Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb Page A

tempted to say that she didn’t have to be festooned with tortoises to look good, but I thought it would be more tactful to hold back.
    ‘I do sort of like it . . .’ Chloe hesitated.
    ‘Of course you do!’ I insisted. ‘It’s your goddess frock! So we’ve found them both! Sorted!’
    Although paying for them was going to be a struggle. Neither of us could afford to pay up on the spot and the sales assistant said she could only keep them for a few days. We were going to have to get our hands on some cash – and fast.

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    13
    ‘Right,’ said Chloe, as we settled down by the PC with our cups of zingy ginger and lemon herbal tea. We’d had our baked-jacket spuds, and I’d made a special salad with olives and anchovies. We were now ready to rock. ‘Do a search on goddesses .’ I Googled it up.
    ‘There’s a quiz! A goddess quiz!’ yelled Chloe. Two clicks and we were there. ‘“ Discover your goddess type !”’
    ‘“ Grow your inner goddess !”’ I yelled, clicking like a mad click-beetle.
    ‘“ Your road to growth and inspiration !”’ shrieked Chloe. We soon discovered, though, that it cost $19.75 to take the Goddess Quiz.
    ‘What a rip-off!’ I grumbled. ‘I’m sure the goddesses would be outraged.’
    ‘The goddess of money might be quite impressed,’ pondered Chloe.
    ‘Who needs a stupid quiz, anyway? We can find out everything we need to know by ourselves. A real goddess wouldn’t take a quiz to find out what sort of goddess she was.’
    ‘Indian goddesses are cool!’ suggested Chloe. ‘Let’s have a look at them!’
    Soon we were admiring a picture of Kali, sometimes known as the nude Indian goddess of evil.
    ‘Well, that’s so me, obviously,’ I sighed in rapture. ‘Look: “ For earrings she wears two dead bodies and she has a necklace of skulls .” That is so the look I was planning for this winter.’
    ‘The dead bodies as earrings idea is attractive, obviously,’ said Chloe. ‘But wouldn’t they drag your earlobes down a bit?’
    ‘Not if they were dead mice or spiders,’ I mused. ‘Oh no, wait – I’d need a garland of fifty human heads, apparently. I’m not sure I could get away with that in school. Maybe Kali is a bit too challenging as a role model.’
    ‘Look, though,’ said Chloe, peering at the screen. ‘Her sword “ cuts the knots of ignorance and destroys false consciousness ”. Cool!’
    ‘False consciousness is a problem, though,’ I added. ‘I mean, how do you know if your consciousness is false or not?’
    ‘Find another goddess,’ urged Chloe. Within moments we were devouring the details of the Norse goddess Freya. It said she was often depicted travelling in a chariot pulled by two blue cats.
    ‘Blue cats!’ exclaimed Chloe. ‘Great fashion statement! I like Freya. Show me more!’
    ‘Her husband Od was lost at sea but when she was reunited with him he had been turned into a sea monster.’
    ‘Typical man!’ snorted Chloe. ‘So unreliable. I wouldn’t mind a husband called Od, though. “ Can I introduce my husband, Od? ” It would be kind of a talking point.’
    ‘Very Od,’ I agreed. ‘She remained devoted to him even though he was a sea monster,’ I read on. ‘Oh dear . . . but he was killed, in the end. Bad luck!’
    ‘Tough!’ sighed Chloe. ‘I was kind of getting into Od, even with all his tentacles and slime.’
    ‘Couldn’t be worse than Joe Gibbons in the lower sixth,’ I observed. ‘Oh look! It’s all right, after all, because the rest of the gods allowed him to have conjugal visits.’
    ‘What are conjugal visits?’ asked Chloe. We weren’t quite sure so we looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently a conjugal visit is where a prison inmate can be visited in private by his wife in a little cell with a bed and stuff, so they can get up to all sorts of hanky-panky.
    ‘Gross!’ shrieked Chloe. ‘I was really into Freya because of the blue cats, but now I know she sleeps with a sea monster who is also a