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

broke down into silent tears, ran from the school and was never seen again. Gemma laughed and said loudly to anyone who was listening – which was everyone – that “some people just can’t take a joke”. She also changed the results so she won Most likely to be a model. Bree knew this because she’d helped on the yearbook and was in charge of counting up the votes.
    Gemma hadn’t even made the top twenty.
    Jessica Rightman
    Jessica was convinced she was going to be a Hollywood movie star. And so was the rest of the school. She’d been the lead in every school play for the past four years. She sang throughout every lesson in her TERRIBLE nasal voice. She’d got some God-awful brother, Drew, in the year above, who also believed he was some sort of acting genius. Their parents had to be pushier than Stalin.
    Aside from the annoying singing habit, Jessica also practised her vocal skills by making snide comments to anyone she considered beneath her. Which was everyone. Like she was permanently pissed off that she had to share oxygen with other people.
    Jessica also wasn’t that pretty, definitely not as pretty as Jassmine. Everything on her face was right. Two eyes (blue), a nose, okay lips, cheeks, etc. But the way they were put together wasn’t quite correct. Everything was too angular and pointy. But Jessica believed herself to be a goddess and threw herself at all men, expecting them to drop dead with gratefulness. Her victims tended to either use her, or shrug her off their laps. At which point she’d laugh, screech “You’re such a tease!” and toss her hair back with a big swoosh of inner denial.
    And then there was the hanger-on.
    Emily Nashville
    If anyone needed an example of vacuous air, they should just point to Emily. She’d sacrificed her personality, on a metaphorical temple like a slaughtered lamb, in order to get in with the perfect posse. Her opinions were Jassmine’s opinions. Her jokes were Gemma’s jokes. Her put-downs were Jessica’s put-downs. She laughed at anything any of them said, clutching her sides like she was trying to hold in her guts.
    So that was the four. The four Bree needed to infiltrate somehow.
    Bree’s concentration was interrupted by a flurry of vibrations echoing around the classroom. Phones rumbled on silent simultaneously under people’s desks. Her Latin teacher, Mrs McQuire, who was oblivious to any technological advance from the twentieth century onwards, didn’t notice.
    Well, she didn’t notice until the whispering began.
    â€œOh my God.” Someone psst-ed next to Bree, shoving their phone into their neighbour’s lap. “Have you SEEN this?”
    Bree, whose phone, oddly enough, hadn’t gone off, strained her neck to catch a glimpse of the screen.
    She caught her breath.
    It was a photo of a girl from their year, Natalie. Topless. A selfie, from the looks of it. She was pouting naively at the camera, but Bree’s eyes ignored that, and went straight to her chest. Someone had manipulated the photo in Paint, pointing a massive red arrow to her boobs, with the words BURGER NIPPLES scrawled underneath.
    So this was what Gemma had been talking about. This was the life the perfect posse had decided to ruin that day. For sport. Some poor girl they hardly knew, whose only sin was to be naive enough to send a photo like that to her boyfriend.
    The poor, poor girl.
    â€œQuiet,” Mrs McQuire said. “What’s going on? No talking.”
    The class ignored her.
    â€œIt’s Natalie – jeez, have you ever seen areolae that big?”
    â€œWhere did it come from?”
    â€œGemma’s phone.”
    â€œPoor Natalie.”
    â€œWhat a bitch.”
    â€œHave you sent it to anyone else?”
    â€œQUIET, PLEASE!” Mrs McQuire yelled, and they settled – for now. But the buzz of silent gossip hung heavy in the air, the vibration of received texts