Girls to total goddesses, p.1
Girls to Total Goddesses, page 1
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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
Text copyright © Sue Limb 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Poem The Sick Rose by William Blake
This electronic edition published in July 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1289 1
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Also by Sue Limb
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Girl, 15: Flirting for England
Girl, 15: Charming But Insane
Girl, (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture
Girls, Guilty But Somehow Glorious
(Previously published as Zoe and Chloe: On the Prowl)
Girls, Muddy, Moody Yet Magnificent
(Previously published as Zoe and Chloe: Out to Lunch)
Girls to Total Goddesses
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For Anna Wednesday Meyers
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CONTENTS
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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
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
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1
‘Right,’ said Chloe. ‘When are we going to start our makeovers and transform ourselves into goddesses?’ We were snuggling in the warmth of the Dolphin Cafe, one foggy afternoon in November. We’d been busy with school stuff for weeks, so we’d had to put the goddess project on hold. Further delay could prove disastrous, however: I felt we were beginning to drift.
‘Right now!’ I insisted. ‘We’ve got to get started! Remember what we said back in the summer? Girls to goddesses in seven days. Anyway, I have to be irresistible by eight o’clock tonight.’
‘Eight o’clock? What’s happening at eight o’clock? You never mentioned anything.’ Chloe’s eyes widened excitedly.
‘Who knows?’ I smiled mysteriously. ‘Once we’re goddesses, the sky’s the limit!’ I had slightly randomly fixed on eight o’clock as a time for our new lives to begin. Eight sounds so much more major and exciting than seven, come to think of it. Maybe it should be girls to goddesses in eight days: we might need an extra day to complete our transformation.
‘So where do we start?’ Chloe whipped out her notebook and wrote the words GODDESS PROJECT at the top of a page.
‘Well,’ I mused, staring into the muddy remains of my hot chocolate, ‘I’ve got to transform myself. I mean, you’re amazing, you’re totally cool and stuff, but I’m just hideous from head to toe! My hair’s like wire, my nose is a turnip, my teeth are too big, I have the largest spot in the history of acne …’ (Nigel, incidentally – he’s such a big presence in my life, he’s become more of a pet than a blemish) ‘… my tum is like an air bag, my legs are fat, I’m knock-kneed and pigeon-toed … I come flubbering out of bed in the morning like a Thing from the Bottom of the Sea, all slime and tentacles.’
‘Stop! Stop!’ laughed Chloe. ‘Zoe, don’t be stupid! You’re gorgeous! You’ve got an hourglass figure to die for, your hair is crinkly and all glittery and bronzy, your eyelashes are huge, your legs are endless, you’re tall and commanding and amazing and funny. I’m the one who needs a transformation!’
‘No!’ I protested. ‘That’s rubbish!’
‘Listen!’ insisted Chloe. ‘I’m basically a dwarf, I have no boobs – they’re smaller than your average walnuts, my hair is dry and demented and worst of all horribly, horribly RED and clashes with everything, my skin is the colour of porridge and covered with horrendous freckles, so I look like a goddam TOAD, plus the moment I go into the sun I get barbecued – oh, and my legs! Hideous and stringy! My shinbones are so sharp, you could cut cheese with them! Nobody is ever going to want to marry me!’
‘Yes, they are!’ I told her. ‘You’re a perfect petite size 8, for God’s sake! Your hair is a divine red cloud! Your skin is like flawless snow and totally without polar bears’ footprints! Next time they make a film about Queen Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett will be out of a job!’
At this point Maria, who owns the cafe, came up and asked us to keep the noise down. ‘You’re disturbing other customers,’ she hissed in a surly manner. Although she is basically a tyrant obsessed with men, we have to keep on the right side of her because the Dolphin Cafe is the place to be. Our mate Toby was a waiter here back in the summer hols, and he told us that Maria let him kiss her in the pantry on Thursdays.
‘So where do we start?’ whispered Chloe.
‘It’s got to be exercise,’ I said determinedly. ‘Because I can’t give up on food. Not yet. And apparently exercise improves brain function, too.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Chloe nodded, writing down EXCERSISE. Her spelling’s not brilliant, but she can do amazing sums in her head. ‘Exercise is a great idea! Maybe I can find an exercise to develop my boobs! And our skin will glow and our eyes will sparkle …’
‘With supernatural fire!’ I agreed. ‘But I’m not going to exercise in public. I don’t want anyone to see my flab flapping.’
‘Yeah!’ Chloe shuddered. ‘That would be weird!’ It certainly would be weird if Chloe’s flab flapped, because she basically has about as much cellulite as a pixie. ‘Also I don’t want anything to do with ball games!’ she added. Chloe’s wonderfully uncoordinated in a hilarious kind of way. I hope she never has to meet the Queen, because her curtsy would probably end up as a kind of headbutt and Chloe might get arrested.
‘No, no,’ I agreed. ‘No ball games, no team games.’
‘I hate team games,’ sighed Chloe. ‘People always think I’m the nerd.’
‘You are so not the nerd!’ I whispered indignantly. ‘I’m the nerd! Whenever I try sports, my thighs kind of stick together. I hate team games anyway, except when played by gorgeous men with rippling torsos.’
‘Oh yeah!’ smiled Chloe. ‘Remember that beach rugby in Newquay?’
Remember it? Little did Chloe know that approximately every five minutes ever since, I’d thought wistfully of Beast racing across the sands. God, he was such a legend! I remembered how his black curls had danced in the sea breeze, and his grey-green eyes always seemed so restless and interested in everything. School had become a deserted dungeon since he’d left. There was no longer any chance that I’d bump into him in the corridor, and now I was tragically haunted by all the places where I’d bumped into him last year, when I hadn’t even realised how fabulous he was, so it had been a total waste of bumpingness.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Chloe sharply. I had clearly started to wear a foolish faraway grin. I hadn’t told her I was mad about Beast, because it was a slightly dodgy subject: Chloe had been mad about Beast herself, all last term, before the summer hols. I’d have to get round to telling her soon, when I thought she could cope with it.
‘Nothing, nothing.’ I shook myself out of my reverie. ‘I’m just thinking how wonderful it’ll be to get fit. So when do we start the exercise? And it can’t be jogging. You can get something called “Jogger’s Nipple” and I’d die rather than have to go and see the doctor about that!’
‘Aerobics!’ yelled Chloe. People at nearby tables looked startled.
‘Sssssh!’ I warned. Thank goodness Maria was in the kitchen.
‘We can get a DVD and do it secretly at home!’ whispered Chloe. ‘If we did it every day, would we start to see results in seven days?’
‘Of course!’ I was wondering how Beast would react to a new, slim, fit me. ‘We’d start seeing results from Day One! And we can take photos of ourselves before we start, and once we’ve transformed ours elves we can take After Photos. And we must be totally honest with each other about what we look like.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Chloe. ‘In fact, we must be honest with each other about everything.’ I gulped guiltily here, because of Chloe being in the dark about my feelings for Beast.
‘We need a deadline,’ I suggested, because I wanted to steer the conversation away from honesty. ‘You know, a big event we can prepare for, so we’ll have to be amazing by then. Hey! How about Jailhouse Rock?’
Jailhouse Rock was this amazing rock concert Beast was helping to organise, scheduled to take place in about four weeks’ time in the Sir George Plunkett Memorial Concert Bowl, known to one and all as Plunkett. It was being organised by Young People for Young People, in aid of Amnesty International (hence the name Jailhouse Rock – because Amnesty supports prisoners all over the world who are unjustly in jail only for speaking out against bad governments).
‘Jailhouse Rock!’ exclaimed Chloe. ‘Perfect! We have to be there anyway. We’ll arrive looking like a million dollars.’
‘We’ll blow everybody away.’ I nodded. I was secretly wondering how much of a transformation I’d need to undergo to blow Beast away. The trouble was, once upon a time, he had actually asked me out – back in the grim old dark ages when I’d hated him, and I’d told him I wouldn’t go out with him if he was the last man left alive.
And though he’d been polite since then, whenever we’d met, I realised that he was never going to refer to it ever again: the whole episode had been hastily wiped from his memory banks. I felt sure he wouldn’t ask me out again if I was the last girl left alive. We were going to remain on chilly but polite terms until the end of time – unless I managed to transform myself into such a goddess that he would completely lose control, forget about the past, and throw himself at me at a hundred and seventy miles per hour.
Chloe doodled on the margins of her notebook. She drew a massive pair of goddess-like eyes. Maria arrived at our table and pointedly took away our empty mugs. We were going to have to queue for some new snacks or vacate our snug little corner.
‘Anything else you think we should put on this list? As in, kind of basic principles?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I’ve not really done enough research into goddesses …’
‘Oh, only that boys are going to be totally off the map!’ said Chloe firmly. ‘No crushes, no falling head over heels, not even a piddling little minor half-hearted moment of fancying a guy until we’ve transformed into goddesses, OK? We’ve wasted so much time thinking about boys in the past! From now on, we won’t even notice if Ben Jones sits next to us in the canteen!’
‘Ben Jones?’ I asked playfully. ‘Who’s he?’ Ben Jones is the school dreamboat, the male equivalent of eye candy, and normally I’d be quite happy to join in a bit of drooling over him, even though, of course, since I’d secretly become obsessed with Beast, nobody else was even slightly interesting.
‘So boys are out!’ insisted Chloe.
‘Absolutely!’ I agreed, secretly indulging myself in a little tiny thought about Beast’s lovely strong masculine hands. ‘But, Chloe – what if … ?’
In a sudden feverish fantasy, Beast turned up on my doorstep, just like he had last summer, and asked me out. And this time I didn’t tell him to get lost …
‘No what ifs!’ insisted Chloe. She can be so headstrong at times. ‘Boys are off the menu while we concentrate on ourselves. It’s pathetic to measure ourselves by our success with boys anyway. We should be powerful, independent females in our own right – right?’
I nodded, trying to look powerful and independent but secretly promising myself a tiny little indulgent thought about Beast as soon as Chloe got distracted by something. Maybe in a minute she would decide she wanted a Dolphin Cafe brownie or cinnamon toast.
A shadow fell across our table. We looked up. A pale, pasty boy stood there with beige slicked-back hair and khaki eyes. Oh God! It was Matthew Kesterton. If we wanted to be completely indifferent to boys, Matthew was the perfect candidate to begin our project. We’d got to know him a few months ago in circumstances too embarrassing to explain here. Oh, all right then: we’d pretended to be life coaches and Matthew had been our only client. He was basically the kind of guy who gets the Nobel Prize for Nerdhood. I had wasted a whole afternoon of my life trying to teach him how to smile.
‘Hi, gels,’ he said in a faux South London accent. ‘May I join you?’ And his lips twitched upwards in a kind of snarl of agony. I could see he still hadn’t got the hang of smiling.
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2
‘Hey! Matthew! Great to see you! How was your summer?’ I indicated graciously that the third chair was at his disposal. Matthew sat down carefully, as if he had never actually done it before, but had read a pamphlet entitled How to Lower Yourself into a Chair. I smiled treacherously – it was so not great to see him. I would rather have been joined by a ten-foot boa constrictor – a creature considerably less cold-blooded than Matthew.
‘It’s Paolo, actually,’ he announced pompously. ‘I’ve changed my name. I think Matthew sounds a bit old-fashioned.’
This was a major style error on Matthew’s part, though I was too polite to say so. I have a snobbish taste for old-fashioned names. Harry, for example. It is, incidentally, Beast’s real name: Harry Hawkins. Beat that for charisma! It sounds a bit like a pirate, but then, he looks a bit like a pirate, sometimes.
‘Right,’ I said mischievously. ‘OK, er, Paolo. I’ve changed my name, too. I’m … Doris.’ I couldn’t help myself: Matthew brings out the sarcastic worst in me. Chloe looked startled. ‘And Chloe’s changed her name to Vera. How was your summer, then, Ma— Paolo?’
‘Oh, it was great, yeah,’ droned Matthew in his strange dull voice. ‘First I did a life-saving course …’ I didn’t like that word first. It suggested we might have to sit through a whole catalogue of very worthy things Matthew had done throughout the summer hols.
‘Oh brilliant, well done,’ I said. ‘So you can save lives, now, can you?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Matthew, evidently deep in some kind of fantasy of being a lifeguard in Atlantic City.
‘How wonderful!’ gasped Chloe, avoiding my eye. ‘So if we were drowning, you could save us!’ I knew exactly what she was thinking: that she’d rather drown, any day, than see Matthew laboriously approaching through the waves like some earnest podgy seal hell-bent on watery courtship.
‘I’m not sure if I could save you both.’ Matthew looked puzzled. ‘Especially if you clung to me in panic.’
‘I promise,’ I said seriously, ‘that I will never cling to you in panic.’ Matthew looked slightly disappointed.
‘Nor will I,’ promised Chloe fervently. It was the first honest thing we’d said since he sat down.
Chloe and I avoided looking at each other. We were going to have such a laugh about this later.
‘I think it’s wonderful, being a lifeguard,’ I said. ‘I really admire you for it, Ma— Paolo.’
‘We ought to learn how to do it, too, really,’ said Chloe.
‘I can do mouth-to-mouth as well,’ said Matthew, ‘so if either of you girls ever goes into a coma, let me know.’ He gave a weird Martian-style smile at this point, so I think this was supposed to be a rather sleazy and unpleasant joke.
‘Yeah, we should do a life-saving course, Chloe,’ I suggested.
‘There’s one every Thursday at the leisure centre,’ said Matthew. ‘Run by St John Ambulance.’
‘Oh dear!’ I dived in quick. ‘We can’t make Thursdays, because that’s the night we go out with our boyfriends.’ I thought I’d better get a couple of imaginary boyfriends lined up quick, after all that unnecessary ghastliness about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
‘Boyfriends?’ enquired Matthew, trying not to look crushed. We were probably the only girls he’d ever spoken to in his life. I knew he preferred me to Chloe, because once he’d said so, which was a terrible kind of curse rather than a compliment. ‘Anybody I know?’
