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.
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.
Not just locked in a cupboard with no working light bulb, no phone
