Hannah and Cate do not, this first day, put up their hands. They watch each other like snipers, each waiting for the other to make the first move. When the poem has been (badly, haltingly) read out loud by someone else, Miss Riley lifts her face to her class.

“Right then. Cate? Can you tell me what this poem is about?”

She is not particularly pretty, Hannah thinks, this girl who got a full 5 percent more than her or anyone in the English exam—97 percent. She has a round face. In an era in which girls wear their socks scrunched around their ankles, and hoist their skirts above the regulation height, Cate wears her skirt at the ordinary length. Her hair is cut to just above her shoulders and she is a little bit overweight. But she has something about her that Hannah doesn’t have the words for, something going on under the surface, some force.

“It’s about love,” says Cate. “And losing that love. He loves his wife and she’s gone.”

“Good. Anything else?”

Hannah raises her hand. Her hand feels hot.

“Yes, Hannah?”

“She’s dead,” she says.

“How can you tell?”

“She’s dissolved to wan wistlessness. Heard no more again far or near. She’s a ghost.”

“Yes.”

“But he’s feeling bad. He’s feeling guilty about something. You can tell by the meter, by the way it stumbles, changes in the last stanza. It doesn’t end well.”

“Excellent!” Miss Riley beams.

And Cate, from the other side of the room, stares at this triumphant girl, her long dark hair, her eyes intent, like a bird’s.

The game is on: from that day forth they are locked in vicious, ecstatic rivalry.

After a certain time has elapsed—half a year or so—they go on a school trip together and end up sitting side by side on the bus on the way to Styal Mill. They get along surprisingly well. The next weekend Hannah stuns Cate with an invitation to tea, and Cate surprises Hannah by accepting.

Hannah’s house is small, a semi-detached in a public housing area off the Parrs Wood Road. It has a long garden in the back. It still has a door between the tiny kitchen and the dining room, through which Hannah’s mum passes oven-baked fries and Angel Delight. Hannah’s room is tiny—smaller than her brother James’s even though he is younger. The injustice of this makes Hannah fulminate.

Her parents go to church and Hannah is expected to go too, every Sunday morning. She often takes books to read during the sermon. After she tells Cate this, Cate lends her a copy of Forever by Judy Blume, covered in William Morris wallpaper and made to look like an innocuous book of poems. I’ve turned down the corners of the good parts, she says.

Next Sunday, while the minister drones on, Hannah opens it and reads: