She drinks water from the tap and then sits on the toilet to have a wee. She feels too bad to care that there’s no lock on the door. The house is quiet anyway. It feels like early morning. If people are awake, they’re downstairs. The loud music has gone.

Knickers round her knees, she wonders why the seams of her blood-stained pants are wrong. They’re facing outwards. The label at the back is hanging into space behind the waistband of her soft pink cotton knickers. Why has she done this? Was she so drunk that she took them off to wee and put them back on the wrong way round?

She stands and takes off her pants, then nearly trips in the leg holes. She starts turning them back the right way but even with her eyes half-closed, focusing on trying not to be sick, she notices that something is not right. There is a whiteness mixed in with the blood in the crotch area.

She cannot believe it. It cannot be right.

She crouches a little and pushes a finger into her vagina, which feels sore, then examines it. Amidst the blood smell of iron is the chlorinous smell of semen. It’s not new to her. She had given Dave Lowden a hand-job at the Spring Ball and afterwards wiped away the rest of it in a toilet cubicle and, curious and unwatched, smelt it, just so she knew.

But how is that here?

She throws up. She vomits green bile and pale liquid onto the tiled floor, then retches and retches.

Where is Scott and did he do this to her?

She does not remember anyone doing anything to her and this is the moment she knows she did not dress inside out.

She would never choose to turn herself inside out.

She holds the pants, still half inside out – at a distance, as if they are someone else’s entrails.

She lowers herself to the floor, cowers, curls into a ball, hiding herself from the reflection in the mirror, afraid to see how much of her has been lost, taken.

And then she loses more: over and over, vomiting onto the bathroom floor. She is all the colours of the rainbow, what with the pearlescent-white semen and rose-red blood and infected green bile and girly pink scraped skin. All the colours of the rainbow, and yet none of them.