Did you have sex with someone you knew? Do you know for sure that something was stolen and not simply lost? Making an accusation? That’s someone’s life you’re playing with!

But whose life? And what will become of her life?

Even if she goes to a police station she will not be able to answer a single question: no who or when or how. She does not know anything. She can guess, but she does not know. Not for sure.

And if she reported it, and the story got out? Slag and slut is what they would say of her in the corridors at school. They would say they saw what she wore that night, that they saw the look on her face and heard the game she was playing, all that time, behind closed wardrobe doors.

Bringing it on herself, the slag.

Making it happen, the slut.

She arrives home, and takes a hot shower, and then goes to bed, where she cannot sleep.

After midday, Mary texts her to report that she and Brendan had sex and to ask where Becky got to. Was it Scott??!!

She lies under the covers and feels a dull ache somewhere in her arm. She holds her hand up to the light and sees that a chaotic line of fingerprint bruises has appeared round the top of her wrist, like a bracelet of small grey pebbles.

Was it Scott? Becky asks herself. Was it Scott?

She holds her wrist lightly, covering the pebble shapes with her hand and fingers. Closes her eyes but she still can’t sleep. It is like there is a high-voltage buzz in her head. She feels high, like adrenaline is making her alert to everything.

She draws her hand into her stomach and curls round it, and soon enough she falls asleep this way.

When she wakes into another day, in some ways nothing has changed. There are no new facts or anything like that.

But she remembers it as a new formulation now: I passed out and while I was unconscious somebody stripped off my clothes and had sex with me and then put my pants back on me and then left.

The numbness of shock has gone. Now the blame burns a boulder-sized hole into the middle of her.

Some weeks later, when she’s back at school, Becky runs into Scott in an empty corridor. He is in front of her before she is even aware of him. He smiles at her.

‘I heard about this,’ he says, indicating her stomach. ‘That’s a pretty huge thing.’

She pushes past him without replying. He tries to catch her arm and she evades it. She spends an hour shaking in the girls’ toilets.