Rose is there, feet up, her coat pulled under her bum.

Alisha’s lunch is a Mars Bar and a coffee. She’s trying to lose weight. Not really trying, not like the girls who wear gym gear and talk about spinning. But trying. And any other day Dillon would have shared his chips with her.

Rose has a McDonald’s on her lap. Alisha sits down next to her.

Rose stiffens slightly, but carries on eating.

Alisha is intrigued at first to see someone so skinny eating so much, but then she turns away. It’s hard to put a finger on, but the way Rose looks at her food, the way she holds her chips, even the way she sits, make Alisha uncomfortable.

But she’s finished now. She folds her rubbish up and holds it in one bony hand.

‘Is Dillon OK?’ Rose asks. Her voice is quiet, careful, slow to the point of sounding stupid.

‘He’s gone to the hospital.’ Alisha looks at the folded packet of rubbish and wishes she’d had a Maccy D’s. ‘He’s not dying or anything, but he might have broken his arm.’

‘What was it all about?’

‘Reece being a prick,’ she says. ‘Dillon and Callum got into something yesterday, and Reece wanted to act the big man.’

Alisha remembers how she and Oni used to say Rose stank. She did, too. They would spray Rose with Impulse and piss themselves with laughter. Rose never reacted. She wasn’t reacting much now, either.

Alisha’s eyes narrow. ‘Do you like him?’ she asks. She thinks she can detect a glow beginning to spread across the girl’s pale cheeks.

‘Do you like Dillon?’ Alisha insists.

Rose’s face is still, so still that it seems like an effort of will.

‘Do you want me to say something to him?’ Alisha asks. There’s a gentleness to her tone that even she wasn’t expecting.

Rose’s fingers move over the little packet of rubbish in her hands, making a faint rustling noise. She shakes her head, but slowly.

Someone calls, ‘Rose?’

The lady from the Media Studies talk is there. She’s taller than she seemed in the classroom. She’s wearing a coat now, a long, elegant coat that hangs down to her well-turned ankles and polished heels. In the classroom, Alisha thought she was weird looking, but now, in the open air, her full, careful face seems younger and kinder. Under the indoor lights you couldn’t help noticing how her lipstick didn’t quite seem to match the shape of her lips, but here you just saw the red line around her white teeth as she smiled.

‘It is Rose, isn’t it? I saw your work on the wall. It was just fantastic.’

Her voice is amazing. It sounds like fruit.

‘You’ve got real talent,’ she says to Rose. The words stretch at odd places. There’s a hiss of saliva behind them. Alisha now wonders if the woman is drunk.