I live in my head and my head is a torture chamber now. As much as I love everyone, my life has to stop because everything hurts too much. But the thing that scares me most, G, is that you are so like me. You want to be best at everything. You’re talking about doing medicine or maths at uni. You do the same stuff I used to do to stop Mum and Dad from killing each other. And, let’s be honest, you’ve even got a little crush on Zac :-)

PLEASE, think before you go on blindly like I did. Mum, Dad, Nan, school and everyone else will shower you with praise for working hard and aiming high. But at some point you need to stop. Ask yourself who Georgia is and what YOU really want to do.

In the end, I drove myself so hard for so long that I literally couldn’t see straight and wound up killing a thirty-eight-year-old boiler engineer with a pregnant girlfriend.

There’s nothing wrong with being great, but above all, be happy.

Massive love.

Sophie

XXX

Georgia had read the note a hundred times. She accidentally smudged butter on it, after which she photographed the letter on her phone and put the original in the envelope at the bottom of her desk, with her swimming certificates.

And she couldn’t do her history project. Georgia got out three different coloured Uni-ball pens and a new Rhodia pad to make reading notes. But the whole thing felt ridiculous.

Who gives a damn about Ancient Egyptian medicine?

Read it, remember it, write about it. And the next year you forget the lot and learn other random stuff to jump through the next set of hoops … It had all made sense. It had all been leading to something. Georgia had never known precisely what the something was, but she’d believed hard work and A-stars would take her to better places than the kids who got Bs and Cs and who didn’t volunteer, helping grannies in and out of the pool at the Old Ducks Aqua Club.

Dr Sophie Pack proved the argument, with her yellow Audi and the boyfriend who smelled like heaven. But the proof had agreed to donate her body to science when she started med school, so now Sophie had been stripped of heart valves, corneas and other useful tissues, and was lying in deep freeze, waiting to be a practice dummy for trainee surgeons.

Nothing had meaning as Georgia took the lid off her pen and doodled a giant nuclear mushroom cloud, with a bunch of little stick figures running away. Then she gave them speech bubbles. One asked, ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ while another said, ‘Honey, I have to go back – I think I left the iron on.’

Then Georgia sat facepalmed, hearing the washing machine and her parents bickering, until her dad yelled, ‘Food down here if you want it.’