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and their shoe fetishes and I’d have felt left out. Moss and I grabbed Digby and a packet of custard creams and headed up to my room to ‘revise’.
    My messy room’s nice but it’s very cold. That’s how I like it (the cold bit – I’m neutral about mess as it’s just there) but Moss gets shivery so we piled
(Digby included) under the duvet.
    ‘So, what happens next?’ she asked.
    I looked at Moss a bit blankly. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose I wait.’
    ‘What did they say would happen?’
    ‘I think they’ll just phone me if there’s something they think I could try for.’
    ‘You’d better not lose your phone then.’
    I started to object to that slur on my character, but to be fair I had form on losing my phone. ‘Well, they’ll probably phone my mum. Until I’m sixteen, I need to get
permission from her even to audition.’
    ‘I’ll need permission from my mum to do anything until I’m at least twenty-one.’
    ‘Anything?’
    ‘Anything.’
    ‘Well, that’s going to be embarrassing.’
    Moss groaned and crammed a whole biscuit into her mouth.
    ‘Do you want to see my headshot?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes!’
    I pulled it up on my phone. ‘What do you think?’
    She gave it the sort of close, critical examination it deserved. ‘Wow . . . It’s like you but not like you. It’s like a better you. Sort of a glossy version of you.’
    ‘Thank you, I think.’
    ‘You should totally make it your new Facebook profile pic.’
    ‘No way. It’s too . . . perfect.’ I meant the photograph, not me obviously.
    ‘Flissy has her profile pic taken professionally.’
    Of course she did. Flissy had her hair blow-dried and wore a smoky eye to school. ‘I’m not going to start competing with Flissy.’ There was only so much narcissism that someone
outside her crew would get away with.
    ‘What was the photographer like?’
    ‘Old, quiet, quite sweet. It was still scary though. I felt really self-conscious.’ And weirdly aware of my teeth. In the end, I’d had to act being a super-confident actor
(with no teeth hang-ups) getting her headshots done.
    ‘Well, it was only one photo. It can’t have been that scary.’
    ‘You have no idea – it took forever to get that shot.’ Literally hours – respect to models; at least I could eat biscuits while he was fiddling with the lighting.
‘I’m like an expert now.’ I took back my phone. ‘Come on, I’m going to take your headshot now. Give me your best pose . . . Chin down . . . Neck back and up, sweetie .
. .’
    ‘He called you “sweetie”?’
    ‘Yes, but in a nice not weird way. Concentrate. Eyes to me . . . Time for a few with your hair up . . . No, not like that . . . Leave it down . . .’
    ‘It’s my ears, right? They always look weird in photos.’
    She did have very big ears. ‘They’re only ears; nobody’s ears are a huge selling point. Stop pouting.’
    ‘I wasn’t pouting.’
    ‘You so were. That was a Flissy-level pout. Come on, I want to get the perfect shot, face slightly to the left . . . NOT YOU, DIGBY.’ He was photobombing. ‘Now to the right,
Moss . . .
Relax
your face.’
    ‘What does that even mean?’
    ‘I don’t know, but the photographer said it to me
a lot
. Try blowing out through your mouth like a pony – that was another of his top tips.’ It was a direction too
far. Moss lost it. I wasn’t going to get the
perfect
shot. I had some quite funny ones though.
    ‘Are you scared about auditions and – I don’t know –
doing
stuff in front of people?’ Moss asked when we’d got ourselves together.
    I thought about it. ‘Nah. I mean, I probably will be, but it’s not real yet so not much point getting worried about it.’
    ‘I couldn’t do it.’
    Moss had had a seriously traumatic experience as a gryphon in our Year Seven production of
Alice in Wonderland
and I doubted if she’d ever get on a stage again.
    ‘There must be some stuff you wouldn’t want to do.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Don’t