Hi everyone! Leigh (@leigh_) here, and I'm so excited to announce the really exciting project I've been working on with Comic Relief to celebrate Red Nose Day. When thinking of charity and comedy, my mind instantly went to all the wacky things people have been known to do in the way of fundraising. And I think you'll find my characters take it to the next level...
I'm so excited for you to read this story, and I hope you fall in love with Mia and Alex as much as I did when writing them!
Leigh
***
It all started with a box.
Said box had been sitting in the sixth form common room for the best part of a week, but I wasn't sure anybody had even noticed. The sign I'd scribbled in permanent marker and underlined five times had done about as much good as invisible ink. My classmates brushed past like it wasn't even there, and even knocking it off the table with the corner of their bag wasn't enough to make them look round.
Of course, you could argue that it was a cop-out putting the box there in the first place. We were the ones wanting to fundraise, so we probably should've been doing the thinking ourselves. But Alex and I had already agreed how deadly boring bake sales were - and anyway, half the sixth form girls had already proclaimed themselves to be on strict vegan diets, like the reason for turning down the mouldy-looking cheese in the canteen had everything to do with animal rights. We needed new ideas. Ideas that nobody had come up with before, and that would be a sure-fire way of raking in the spare change of our classmates.
The problem was we didn't have any.
We'd set up the box as a kind of metaphor for our foolish optimism, figuring that if we stuck a label reading fundraising ideas on the front of it, our classmates might stop and do the hard work for us.
As it turned out, they didn't.
That Friday afternoon, I found Alex in his favourite corner of the common room - the only person still buried in their textbook during the last hour until the weekend. In fact, he was so absorbed in the fascinating illustration of cellular organelles that he didn't even notice me until I'd got right up to the table and dumped the box in front of him.
He looked up, offering me a smile. "Hey."
"We got nothing," I said, not bothering with a greeting. The box flapped open on the table as I pulled up a chair and collapsed into it. "A big fat nothing."
"Nothing at all?"
"Not a sausage." I let out a long sigh, sparing a brief glance for the impeccable colour-coded diagram on Alex's page, copied from the textbook with painstaking detail. I had to wonder - with a slight tinge of envy - where he got his motivation from. "Guess people aren't as willing to give us their good ideas as we thought."
"Well," he said, "maybe it wasn't quite in the spirit of the charity prize, anyway."
"We're still going to get it," I told him adamantly. "This is just a minor setback. We've had our eyes on it from the start of the year. And let's be real, nobody else in sixth form is any competition - it's only the lower school we've got to deal with."
He looked at me, smiling slightly. "You know, we probably shouldn't have written on our university applications that we'd already won it."
"Well, if we had to tell the truth, we would've missed the deadline," I said, waving him off. "It doesn't matter, anyway, because we're still going to win the prize. We just need to put our heads together and come up with an amazing idea."
"You're sure no one submitted anything?" He pulled the box toward him, giving it an empty-sounded shake before delving his hand inside. I watched him scramble for a second, and there was a slight pause before he pulled something out - what looked like a small scrap of paper. "Looks like you missed one."
He unfolded the paper, and I watched a straight face turn into a smile just a second later. Then he tossed it toward me. "Maybe not. Looks like you've got a joker on your hands."
I smoothed the fold down with my fingers, glancing at the scrawled handwriting. In untidy letters, it simply read: I dare you to dye your hair bright purple.
I pulled a face. "Someone submitted a dare?"
"Messing around, probably." He took the paper back again, studying it for a second time. "I don't recognise the handwriting, though."
And yet my focus was elsewhere. "Purple?" I said. "Who thinks purple would be a good look for me?"
"I don't know," Alex said, with an amused smile. "It might suit you."
"If that's your way of talking me into it, then it's not going to work." I leaned back in my chair, tipping backward to balance on the back two legs. The kind of thing we all still did, despite having spent the last twelve years being told by teachers not to. Then, suddenly, the idea occurred to me, with such abruptness that I sat forward and jolted as the other two legs hit the floor. "Wait."
Alex was looking at me strangely. "What?"
"Maybe this could be our idea," I said quickly, gesturing to the box. When his confused expression didn't falter, I picked up the slip of paper to wave it in front of his face. "Dares are funny, right? That's why someone's put this in in the first place. What's stopping us from cashing in on that?"
He frowned. "I'm not following."
"I'm saying," I continued, leaning in so my arm practically covered his neatly-drawn diagram, "we put the box out again, except this time we ask for dares. People can ask us to do whatever they want, and if we do it... they have to pay up."
He was looking at me, following each word with a growing half-smile. "You know," he said, "that might actually work."
"Of course it'll work." I was grinning from ear-to-ear now, utterly convinced that we'd landed on the jackpot. We didn't need a box after all. We already had our winning idea. "You know what people are like. They won't be able to resist. And then they'll have to put their money where their mouth is."
"For how long?"
I considered it for a moment, glancing around the common room, which was slowly starting to see its occupants drift out for the weekend. "A week," I said decisively. "Monday to Friday next week. The box opens for business, and we do as much as we can."
"There's just one thing left to deal with," he said, with an amused note to his voice.
"What?"
The slip of paper was pushed back across the table, in my direction. "You've got your first task already."
"Are you joking?" I asked, crossing my arms. "I was the one who came up with the idea. If anything, you should be the one doing it, and I should escape."
"Hey, now, Mia," he said jokingly, "that's not in the spirit of the game. It's for charity."
"So..." The word trailed off into an ominous pause, and I could tell he knew what was coming. "According to those rules, it sounds like we're both in this."
A look caught somewhere between horror and disbelief crossed his face. "You're saying I have to dye my hair purple."
"Hey," I said, "you're the one who agreed. We're in it together."
He looked like he was about to protest, but soon thought better of it, closing his mouth in a way that vaguely resembled a goldfish. A moment of silence lapsed between us, broken only by the sounds of the final few stragglers across the other side of the common room, departing for their weekend break. "Okay," he said eventually, "but we better win the prize for this."
I smiled sweetly, torn between excitement and fear for what awaited us next week. "We will," I told him, pulling the box back toward me. "I'll make sure of it."
***
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
The note of apprehension in Alex's voice did not, to say the least, fill either of us with confidence. The two of us were sitting in his upstairs bathroom, his head tipped back into the sink after a round of rock-paper-scissors had not left luck on his side. I picked up the torn-open packet of supermarket dye we'd picked up on the way home from school, studying the instructions for the fiftieth time.
"Of course," I lied, though I still couldn't work out what they were trying to tell me. "Looks easy enough."
His golden blonde hair splayed out over the white sink. Never before had I taken notice of what a pretty colour it was - and in a matter of seconds, I could potentially ruin it for good. Was it me, or was the pressure suddenly on?
Below me, Alex squeezed his eyes tight shut, bracing himself for what was to come. "Just do it," he said. "I can't bear to watch the process. It's way too painful. Let's get this over with."
"Uh..." I took another worried glance at the instructions. "Okay."
Maybe confidence was key. That was, at least, what I tried to tell myself as I pulled the plastic gloves over my fingers, wondering how best to tackle the task. His hair was short, so that should make things easier, right? Less ground to cover. Think positive, Mia.
And it wasn't so bad. Once I got started, the task became less daunting, and I realised the instructions had been a real over-complication. Alex's hair was soon plastered with what could only be described as purple goop, and for the ten minutes it had to stay there, he seemed to relax a little.
It was only when the timer went off, and I reached for the shower head to begin rinsing, did things start to go wrong.
"Uh..."
It was the only word I could manage as purple water drained down the plughole, freed from Alex's hair.
His eyes snapped open at once. "What? I don't like the sound of that."
"Nothing," I assured him, though the flash of panic in my face was probably a dead giveaway. I kept the water running through his hair, hoping it would fix itself, but with the bulk of the dye gone the problem was no longer so well-masked. "It's fine."
"It's clearly not fine," he insisted. "I can tell by your voice. What have you done?"
When I didn't say anything, Alex batted me away, lifting his head from the sink and turning towards the bathroom mirror. There were a couple of seconds of tense silence, in which my breath seemed to catch in my throat, before his eyes met mine.
"Mia!"
The force of his voice had me fighting the urge to take a step backward. "What?"
"I thought you said you knew what you were doing!"
"Well..." His glare intensified, and I realised I wasn't getting away without an excuse. "I may have been less confident than I let on," I said eventually. "It looked like I got it all! I'm sorry."
I'd learnt one thing: short hair did not make things easier. Short hair only made it harder to cover all ground with purple goop - which was why Alex's hair was now half-blonde, streaked by purple stripes like some kind of odd zebra.
"Are you joking?" he said, still staring at his reflection in anguish. "I look like an idiot."
"Hey, maybe we should look on the bright side." I tried my best to sound optimistic, but this was difficult when I thought Alex might pounce any minute. "We might get more donations for stripes."
He turned to me, gaze catching momentarily on the opened dye packet balanced on the sink. Then, the faintest hint of a smile twitched the corner of his lip. "Your turn now," he said rather ominously. "Maybe I'll get my own back."
The last thing I wanted to do was let Alex loose on my own hair. But with the agreement still bound between us, and guilt still washing over me with his ridiculously striped hair, there was nothing I could do but lower myself into the seat and brace myself for what was to come.