The Bad Karma Diaries by Bridget Hourican Page A

Finally he managed to stop us being silly by showing us different ways to Photoshop. You can do a lot with photos if you know how. Declan said all photos in magazines are Photoshopped and the models don’t actually look that good, which is good to know. We’re not trying to improve our looks though, we’re just trying to crop kids’ faces and enlarge their feet.
    We were interested in Photoshop, but then Declan started in on the look of the blog. He wanted our opinion on miniscule changes to the background colours and I really couldn’t see much difference between the hundred shades of green, and then he started on the letters, which he calls fonts, and did we want the font curly or slant, or bold or faint, or boiled or bubbled (well that’s what it sounded like), and he started muttering names of font, like Arial and Verdana and Calibri and Palatinoand Garamond and he was reminding me of Renata and Alva saying cake names, except his sounded like characters in Shakespeare, so I said, ‘Titania would be good’, and Anna got it immediately and said ‘Bassanio’ and I said ‘Romeo’ and she said ‘Mercutio’ and I said ‘Caliban’ and she said ‘Bottom’ and then we collapsed laughing.
    Declan said, ‘Oh, ha’, in a confused way, although our names were as good as his. So then Anna tried to be polite and interested, but we were just feeling too silly and he was beginning to look quite desperate.
    So Anna said, ‘Oh, you decide Declan. Whatever you think – we don’t mind, Titania or Oberon or Caliban, whichever you think looks best!’
    I said, ‘Yeah! And thanks’, but I didn’t thank him in the sincere, heartfelt way that I did the other day. I thanked him in a rude, rushed, and offhand way.
    This is what happens when you think someone who you don’t fancy might fancy you. It makes you a) uncomfortable and rushed, b) rude and cruel. You feel quite powerful and then you start to exploit your power. Well I do. Apparently. Does this make me a nasty person? Probably.
    So then we giggled our way in and out of shops. Some of the clothes shops were open. But I didn’t feel like buying anything. I get quite confused about what to buy in clothes shops. Anna doesn’t. She just wears jeans and t-shirts and runners. Everything she wears looks very clean and neat and cool andsuits her. But she practically dresses like a boy. So do I, because it’s easier. But I would like to wear wackier clothes. Actually I would like to dress like Renata in dresses over leggings and jumpers and belts and boots and bracelets.I am going to dress like that when I’m in sixth year.
    When we were looking at bags in Topshop – Anna wanted this kind of canvas rucksack – Anna said, ‘Do you think we ganged up on Declan?’
    I said, ‘We didn’t mean to …’
    She said, ‘He was doing us a favour too.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have said he fancied me.’
    ‘Yeah, well he does.’
    ‘Maybe not any more … maybe he thinks we’re annoying little girls.’
    So then we began to giggle again. As we were coming out we bumped into Brian and his mum! We said, ‘Hi, Brian’, and he looked mortified like you’d expect because someone like Brian doesn’t want to be seen with their mum, and he muttered, ‘Hi …’
    Then his mum said, ‘Introduce me to your friends, Brian!’ in a bossy voice.
    Brian turned redder than ever and muttered, ‘Anna, Denise,’ and we said, ‘Hi, Mrs Stewart!’ in our best polite voices.
    She kept us chatting a bit, but then we took pity on Brian and said we had to go.
    ‘Bet she’s giving out to Brian for not “introducing hernicely”,’ I said, and Anna said, ‘Yeah … did you notice how posh her accent is?’
    That was it! I knew there was something funny I couldn’t put my finger on. She has a real D4 accent, what Renata calls ‘strangled 4 by 4 vowels’, and Brian, well, Brian sounds hard and rough.
    No wonder he was so embarrassed meeting us! We have totally blown his cover. He is not