Beautiful People
three hundred or something? I hear that's the normal minimum. Tania Whyte-Oliphant was telling me yesterday that Ariadne—she's the part-time model, going to Cambridge—has over six-hundred friends on Facebook! And Eliza Cocke-Roche gets poked over a thousand times a day!"
        "Mum!" Orlando would groan. He absolutely didn't care about Facebook. But he did care about his mother, and to see her stooping to such levels was far more distressing than his cyber-unpopularity…
        Facebook, however, had been the first indicator of his recently altered status. Some time before he grasped the extent to which his looks had changed, Orlando was puzzled to find that his inbox was suddenly full of people proposing themselves as cyber-acquaintances. None of them were middle-aged women either.
        From having ten friends, Orlando suddenly began to find he had twenty, then fifty, then a hundred, then hundreds and hundreds. Most of them were girls. Some he knew: girls from his own school, sisters of his school friends, girls in the sixth form. But many, many, he didn't. He had scrolled through, dumbfounded. There was page after page after page of them, some extremely pretty, with long blonde hair and big pink smiles. Others smouldered from behind black tresses. All seemed to be staring at him expectantly. Orlando was scared of all of them. What did they want?
        As the numbers spiraled towards the thousand mark, Orlando stopped going online, terrified of his mother seeing the hugely increased figures. Her excitement would have been excruciating.
        "Aren't you a bit old for this?" Georgie was gesturing at the television, where a giant purple cat was demonstrating how to make pineapple-topped pizza.
        "Yes," Orlando agreed readily. He had no idea why he was watching it either. He had a vague inkling that the world of children appealed to him more and more as he got older and the pressures of adulthood revealed themselves. But he could not have said this to his mother, nor would she have wanted to hear it.
        Neither had he said to his mother that a model agency had approached him. This was because he could easily picture her indignation—with him. So desperate was Georgie for him to be a success at something that she would have phoned Wild up on the spot and offered his services.
        As Orlando reached his late teens, the fact that he was less and less the child his mother had hoped for was becoming more and more obvious. Of course, he loved her—as he did his father—very much, and he knew that she loved him. But he also knew that she found him annoying. As she saw it, Orlando knew, he resolutely refused to make the most—or indeed, anything—of the opportunities she lavished on him. While Orlando, although he tried to feel grateful, was increasingly, bleakly aware that he had not wanted these opportunities in the first place.
        The expensive private school, for which his parents had scrimped and saved to send him, was the most glaring illustration of this. It maddened Georgie that the only determination Orlando had shown in regard to Heneage's was in relentlessly not trying to become friends with the sons and daughters of what his mother called the movers and shakers.
        "You never get asked to anyone's house for the weekend," Georgie wailed at one particularly frustrated moment.
        Actually, he often got asked these days, but he was careful to make sure his mother did not know he had refused. The frantic, competitive social fray revolving around whose smart house everyone else was staying at in the holidays—or which festival in the grounds of whose grandparents' castle everyone was heading to with their tents and Temperley party dresses—filled him with horror.
        He was not academically gifted either and was further hampered in success of this nature by what had been diagnosed as borderline dyslexia and by more than borderline lack of interest in either the

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