Pretty Funny for a Girl Read online

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re late, that’s all. C’mon.”

  I rub his back and give him a smile, which seems to stop any impending explosions, only now he thinks playtime can resume. I try to grab his hand again, but he raises both his arms out in front of him and lets out a loud groan as he takes a painfully slow step forward.

  “Noah, now what are you doing?”

  “I’m…a…zombie…” he moans.

  “Brilliant. Could you be a quick zombie?”

  “Zombies…aren’t…quick…”

  “Well, what if you’d eaten the brain of a really fast runner? Then you’d be a quick zombie.”

  “It…doesn’t…work…like…that.”

  “Could it work like that today though?”

  “No.”

  I bend down toward him, look him in the eye, and try to talk in a steady, patient voice, like Mum would, but it just comes out fierce.

  “Noah. This is stupid. We need to walk quicker. We are going to be SO late. Now come on!”

  His bottom lip starts to quiver. Oh God, here we go.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’m not angry, see—happy face!” and I force my lips into a grin, which is way more sinister than jolly.

  He lets out a loud cry as he sits heavily down on the grass by the pavement.

  “I KNEW you were angry!” he wails.

  “Well, I AM NOW!” I spit as I turn away, my fists clenched in frustration. And I want to scream. I want to grab his little hand and drag him along the ground if necessary, all the way to school.

  I mean, seriously—people go on about how cute and innocent little kids are, but they can also test the patience and understanding of a frickin’ saint. Surely even Mother Teresa would find it hard not to lose it big-time with this kind of dumb-crappery.

  Ready to burst forth with a massive rant, I turn and look down into his little pink face, all screwed up and wet with tears. His big, sad brown eyes look up at me. And immediately my anger fades and my heart melts and I just want him to be happy again. So I scrunch my eyes up tight for a moment, gathering any patience I have left in me, and sit on the grass next to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as his sobs continue. “What if we play I-spy?”

  “No.”

  “What if we…pretend to be trains?”

  “No.”

  “What if…I give you a chocolate bar after school?”

  He sniffs. “A Milkybar?”

  “Yeah, OK, a Milkybar.”

  “Pinkie promise?” he says, extending a little finger.

  “Pinkie promise,” I say, curling my little finger around his.

  “OK,” he says, before springing up and carrying on the journey like nothing’s happened.

  And I feel bad because Mum says we have to cut down his sugar intake. But Milkybars are made out of milk, right? And cows make milk. And cows eat grass. And grass is basically a vegetable so, if you think it through, it’s basically one of his five-a-day. Basically.

  After dropping him off at his school, I start to run the rest of the way to mine, until my boobs hurt and then I just power walk the rest of the way. And by “power walk” I mean balling up my hands into fists and then walking slightly faster than I do normally. In truth, it’s less a “power walk” and more a “determined stroll.”

  So of course I get to school late.

  As I walk into my homeroom, my fringe sticking to my forehead with sweat, my teacher’s just about to finish attendance, so at least I don’t have to make the walk of shame to the office to sign in.

  “Late again, Haylah?” bawls Mrs. Perkins, pointing her sharp nose and severe cheekbones in my direction. If I have a body made up of circles, hers is made up of triangles and straight lines. She’s like the Eiffel Tower in a cardigan. Though, for all her thin, upright boniness, she somehow has a voice louder than gunfire.

  “Sorry, miss,” I pant. “I did try but…”

  “It’s OK,” she says with a patronizing, teeth-sucking grin. “Just try and make it the last time this week or I’ll have to make a note of it.”

  I nod. And I’m grateful to the woman for letting me off, but I also kind of wish she wouldn’t. She might as well write on the whiteboard and get everyone to copy down that “Haylah Swinton is just a loser from a needy, broken family who couldn’t possibly be expected to function on the same level as normal folk.”

  I make my way to the back of the classroom where Kas and Chloe are sitting, as always. The three of us have been BFFs since primary school, when the only deciding factor for choosing your best friends was who lived nearest to you and who shared your love of My Little Ponies and friendship bracelets. Now we’ve been together so long we’re like an old married couple; we might be better off and happier without each other, but it’s just not an option anymore: we can no longer function without each other. Or perhaps, because there’s three of us, we’re more like an old married couple and their faithful old, fat dog.

  Which would obviously be me.

  As I walk past some of the boys, Dylan, a big loudmouth guy, who never misses an opportunity to make fun of me for a laugh, wolf-whistles ironically. His friends snigger. So I turn to them and do a curtsy. Which makes everyone laugh. My insides swell with excitement. This might turn out to be a good day after all.

  There’s no better feeling than getting a laugh. Nothing beats it. I mean, I’ve heard a rumor that kissing feels pretty good, but I can’t imagine it would make my brain light up nearly as much. Plus, when you make someone else laugh, you don’t have to swallow their spit.

  Unless you tell a joke to my fat-tongued Auntie Pam.

  “Just sit down, Haylah. We don’t need a dramatic entrance, thank you,” bellows Mrs. Perkins.

  “Nice curtsy, Pig,” says Chloe with a giggle as I sit down next to her.

  Yep, so there’s something I can’t keep hidden from you any longer: everyone calls me Pig, OK? I’m all right with it, so you need to get over it quickly so we can move on. It was kinda my doing anyway.

  It started when we were all new to “big school” and trying to figure each other out. Year Seven is like the birth of a dystopian society. Still suffering the aftershock of the cataclysmic event of finishing primary school, we’re thrust into fending for ourselves in an unknown and brutal gated community. All individuality is suppressed as, dressed in the Regime’s standard-issue uniforms, there’s a mad scramble to assign everyone to predetermined categories: geeks, populars, bullies, losers, brains, princesses, and so on. Our past lives are forgotten and in this new dog-eat-dog world we must find a place for ourselves, and fast, otherwise we’ll be left alone, friendless, and hopeless in the dusty wasteland of the astro turf.

  And, when you wear what people see as part of your personality on the outside, like I do, people are quick to jump to conclusions. I was big, so the conclusion drawn was that I was a loser, easy prey for bullies who wanted to get ahead of the game and prove their own strength and superiority over their classmates.

  It was standard name-calling at first: Fatso, Fatty, Chubster, Big Fatty Boom Boom—you know, the predictable wit of the underdeveloped Neanderthal brain. But it wasn’t long before one of them made the link between my surname—Swinton—and swine, meaning pig, of course. I started to hear people snorting and whispering “Pig” as I walked down the hallway. Chloe and Kas said I should just ignore it, but I decided on a different approach. So one day I asked them both to start calling me Pig.

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I actually think it’s pretty cool,” I said. “I’m rebranding myself with a one-word name, like other awesome women before me such as Beyoncé or Pink. Or God.”

  “Erm… God’s not a woman,” said Kas.

  “Oh, come off it! Handmade and ran an entire universe while single-parenting a polite and well-behaved son? There’s no way a dude could pull all that off.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kas.

  “Yeah, but PI
G?” Chloe said.

  “What?” I’d replied. “They’re intelligent, cute, and they taste amazing—I can live with all that.”

  After that, I made everyone call me Pig and whenever I heard someone whisper it in the hallway I would turn to them, offer to shake their hand, and loudly say, “Yeah, that’s right, my name’s Pig. Did you want something?” And they’d realize there was nowhere else to go with the joke. As they shrugged and walked off, my friends would laugh as I threw my hands high into the air and proudly yelled, “That’s right, I am Pig and don’t forget it!” It worked. The bullies gave up on me and moved on to the next obvious prey as I’d made it clear I was no victim. I make the jokes. I am not the joke.

  I do remember though that the first day I decided that I was going to be Pig, I cried myself to sleep.

  Now I’m just used to the name. I don’t mind it. Not really. At least it’s a punchline I wrote.

  “Right, class, it’s a school assembly now so gather your things up and walk QUIETLY down to the hall, please!” booms Mrs. Perkins.

  We all take note of Mrs. Perkins’s request for quiet for around two seconds, but, as the sound of chair legs scraping the floor and bags being zipped up increases, so too does the laugher, chatter, and eventual hysterical yelling at each other across the classroom. Unsurprised by her defeat, Mrs. Perkins trots out of the room, rolling her eyes, as the class begins to trickle out after her. That’s the cool thing with a crappy school like mine—the teachers are about as interested in enforcing the rules as we are in following them.

  I notice Chloe’s still sitting down, doing her makeup. She wears a lot more than the rest of us. To be honest with you, we still don’t really know what we’re doing with it. The last time I tried to put on eyeliner, I sneezed and headbutted the mirror so hard Mum had to take me to the ER with a concussion. That was bad, but not as bad as Mum rambling on in the car about how the wearing of makeup goes against our feminist principles.

  “You’re perfectly pretty as you are, Haylah,” she muttered. “I don’t know why you’d want to plaster your face with that crap just for the sake of what boys might think of you! I mean, come on, we’re all about girl power in this family, and then you go and knock yourself out trying to make your eyes look ‘sexy’ because heaven forbid if a boy looks into a girl’s eyes and she’s not at least wearing mascara. I mean, shock, horror! However would the boy recover from such a gruesome sight!”

  I didn’t point out to her that if you follow her argument through then surely we shouldn’t do anything to look more attractive to anyone. We shouldn’t wash or wear a bra or get our hair cut or wear nice clothes, because true feminists should just present themselves as bedraggled, grotesque, stinky, hairy, saggy scummers. Problem is you can’t really expect anyone to want to be near you then, let alone like you.

  But I didn’t point that out or the fact that I hadn’t actually been putting makeup on to attract boys. I was just bored and was also going to eyeliner on a little Jack Sparrow-esque beard and mustache before sending a selfie to Chloe and Kas with the caption, “You guys always say I should try wearing more makeup, is this right?” But instead I just softly groaned along to the throbbing in my head.

  My mum’s a nurse so the injury must have been really bad for her to take me to the hospital—you’ve got to be pretty close to death before she’ll give you a bit of aspirin, let alone bother her colleagues with your suffering.

  Chloe really knows what she’s doing with makeup though, even if she’s doing it for dubious reasons (in Mum’s book at least). She models herself on her older sister Freya, who’s training to be a beauty therapist and is also an actual model. Well, I mean, she says she’s a model, but all she’s really done is posed for a flier for a local garage and done some dodgy stuff online under the name “Booty McTooty.”

  Anyway, Freya taught Chloe everything she knows about foundation, contouring, multi-masking, muck-spreading, and steamrolling. OK, so I made those last two up, but I mean, what the hell do I know? Feminism and the risk of brain damage aside, until they invent a blush that makes my cheeks look less like two hippity-hops squashing a ping-pong ball, there seems little point in me wearing makeup.

  Chloe always looks gorgeous though. Well—a bit tarty, but gorgeous. Underneath her perfectly styled short blonde bob she has cheekbones you could crack an egg on, and her eyebrows are a work of art in themselves. Like two elegant wings of a dove, rather than my unplucked beasts, which look like two hairy caterpillars gearing up for a fight.

  While Chloe piles on the eyeshadow, Kas produces a hairbrush almost the size of a tennis racket from her bag and starts brushing her long dark hair. Kas isn’t knock-out gorgeous like Chloe and she doesn’t think she’s pretty either, but everyone else does. And yeah, I guess she has a slightly larger than average forehead, but her little chin makes her face heart-shaped, and her permanently narrowed eyes make her look like she’s always on the verge of bursting into hysterics.

  “Oh God, I forgot it’s assembly today. Who’s doing it?” she says in her gently accented voice. Oh yeah, she’s also Polish and lived in Poland until she was, like, five and although most of it’s gone you can still hear the twang of a distant land in her speech. So she’s got that sultry foreign accent thing working for her too. It’s so unfair. I mean, would it have been too much to ask that Mum could have made me live in an Eastern European country for a few years when I was younger until I picked up a sexy accent?

  “Oh, please say it’s not Mr. Jacobs talking about the war again,” says Chloe to her reflection in the mirror.

  I immediately do my best Mr. Jacobs impression—low-voiced, mumbling, wide-eyed, and Scottish. “Imagine yourself there…in a trench…knee-deep in poop…and mud…and more POOP… You don’t know what day it is… You can’t think straight… You can’t hear anything above the great rumbling sounds of death and destruction all around you… You haven’t slept in days… That was one hell of a weekend at Coachella, I can tell you.”

  Kas and Chloe both laugh which makes me smile and twinkle a little bit inside.

  “Come on, we’d better go,” says Chloe.

  In the hall, we’re all relieved when Mr. Humphrey, our head of house (who tries to make up for his lack of personality with the loudness of his ties), announces that it’s the annual house talent show. Basically, each of the school houses picks some idiot to go through to the whole school “Castle Park’s Got Talent” (apparently, not an ironic title) competition at the end of term. And if you’re thinking, Oooh, “houses”—how la-di-da, believe me, it’s not. It’s just a random splitting of the whole school into three clumps and then calling them “houses” as if that’s going to fool people into thinking this is a magical school like Hogwarts, rather than a trashy comprehensive school in an underprivileged arse end of Suffolk.

  To make matters worse, the houses are named after famous people who lived here, which is fine if you’re in Orwell House or Britten House, but they decided to name the third house after a woman and the best they could come up with was Elisabeth Frink, who was some sort of sculptor. Problem is no one’s ever heard of her and Frink is just a naturally funny word. “Did you get into Frink House?” has now turned into a gross, euphemistic way of guys asking how far their friends got with their girlfriends the night before. So everyone wants to be in Orwell or Britten. Obviously, I’m in Frink.

  The competition is all a big embarrassment really. Still, it’s better to sit through this than have Mr. Jacobs trying to get us to imagine all our friends being shot or disfigured by shrapnel.

  First up is Henry from Year Eight, who’s a fellow Frinker and was chosen simply because he was the only one of us who volunteered. If you’re wondering why I didn’t, well, in my dreams is one thing, but I could no more get up onstage in front of a room full of people than I could get Noah to eat a plate of broccoli. Both would end up with me crying in a humiliated heap on the floor while being pelted with vegetables.

  Henry from Year Eight, on
the other hand, was happy to volunteer as he confidently believes he’s a great magician. And to be fair he probably would be a great magician if he had normal social skills, a voice that could be heard from more than a foot away, decent props, and some actual talent for performing magic tricks. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any of those things.

  Words are mumbled, props are broken—and at one point his belt buckle gets caught on the black tablecloth and reveals the stuffed rabbit that’s supposed to appear out of a baseball cap in the finale. Instead, he changes the ending to reveal a folded, oversized playing card from his pocket that’s supposed to match the card Mr. Humphrey randomly chose from a pack earlier. Only when Henry produces the card it turns out it isn’t the right one.

  He stares at the card.

  We stare at the card.

  For a moment, it looks like he’s going to cry, so I start clapping loudly which luckily starts everyone else off and prompts Mr. Humphrey to shuffle him offstage saying, “Well, thank you, Henry, or should I say the Amazing Henry!”

  No, everyone thinks, you really shouldn’t.

  Next up is Jinny, a Britten House girl from Year Ten who sings an Adele tune to a karaoke backing track, and it isn’t too bad. Not great either, but after the Amazing Henry even a Mediocre Jinny manages to impress.

  And then lastly there’s Orwell House’s offering which, to everyone’s surprise, isn’t one of the geeks or princesses—it’s Leo. A murmuring of wonder and admiration swells around the room as he stands at the side of the stage, waiting to be called on.

  Ah, Leo. Everyone knows Leo. He’s two years above us and he’s just this big, easy-going, cool dude who has a smile that could bring about world peace and a smooth voice you could spread on a bagel. Ahhh, Leo.

  “Oooh, it’s lovely Leo!” whispers Chloe.

  “He’s sooo yummy,” purrs Kas.

  “Ugh, please—you guys sound like the voiceover for a yogurt advert. Just stop it now,” I say. I mean, sure, I like him too, but I’m not going to humiliate myself by owning up to such a hopeless crush. “What do you think he’s doing?”