The Manifesto on How to be Interesting by Holly Bourne Page A

around.”
    Gemma shrugged. “Why not?”
    â€œHow did you even get it? Oh, it’s awful! Look at the size of her nips.”
    Gemma shrugged again, her eyes glinting. “Danny left his phone in my form room by accident. I picked it up to see whose it was, found this picture of his girlfriend, and sent it to myself.”
    â€œYou are just evil,” Jassmine said, poking her with delight.
    â€œI’d rather be evil than have burger nipples.”
    â€œ Burger nipples ,” they all whispered and dissolved into laughter.
    Bree wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but she felt like someone’s life was about to get ruined.
    She needed to be in that huddle. To find out what was going on. How was she going to break them?
    During Latin, Bree sat in her usual spot, doodling in her notebook, as she’d already conjugated the verbs set for that week. Latin was a very full class – it looked good on the UCAS form. And Bree would do anything to ensure her place to Cambridge. In her head, she saw herself frolicking through the cobbled streets with a gang of lovely smart friends, trading intellectual comments with one another…
    Anyway, Latin was so crammed, her scribbling went unnoticed.
    Bree wrote down everything she knew about the perfect posse.
    The perfect posse
    Jassmine Dallington
    Aka The Queen.
    Why? The usual reasons. Tumbling mane of perfectly coiffed blonde hair. Perfect body, combined with that weird power some people have that makes everyone desperate to be liked by them.
    If rumours were true, she wasn’t utterly perfect though. She was nicknamed “Apple Tits” behind her back, because apparently her boobs looked like two halves of an apple stuck onto her body. And she seemed to have an utter weak spot where Hugo was concerned – letting him mess her about like an abused puppy.
    Apart from that, there wasn’t much there with Jassmine. She was pretty vacant, like personality would damage her reputation or something.
    Gemma Rinestone
    Gemma was mean. Soulless mean. Like, you wouldn’t be surprised if she laughed watching Schindler’s List mean. Anytime Bree had been teased by the perfects, Gemma had been the orchestrator. She’d been that way since they were little kids, yelling “LOSER” the loudest through the gap under the toilet cubicles in Year Seven when she knew Bree was hiding in there.
    The weird thing about Gemma was that she wasn’t actually very pretty. At all.
    She was also blonde, but her hair was frizzy and she had a weird gummy smile with too-big clown lips. Plus, the foundation she shovelled onto her face didn’t hide the thick layer of acne on her chin.
    That said, when Gemma Rinestone started putting her hair up in a bun with rainbow clips – a fashion nuke bomb for anyone else – a week later the whole school was doing it.
    And though attractiveness might not be a currency she was wealthy in, Gemma was filthy rich in the currency of evil. These were some of the mean things Bree had seen her do:
Lifted up some random Year Seven’s skirt for five whole minutes while the poor kid just stood there, crying.
Personally stolen Bree’s graphics coursework, dumped it in the canteen bin so it was irrevocably ruined by spaghetti hoops, then boasted about doing so.
It was she who’d started Jassmine’s “Apple Tits” nickname, during some intensely complicated fight with her about something to do with somebody else’s ex-boyfriend and a sexual experience on a bench at a party… Jassmine still didn’t know.
She was the “editor” of the Year Eleven yearbook and tampered with the Most likely to be… results. She invented a new category called Most likely to eat their way through the school canteen and made the winner this poor fat girl called Matilda, who’d never once spoken to Gemma or anyone else for that matter. When the yearbooks were handed out, Matilda