Then she stops, and the high lasts for a bit, but she needs to stretch carefully, and she finds the fantasy of strength creaking into stiffness, and she goes in to Andy and a bath.

On the day they return to school, Media is first lesson, and Rose is there. She wears new jeans and a halterneck top. Her shoulders jut out surprisingly, and she looks a bit chilly, but the main thing everyone notices is that her hair is different. It changes her completely. The style is similar, long and straight, but it has somehow been cut in a way that makes it a hairstyle, rather than just hair. And it’s clean. It shines.

Dillon didn’t expect her. He’s seen photos of her online and in a magazine that everyone shared round. There was a story about her – a small one – about the girl who had been found and signed after an Instagram post. When he read it, he felt a pang of loss or of foolishness. It seemed to him like he could have been going out with a model now if he had played his cards right. He didn’t, or couldn’t, name the deeper current of feeling. It swirled around, a mixture of self-denial, self-disgust and relief.

He’d seen the other photos too. Badly photoshopped. Shaved, slick, lips peeled back, tits hard and high and round, then above, her face. They were lies, but they didn’t feel like outright lies. They felt like a fear made flesh, a fear of hard, careless sex and women, better than you, who might laugh at you.

Even when she smiles on a spot cream advert, or laughs at a mobile phone, she seems now like she might laugh at him.

He says hi to her in the Media lesson, then sits far away. He can see her hair. Relief is what he feels, mostly.

They are at the timber yard. It was Jack’s idea. He knows the combination for the padlock and how to accidentally knock the CCTV camera on the way out of work so it misses everything. He lights the brazier, pulls off-cut stumps round for seats. Everyone’s there. It starts with a few of them, but Callum messages someone, and then more come, and Jack is too drunk to worry by the time he notices there are fifty people there.

‘Fuck it,’ he says to Callum. ‘The buildings are all locked up.’

People from town are there, and people from sixth form. Tinny speaker music fills the circle of warmth. Some people are dancing. Someone has made a bong. People pass a bottle of vodka, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Dillon is there with Alisha. She’s offered him a pill. He doesn’t want it.

Yannis is there. Ceri is with him. She leans into him. He has an arm round her. He fingered her by the chain-link fence before they came in.