“You can pay me back if you want to, but trust me: the amount you earned this week – and Wilbur promised me he wouldn’t tell you how much that is – you won’t even notice.” Annabel looks at the piece of paper again. “As for the models, we can obviously put that down to the fact that they’re models and also women.”
She crosses them off as if that explains itself.
“But everyone at school… everyone in my class, they—”
“Put their hand up? Nat rang and told me. Has world history taught you nothing, Harriet? Countries will always side with those who have the biggest weapons. Your classmates were scared of Alexa and not scared of you. You should take that as a good thing, unless you have dictator ambitions.”
And she crosses them off the list as well.
I blink a few times. I suppose I hadn’t thought of it that way, but countries with lots of nuclear weapons tend to have an awful lot of allies.
“And as for Alexa…”Annabel pauses. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the girl. The point is: who cares?”
“I care.”
“I know you do,” Annabel says and her voice is gentler now. “That’s the problem. You need to stop caring what people who don’t matter think of you. Be who you are and let everybody else be who they are. Differences are a good thing. It would be a terribly boring world if we were all the same.”
“But, Annabel, I’m a… I’m a…” I can’t get the word out, so instead I lift my satchel and point at what’s left of the red word.
“A…” Annabel squints slightly. “CE-H? What’s a Ceh?”
“A geek. It says Geek. Or, at least, it used to.”
“Oh.” Annabel shrugs. “So? Some of the best people are. And – for the record – I didn’t want you to model precisely because I didn’t want you to become someone else.” She picks up the newspaper and points at the article of me. “But I was wrong. You’ve stayed you and I’m so proud. What you did was kind. It was courageous. It was strangely inspired. It was everything I love best about you. It came from a good place.”
“Russia?”
Annabel gives me a long look. “No, Harriet. Not Russia. You.” She lifts an eyebrow and then looks back at the paper. “Take yourself off the list and you’ll find that the rest start to disappear as well.”
And she draws the final line.
I can feel my head starting to go swirly again. Annabel looks at me in silence and then she hands me the paper.
“There’s still one on there,” I point out sadly.
“What did I tell you about putting people who love you very much on this list, Harriet?”
“Nat doesn’t—”
“Don’t be daft – she’s just hurt and angry. Nobody likes being lied to by somebody they trust. When you’ve worked out what it is Nat needs from you, you’ll be able to cross her off too.”
“Is it…”
“No, it’s not personalised flapjacks, Harriet.”
I nod and tuck the list in my back pocket. I don’t know why I didn’t come here first of all: Annabel always knows how to organise the world for me so it makes sense again. Just as she does when she tidies my room. “Are you coming home, Annabel? Ever?”
Annabel sighs and looks back at her report. “I don’t know. Your dad has his own list to think about. And unlike you, he’s old enough to do it on his own.”
Her phone beeps.
“Annabel? Roberta Adams says if she doesn’t get back soon, Fred is going to start getting anxious.”
“God forbid I should make a guinea pig feel unloved. Send her up, Audrey.” Annabel looks at me. “Now go home and study that list,” she adds in her normal sharp voice. “You know where I am if you need me. My bed is in the cupboard.”
And as I turn round and walk back out of the office with the paper in my hand, I realise how happy I am that Annabel knew about everything the whole time. It reminds me of that famous fridge magnet: the one about footprints in the sand.
I wasn’t as on my own as I thought I was.
o I no longer have a plan.
The universe has shown me, repeatedly, that it has no respect at all for bullet points or pointers or lists or charts. Plans don’t work and even when they might work and should work, people ignore them. So I’m going to try a brand-new strategy: not having a plan.
For the first time in my life, I’m just going to attempt to bumble through from one moment to the next and see where I end up. Just like a normal human being.
Or, you know. A bee.
“Are you kidding me?” I say as I open the front door. Dad’s still in his dressing gown from yesterday, and the only difference is that he now has a family-size packet of gummy sweets nestled in the crook of his arm. I read somewhere that in an average lifetime we each use 272 cans of deodorant, 276 tubes of toothpaste and 656 bars of soap, and it is quite clear that since Annabel left, Dad hasn’t touched one of them.