We’re talking so much that we miss the discussion about the wonders of renewable energy which means that I will almost certainly fail next week’s test, but I’m struggling to give even half a shit because I want to ask her everything. I know that her name is Poppy Morgan and she’s sixteen, like me, and she’s just started at Roedean after being kicked out of another super-posh boarding school called Wycombe Abbey. I know that she likes to twist her ponytail around her hand when she talks, that she presses her lips together when she’s thinking and that she’s OK with open water, but she doesn’t like heights.

It’s not enough, though. I want to know if she has any brothers or sisters and what her favourite song is so I can go home and listen to it on repeat, but it’s all so perfect. It feels like she and I are encased in a soap bubble that will pop if I am foolish enough to do anything to disturb it.

So I don’t say a word, painfully aware that a clock is ticking somewhere as the shoreline gets closer and closer, and it’s like I’m floating, like I’ve left my body and I’m looking down at us, standing on the deck on the boat and God, it’s perfect. The sky so big that I want to see every corner of it. I tell myself – beg myself, actually – not to overthink it. To just enjoy these last few moments, but the clock is tick, tick, ticking and the shoreline is getting closer and closer and I’m waiting. Waiting for the bubble to burst, because it always does.

She’s so near that I feel the heat of her next to me, and I warn myself not to make it more than it is. I haven’t done this often, but I’ve done it enough to know how this ends. All the girls in the rainbow T-shirts who kiss girls to impress boys but would die if anyone called them a dyke. The girls with the careless smiles and thirsty hearts who draw lines only they can see and move goalposts when I’m not looking. All those things said and unsaid, never to be spoken of again. All the times I said, ‘OK’ when I really wanted to say, ‘I don’t want to be friends.’