loudly as he’d arrived.

Slowly, I turned to look at the models sitting behind me.

I read somewhere that ants can survive in a microwave because they are small enough to dodge the rays that would kill them.

Judging from the expressions on these models’ faces now, my two options were either to turn into an ant or to spin slowly in circles before finally exploding.

“Umm,” I said nervously as the glares intensified. “Have you met Wilbur before?”

“He’s our agent too,” the blonde model said tightly. “Believe it or not.”

“Ah. Right.” I coughed and looked desperately at the receptionist. “Is there … umm … perhaps a bathroom I could use?”

“It’s down the stairs, out in the corridor,” the receptionist said, pointing with lowered eyelids. “Corridor. Spelt c-o-r-r-i-d-o-r.”

I flushed a bit harder.

“Thanks.”

Then I disappeared out on to the stairs as quickly as my zebra legs would carry me.

After all, a lot of things can happen in four minutes.

In four minutes, lightning strikes the earth an average of 14,400 times. In four minutes, there are twenty earthquakes and 482,692 pounds of edible food is thrown away in the United States.

Every four minutes, 418 people around the world die.

And, if I stayed in the same place, it was starting to look increasingly likely that I would be one of them.

uffice to say, I locked the bathroom door behind me.

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.

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.

Him and whoever hands out the Nobel prizes, you know.

Just in case.

“Umm, hello Nick,” I say coolly, sticking my chin in the air as regally as I can. He smells green, even in a cupboard full of bleach.

“Hi Harriet. Were you under the impression that you’ve recently turned into a cat?”

It’s dark in here, but not quite dark enough: I can still see the end of his nose twitching in amusement.

“Of course not.” I try to lift my chin a little bit more. “I was just … umm …” What? What am I doing in a cupboard? “Keen to see as many elements of the fashion industry as possible. It’s important to get a really rounded view of modelling. From, you know, different angles.”

I clear my throat.

“Uh-huh,” he says, except this is nothing like the uh-huh the models gave me an hour ago. It’s a warm uh-huh. An amused uh-huh. An I inexplicably understand what happened without being told and I don’t think any less of you for it uh-huh.

“Umm.” I swallow. “What are you doing here?”

He grins and takes a step towards me. “I had to pick up a Versace contract from Wilbur, and he told me you’d gone missing. He’s checking under all the tables in the building, and I’m doing all the cupboards.”

My cheeks get steadily hotter.

Just because the first time I ever met Nick Hidaka I was hiding under a table doesn’t mean I’m always under one. I’ve seen him several times outside of furniture too.

His memory is very selective.

We stare each other out for a few seconds.

Clearly the only way to get out of this predicament in style is to stalk out of the cupboard. To stick my nose in the air, be dignified, and charge out in an adult, sophisticated kind of—

A bubble of embarrassed laughter pops out of my mouth.

Nope, that wasn’t it, was it?

“I’m a ninny, aren’t I?” I say, twisting my mouth and staring at the floor.

“A little bit,” Nick laughs in his warm Australian twang.

“I try really hard but I’m not entirely sure I can help it,” I admit. “It seems to be inbuilt.”

Nick puts a hand under my chin and gently tilts my head back up so I’m looking at him again. “Luckily, I have a soft spot for ninnies. Especially the kind that can recite the periodic table backwards.”

And as the boy I like best in the world leans down to kiss me, suddenly a cupboard doesn’t seem like the worst place in the world to be stuck in after all.