Holly Webb

mean to me, ever. Because I might invite them over,

“And cobwebs are bio-degradable, Maya,” she’d promised, knowing how much her friend worried about the mountains of landfill all over the place. “Not like plasters. They’ve been used on wounds since the Middle Ages, honestly.”
Maya still wasn’t convinced. Didn’t people always die really young in the Middle Ages? It was probably because of all the spiders’ webs.
Anyway, there was no way she was even trying the throat sweets – who knew what Poppy had put in them? Chocolate and nettles or something. She’d have to flush them down the loo. But she didn’t want to hurt Poppy’s feelings. “OK,” she murmured, crossing her fingers under the table again. Emily rolled her eyes at her, just a little.
Anyway, Maya didn’t really have a cold. The red eyes probably just meant she was allergic to the stupid false eyelashes Mum’s stylist had insisted she wore for the magazine photoshoot.
It was worth it, though. The interviewer had let Maya talk about cruelty-free make-up, and she’d promised they’d put that bit in the article. Mum had even said she liked to use animal-friendly brands too, after Maya had elbowed her in the ribs to remind her they had a deal. She’d refused to do the last two photoshoots, so Mum would have promised her almost anything.
No one she knew was ever going to see it, anyway, Maya told herself hopefully. No one at this school seemed to read celeb magazines much. Anyway, with that much make-up on, the photos wouldn’t even look like her…
It would have been different if she’d still been at Graham House, her old school. There all the girls would have been passing the magazine around. Someone would have recognised India Kell, and they would have gone on and on about it for days, as though it was the most exciting thing in the world that Maya’s mum used to be a singer.
She still was, Maya supposed. But her mum mostly did TV presenting now. People always wanted to interview her. The magazines wanted to talk about her clothes, and her house, and her favourite make-up. And Maya. Her mum had a book of all the photo spreads from over the years – Maya as a baby, Maya the cute toddler, all the way up to age seven when she’d stopped enjoying it.