She sits up and tries to swallow, but without enough saliva the movement hurts her throat. She feels around the sore edges of her mouth with a dry tongue. Next an aching pressure down the length of her spine – the way she had been sleeping, perhaps. Bolsters herself with both hands, legs out straight. For a moment she feels little and young, like a child in ballet class doing the exercise with toes pointed up, toes pointed down – good toes, naughty toes, good toes, naughty toes.

It is then that she feels something warm escape from between her thighs. She looks under the pink coverlet, too dark to see though. She feels afraid and ashamed at the thought that perhaps she has wet herself or, worse, is spilling dark menstrual blood onto their beautiful covers. She thinks this is the worst she will feel, she does, so appalled at the thought of soiling other people’s things she tears pillowslip from pillow and rams it between her legs, eyes filling with tears at the thought of a parent’s reaction to such damage. Injury, accident or stupidity?

She gets out of the bed and staggers stiff-legged past the walk-in wardrobe where she had spent half the night with Scott. He was fun. That was nice. Now she feels like shit. She goes into the bathroom: towels rippled in piles on the floor, bottles knocked over.

Faced with a full-length mirror now, a ceiling light illuminating her naked white legs, she stands pale in her pink cotton pants and T-shirt. She doesn’t remember undressing. She doesn’t remember leaving the wardrobe. There is an angry smear of blood down her thigh almost to her knee, some dark, some fresh, it has moved like a slow and quiet river out of her. She swallows, digesting this violent image of blood against skin where previously there had only been sun cream and chlorine.

Her thoughts snag and begin sifting back through time. It hadn’t been that long since her last period, a week or so at most. A family lunch, old friends, she’d played Happy Families with the child closest her age, then visited the toilet. How silly she’d been not to bring sanitary towels, couldn’t find anything in the cupboards, had to make do with a rolled bunch of rough recycled toilet paper. And now her body is bleeding again and there is obviously something wrong with her stupid body that it is bleeding again so quickly.

Then she sees a red mark across her ribs like a cat has clawed at her, and she has to step forward to examine herself closer in the mirror just to check it isn’t crayon or pen. It doesn’t wipe away and she wonders why. Part of a game with Scott, perhaps.