‘What did one butt cheek say to the other?’ he shouts.

‘I don’t know,’ says Rose.

‘If we stick together we can stop this shit!’

Aaron cackles, a high, raw, dizzy sound that spills out of his slight frame. He’s so skinny you can clearly see where the skull dips in at his temples.

‘Good one,’ says Rose. She smiles at him.

Aaron falls silent, a look of wonder at the brilliance of that joke still on his face.

Rose switches feet again. Through the window she can see glimpses of her mother, a heel, the edge of a red coat as she rounds an aisle. When she dresses up like this, she seems like a different person.

At home, they have a magazine. Rose reads it, every night. She always looks on the back cover first. The girl there is long limbed, red hooded. Beside her a wolf, sleek, pale eyed. Trees, fingering the darkness, and a moon, a penny dropped on black velvet. She has a dream that feels like the picture, a dream of night as thick and rich as chocolate.

The shop door slams.

‘Rose!’

Her mother’s voice hisses in her ear. She feels thin fingers grip her cheek and then they press something in at her mouth. For a moment she smells the sour faggy musk of her mother’s unwashed hands, and then the sugar hits, a bright, glorious fizz of cola.

‘Now, quick.’

Aaron jumps up and runs off ahead. Rose hurries after him in her stockinged feet. Her mouth is filled with saliva. She feels light and dizzy. She thinks that there has never been a better taste in all the world.

‘Did you get them?’ she shouts back to her mother.

‘Yes!’

Rose runs faster, lighter, the balls of her feet aching.

That’s how it starts. It’s always the same. There are rules, and when you break them, somewhere out there in the forest the wolf pricks up his ears, and the story begins.

‌Rags

Three years later.

Beyond the end of the estate is the bridge. Where the bridge crosses the river, the path passes under the arch. When spring comes, when they are fourteen, this is where Alisha teaches Dillon to smoke.

Dillon takes the cigarette from the packet. He holds it tentatively between his finger and thumb. His face is white and round, pasty pale and featureless with youth. His eyes are pale too, a soft grey under faded blond eyebrows.

Oni laughs. ‘It won’t bite,’ she says.

Oni’s face is also plump and young, but she is as black as he is white, a proper rich blue-black. Alisha is somewhere in between, dark with fake tan and foundation, her eyelashes heavy, false and beautiful.

Alisha takes the cigarette off him. She puts it between her shiny lips and lights it. Her cheeks suck in.

‘Here,’ she says.

The end of the cigarette is on fire. Dillon can see the smoke.