target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 43
model [mod-l] noun, adjective, verb
1 A standard or example for imitation or comparison
2 A representation, generally in miniature
3 An image to be reproduced
4 A person whose profession is posing for artists or photographers
5 To fashion something to be like something else.
ORIGIN from the Latin modulus: ‘absolute value’
I know I’m a girlfriend because I can’t stop beaming. Apparently the average girl smiles sixty-two times a day, so I must be statistically stealing somebody else’s happiness. I’m grinning every thirty or forty seconds, minimum.
I know I’m a girlfriend because I’m giggling at my own jokes, singing songs I don’t know the words to, hugging any animal within a hundred-metre radius and twirling round in circles with my hands stretched out every time I see a small patch of sunshine. Thanks to my brain drowning in the love chemicals phenylethylamine, dopamine and oxytocin, I’ve basically morphed into a cartoon princess.
Except one with an astronomically high phone bill and a tendency to look up ‘symptoms of being in love’ online when her boyfriend isn’t looking.
Anyway, the final reason I know I’m a girlfriend is this, written on the inside back page of my new bright purple diary:
I did it, obviously. It would be a really weird thing to doodle on someone else’s private stationery. There’s a sketch of me and it’s timed and dated to commemorate the precise moment – four weeks and two days ago – that Lion Boy and I became an official item.
That’s right: Nick and I are finally a proper duo.
A