The Making of Mia Read Free Page A

couldn’t protect her from being the odd one out in a school where everyone had to be perfect.
    ‘Oh, look, there’s Jo Hill skipping her homework again so she can be in bed with a magazine, what a surprise!’ A nasal voice
     interrupted her thoughts, and Jo turned to see Dominique and her group of blonde, identikit friends. Dominique had the bed
     closest to Jo’s, and since the first year she’d picked on Jo to make herself feel better about her slightly rounded stomach
     and large bottom.
    ‘You’re never going to lose your virginity if going to bed with a magazine is all you’re interested in,’ she said cattily,
     as her friends giggled and nudged each other. ‘Men don’t like girls who just lie on their backs – they like a bit of movement.’
    Jo stared at the girls coolly. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m hoping that when I do get a boyfriend he’s going
     to be impressed by the fact that I have ambition and am not an airhead like you.’
    Dominique doubled up with fake laughter. ‘If you call lying on your back while reading trashy magazines “ambition”, then I’m
     sure you’ll find someone to sleep with you. Especially if he can put the magazine over your head before he climbs on top.’
    Jo felt her good mood vanish, and she turned towards the wall, desperately trying to ignore the giggles and the slumber-party
     atmosphere of bedtime that never included her. The magazine fell out of her hands and opened on the editor’s letter page,
     and Jo stared at it, imagining her slimmed-down and made-up face looking back at her in place of the current
Cosmo
editor. One day Dominique – and Jemima and Susie and all the other bitchy girls at school – would be fat from having babies
     with philandering City bankers, and they would all turn to her magazine for love-life advice. Jo would be thin, stylish and
     the most revered magazine editor in the UK, and when the girls opened the magazine and saw Jo’s beautiful face in prime position
     on the editor’s letter page they’d wish they’d never bullied her at school. She’d show them.

Chapter Two
    August 2000
    Jo woke with a jolt. The sun was streaming through her thin My Little Pony curtains, and for a minute she didn’t know where
     she was until she realised she could smell burnt toast rather than Dominique’s overbearing perfume. She glanced around the
     bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief: she was at home, and she was never going to have to go back to St Christopher’s School
     for Snobs again. Old posters of Kurt Cobain hung limply from the pale pink walls, and her curtains blocked out the view of
     the rest of the Peckham council estate. Jo never opened them – they acted as a barrier to the gangs of teenagers outside who
     taunted her for being ‘posh’ and fat. Jo often wondered if she was the loneliest person in the world. She didn’t feel like
     she fitted in anywhere.
    Today, however, was the start of her brand-new life: A-level results day. Jo couldn’t face going back to the school ever again,
     so Amelia had promised to phone with her results. She couldn’t wait – in a few hours she could properly start thinking about
     how her life was going to be at university, and Jo resolved that today she would start her diet. By the time term started
     she would not only have lost some of her extra weight, but would be ready to meet new people – the people she would be friends
     with for the rest of her life. She grinned to herself. The next few years were going to be fantastic.
    The phone in the hall began to ring, and Jo was about tojump out of bed when she heard her mother answer it. As the voice of her hard, brittle mother relaxed into conversation Jo
     tensed up – why didn’t her mother understand how important it was to keep the line free? Jo tried not to panic and hurled
     herself into the hallway to give Elaine Hill a dirty look. Jo’s mum – who was dressed in velour jogging bottoms and a faded