Girl Online

Chapter Two

For most girls, coming home to find your mum posing on the stairs in a wedding dress would be a freakish occurrence. For me, it’s the norm.

“Hello, darling,” she says, as soon as I come in the front door. “What do you think?” She leans on the banister and throws out an arm, her long auburn curls cascading over her face. The wedding dress is ivory and empire line and has a border of lace flowers around the neck. It’s really beautiful but I’m still feeling so shaken up, all I can do is nod.

“It’s for the Glastonbury-themed wedding,” Mum explains, coming down the stairs to give me a kiss. As usual she smells of rose and patchouli oil. “Don’t you love it? Doesn’t it just scream flower power?”

“Mmm,” I say. “It’s nice.”

“Nice?” Mum looks at me like I’m crazy. “Nice? This dress isn’t just nice—it’s—it’s majestic—it’s divine.”

“It’s a dress, dear,” my dad says, coming out into the hall. He grins at me and raises his eyebrows. I raise my eyebrows back. I might look more like Mum but personality-wise I am much more like Dad—way more down to earth! “Good day?” he asks, as he gives me a hug.

“OK,” I say, suddenly wishing that I was five years old again and I could just curl up on his lap and ask him to read me a story.

“OK?” Dad steps back and looks at me carefully. “Is that a good OK or a bad OK?”

“Good,” I say, not wanting to create any more drama.

He smiles. “Good.”

“Will you be able to help out in the shop tomorrow, Pen?” Mum asks, looking at herself in the hall mirror.

“Sure. What time?”

“Just a couple of hours in the afternoon, while I’m at the wedding.”

Mum and Dad own a wedding-planning business called To Have and to Hold and it’s based in a shop in town. Mum started the business after she gave up her acting career to have my brother, Tom, and me. She specializes in quirky themes. She also specializes in trying on all of the wedding dresses she stocks—I think she misses wearing costumes from her acting days.

“How long till dinner?” I ask.

“About an hour,” Dad says. “I’m making shepherd’s pie.”

“Awesome.” I grin at him and start feeling a bit more human. Dad’s shepherd’s pie is amazing. “I’m just going upstairs for a bit.”

“OK,” Mum and Dad say in unison.

“Ha! Jinx!” Mum cries, kissing Dad on the cheek.

I go up the first flight of stairs, and past my parents’ bedroom. As I reach Tom’s room I hear the thudding beat of hip-hop. I used to hate hearing his music all the time but now that he’s at uni I like it, because it means he’s home for the holidays. I’ve really missed him since he’s been away.

“Hey, Tom-Tom,” I call as I walk past his door.

“Hey, Pen-Pen,” he calls back.

I go to the end of the landing and start climbing another flight of stairs. My room is at the very top of the house. Even though it’s a lot smaller than the other bedrooms, I love it. With its sloping ceilings and wooden beams, it’s really cozy and snug, and it’s so high up I’m actually able to see a dark blue line of sea on the horizon. Even when it’s dark out, just knowing the sea’s there makes me feel calmer inside. I light the string of fairy lights draped over my dressing-table mirror and a couple of vanilla-scented candles. Then I sit down on my bed and take a deep breath.

Now that I’m back home it finally feels safe to think about what happened in the diner. It’s the third time something like this has happened to me now and I can feel a ball of dread growing in the pit of my stomach. The first time it happened, I’d hoped it was a one-off. The second time, I hoped it was just bad luck. But now it’s happened again . . . I shiver and wriggle under my duvet. As my body starts to warm up, I have a random flashback to when I was a little kid and Mum used to make me a tent out of blankets to play in. I’d lie inside the tent with a stash of books and my torch and read for hours. I loved having a little hideaway from the world. I’m about to close my eyes and snuggle deeper under the duvet when I hear three loud knocks on my bedroom wall. Elliot. I throw off the duvet and knock back twice.

Elliot and I have been next-door neighbors our entire lives. And we’re not only next-door neighbors but next-door-bedroom neighbors, which is seriously cool. We invented our wall-knocking code years ago. Three knocks means, Can I come over? Two knocks means, Yes, come over right now.

I get up and quickly scramble out of my school uniform and into my snow leopard onesie. Elliot hates onesies. He says the person who invented them ought to be hung upside down from Brighton Pier by their shoelaces, but then Elliot is seriously stylish. Not in a fashion slave way; he just has this knack of putting really random things together and making them look great. I love taking photos of his style.

As I hear his front door slam, I quickly look in the dressing-table mirror and sigh. I pretty much sigh every time I look in the mirror. It’s like a reflex action. Look in the mirror—sigh. Look in the mirror—sigh. This time, I’m not sighing at my freckles and the way they cover my face like the speckles on a Mini Egg—I can’t really see them in the candlelight. This time, I’m sighing at my hair. How come when the sea breeze messes up Ollie’s hair it looks super-cute but when it messes up mine it looks as if I’ve stuck my fingers in a plug socket? I quickly pull a brush through my curls, but this only makes them go even frizzier. It’s bad enough that my hair is red—Elliot insists that it’s strawberry blond (it’s definitely more strawberry than blond)—but at least if it was permanently sleek like Megan’s that would be something. I give up with the brush. Elliot won’t care. He’s seen me when I had the flu and wasn’t able to wash my hair for a week.

I hear the doorbell go and Mum and Elliot talking. Elliot will love the wedding dress. Elliot loves Mum. And Mum loves Elliot—my whole family does. He’s practically been adopted by us, to be honest. Elliot’s parents are both lawyers. They both work super-hard and even when they’re home they’re usually researching some case or other. Elliot’s convinced he was switched at birth and sent home with the wrong parents. They just don’t get him at all. When he came out to them, his dad actually said, “Don’t worry, son, I’m sure it’s just a phase.” Like being gay is something you can grow out of!

I hear Elliot’s feet pounding up the stairs and the door flies open. “Lady Penelope!” he cries. He’s wearing a vintage pin-striped suit and braces and a bright red pair of Converse—this is him dressing down.

“Lord Elliot!” I cry back. (We spent most of last weekend watching Downton Abbey box sets.)

Elliot stares at me through his black-rimmed glasses. “OK, what’s up?”

I shake my head and laugh. Sometimes I swear he can read my mind. “What do you mean?”

“You look really pale. And you’re wearing that hideous onesie. You only wear that when you’re feeling depressed. Or you have physics homework.”

“Same thing,” I say with a laugh, and sit down on the bed. Elliot sits next to me, looking concerned.

“I—I had one of those weird panic things again.”

Elliot puts his wiry arm around my shoulders. “No way. When? Where?”

“JB’s.”

Elliot gives a sarcastic snort. “Huh, I’m not surprised. The decor in there is vile! Seriously, though, what happened?”

I explain, feeling more embarrassed with every word. It all sounds so trivial and silly now.

“I don’t know why you hang out with Megan and Ollie,” Elliot says, when I reach the end of my tale of woe.

“They’re not that bad,” I say lamely. “It’s me. Why do I keep getting so stressed about stuff? I mean, I could get it the first time, but today . . .”

Elliot tilts his head to one side the way he always does when he’s thinking. “Maybe you should blog about it.”

Elliot’s the only person who knows about my blog. I told him right from the start because (a) I can trust him with anything, and (b) he’s the one person I can totally be myself with, so there’s nothing on the blog that he wouldn’t already know about.

I frown at him. “Do you think? Wouldn’t it be a bit heavy?”

Elliot shakes his head. “Not at all. It might make you feel better to write about it. It might help you make sense of it. And you never know—maybe some of your followers have gone through the same thing. Remember that time you posted about your clumsiness?”

I nod. About six months ago I blogged about falling head-first into the wheelie bin and my followers went up from 202 to just under 1,000 in a week. I’ve never had so many shares. Or comments. It turns out I’m definitely not the only teenage girl born with a clumsy gene. “I suppose so . . .”

Elliot looks at me and grins. “Lady Penelope, I know so.”