His face is pale and alert.

Outside, the shouts are already fading. Schools are places of aching sadness, Paula thinks. Sometimes she can’t bear it.

She looks at Dillon. His anger is wavering. She catches a thought, the faintest of intuitions.

‘You can’t blame yourself, Dillon.’ She feels the delicate touch of possibility. ‘And you can’t blame Rose either.’

At her name his pale cheeks flush a bright pink.

‘People talk for all sorts of reasons. It’s rarely malicious.’ She pauses, carefully holding in her amusement. Maybe she can bear it a little longer. ‘Sometimes people just want to impress their friends.’

As she drives home, Paula watches the white line in the middle tick away. She imagines veering slowly over. She imagines the crash.

She won’t do it.

She thinks of Dillon. He’s the age Finn would have been. She thinks of his broadening shoulders, his confident walk.

She’ll run when she gets home.

In February, Alisha and Dillon decide that enough is enough, and they should just go out with each other. They kiss, and one night, round at Alisha’s house when her parents are away, they get as far as Alisha reaching into Dillon’s trousers. Only he flinches when she touches him, and then she catches his eye and collapses into giggles, and the experiment fails.

They get stoned instead, wrapped in blankets, smoking carefully out of the open window.

After some time, Alisha leans over to him.

‘I wish I could go out with you.’

Dillon giggles. ‘We just tried that.’

She shakes her head. ‘I know. I just wish it worked.’

Dillon looks at her. He knows her so well now. He remembers when he watched her walk through the woods in front of him, and she seemed so exotic, untouchable. Now she’s just his friend.

He tips his head back and groans theatrically.

‘Hey,’ she says. She pokes him.

‘It’s fucking depressing,’ he says. His head is fogged. He’s unsure whether he means it. But he does mean it. ‘Girls say they like you, but as a friend, and what they mean is they don’t want to fuck you.’

‘Hey!’ she says, louder. ‘That was mutual, you prick!’

They settle into companionable silence.

‘You don’t, though, do you?’ he says, after a while.

‘What?’

‘Want to fuck me.’

‘No.’

The air is cold. Through the window, they can see the deep black shadows of the trees, and through their bare branches, stars.

Somehow it seems that anything is permissible, now.

‘Do you miss Jack?’ he asks.

‘I’m not sorry to never see him again.’ She seems like she’s going to say something else, for a second, but no.

‘What’s the connection?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why are you asking about Jack?’ Her eyes narrow.

Dillon shrugs. ‘He never got stuck in the friendzone.’