Becky goes to the GP surgery to get her results, alone. Just her and the doctor in his airless, disinfectant-scented, steel-and-chipped-Formica office. The words bend her reality. She thinks that she is losing her mind and that she is instead simply sitting in a maths lesson, studying a Venn diagram of symptoms for depression and pregnancy, looking where the circles bisect. Depression is the blue circle, pregnancy is the red circle, and there she is, all mixed up in the middle, as purple as a bruise.

Then, she cries a lot.

Time slips past her. The abortion clinic judges that she is well past twenty-four weeks pregnant. They offer to try to make an exception for her but they need to confer with their lawyers. She never goes back. She can’t talk to anyone.

In the end, Adam is the first person she tells about what is growing inside her. He hasn’t stopped coming round to her house, asking to see her, even though she always says no. Mary gave up weeks ago.

Adam holds her in his arms, asking nothing of her, simply being her friend.

Soon after, like it has been biding its time, waiting to be brought out into the open, the size and shape of Becky’s body betrays her and she becomes the example to be avoided, the beaming red sign for how wrong things can go.

People give her a wide berth in the school corridor, like she’s got a contagious illness.

Adam walks her to and from school and holds back her hair when she is sick on her shoes outside the school gates.

Sometimes he says that if she ever wants to talk, then he is there for her.

At home she eats very little and then goes straight to bed and watches television. It’s easy at first, when her dad isn’t talking to her and her mum is smoking a lot at the kitchen table. Becky just has to endure the times between when her dad makes tea and leaves the room, if she is in it, and the times he conveniently finishes eating as soon as she arrives at the table.

But it becomes less easy to shut herself away as her parents’ responses grow more vocal and persistent, like a cancer metastasizing. Her father, in particular, who has spent a lifetime calling pop stars and actresses in short skirts ‘harlots’ and ‘sluts’, becomes consumed with the idea of his daughter having underage sex as a leisure pursuit. He fills with rage and shouts things like: How could you be so irresponsible? Becky finds this response particularly unjust and excruciatingly painful, sinking further into a kind of listless, inward blame – the very worst form of rage. As if it wasn’t enough to watch her belly fill to the brim with her own shame, she has to add her father’s to the mix as well.