Most days she wears the same jeans. They fit her, falling easily into the same folds, smelling comfortably of herself. They feel like part of her, like a skin, but a skin that protects. There’s a tool on Photoshop where you can feather – where you can make the edges of an image blur so it doesn’t seem so sharply cut out. Her clothes, her habits, they all blur her into the world, letting her fade into the background.

Only now her edges are sharp. The skin of her clothes is one that reveals instead of protects. Her T-shirt contains the ghost of that dress, her jeans the echo of her bare legs. People are looking at her in a way that she can’t control. She can feel the eyes on her, probing for things she didn’t mean, and can’t see. Touching her like cold air on bare skin.

When she thinks of it, a caffeinated thrill runs through her, unsettling and exciting.

Rose comes back to school on Friday. She leans against the low wall by the gate. Normally she would have gone in and sat down, but she doesn’t want to go into the café.

Leaning against the wall feels odd, though. She doesn’t know how the girl in the photo would lean.

Behind her, on the other side of the fence, the younger kids zip and shriek around the yard. Sixth formers wander up from the road, buzz in at the side gate.

They look at her as they pass.

She keeps her eyes down. Then she thinks they’re staring, and she knows she should look up.

‘Hi.’

Yannis has stopped.

‘How was London?’

His face is lopsided with a serious yet charming expression – wry, but humble.

‘Good,’ says Rose. He looks weird, she thinks. This is weird, she thinks.

She smiles uneasily, and then stops as he grins at her, a flash of teeth and an appreciative crinkle of the eyes. ‘I saw!’

She holds her face steady.

As he goes, she has a sensation of floating, the dip and lift of the stomach as a rollercoaster passes the slow peak of its climb and tips with sudden dizzying glee into the loop.

‘Rose!’

She snaps her head round, the swirl in her stomach tipping again.

‘You go girl!’ says Ceri, enfolding her in a hug.

Her hair is in Rose’s face. It smells of coconut. The rollercoaster dips and swoops.

Ceri releases. ‘That photo is amazing!’

Rose smiles again, tentatively. Rose waits, holding it. Ceri reaches out to give her a brief touch on the arm, another flash of teeth, and then she’s gone.

Rose waits, in case she’s coming back. She can still smell the coconut on her cheek. She feels unstable, as though she might really be Ceri instead of Rose.

‘What a cunt.’