So she laughed. They all laughed. He said sorry. He said, Sorry, but you should have seen your face. She laughed, and hit him, a mock hit. He kissed her. But she messaged him later and told him to fuck off and die.

Alisha exhales. Jack’s arm is still around her.

‘Aaron!’ Rose’s face is silhouetted against the sky as she leans over the bridge, calling.

Aaron starts for the path. Callum reaches out a hand to stop him. His arm is broad. It surprises Alisha sometimes just how big boys can be.

‘Come down,’ Callum calls. Mocking.

Rose hangs, tentatively, waiting. The light behind her makes her neck thin and the head above it sway delicately.

Callum winks broadly at Jack.

‘Come down!’

The two of them stand, legs wide, teeth glinting.

Alisha steps towards Aaron, and tells him, ‘Just go.’

Aaron stumbles up the path.

Jack’s laugh is a sharp bark that echoes like a shot under the bridge.

It seems to Rose that she’d never seen herself before she came to stay at Graeme’s. She remembers staring in the bathroom mirror, her face framed by toothbrushes and the towel rack behind her. She would turn her head, and her eyes would stay still while the face shifted around them. She would rub her face in her hands, look close at the blackheads stippling across the bridge of her nose, the red in the corner of her eyeball, the flecks of plaque on her teeth. Her face was a map of textures, of contours, of felt experience. It wasn’t beautiful or ugly. Sometimes she pulled her lips back to see her teeth set into the bone of her jaw. She felt her eye socket, felt the bones of cheek and skull. She put a thumb under her chin to feel the gap behind the bone.

Sometimes she makes faces at herself in the mirror still. She looks at herself and tries to see past the gaze of her own eyes. Like she could trick herself and catch herself unawares, see herself like she was seeing a stranger. When she watches other people on the street, in school, their faces are self-contained, closed in on some kind of certainty. Their expressions are true and fluent, even when they conceal or lie. In the mirror, Rose is always haunted by the mocking conviction that she is faking it.

Here is another mirror, though. Graeme has printed it for her. A photo that fits her into the contours of a dress, a turn, two dark eyes thick with mascara and the props of a red carpet and a hashtag. And it looks like a stranger. It is a stranger.