‘I’m sorry about this, Dillon,’ she says.

‘Can I go?’

She nods.

Two in the morning. Graeme can’t sleep.

He remembers being young. Not just remembers, but allows himself to feel it again. A kind of hopped-up, nervy excitement as you headed out. The sense of possibility, of danger without really understanding that danger could be real. The faces of the others – Ash, Frank, Alice, Paula Mason from two doors down. The taste of cigarettes, of weed, of cheap vodka. And laughter.

They laughed so much. Someone splutters over a drink. Someone mispronounces a word. A tampon drops out of a bag. Stupid stuff. But at the time, half pissed, stoned, they creased up. They collapsed in hysterics. It was brilliant.

Graeme can feel it in his bones, surging back through the years. It was his first world, his best world. Nothing else was real. These people were everything, and to miss one night, or to be pushed away from the magic circle, was intolerable.

There was plenty in between. The damp waiting. The conversations that don’t spark. The bit where you hang around with the one in the group that you’re a bit scared of. The tap out of powder on a hand and the pounding thrill of fear in your chest. It was real, and scary, and looking back, for some of them it was the start of something going very wrong.

But then, on those few nights, those special nights, you do more than laugh. You cry out at the moon and shriek your love for the others. You kiss and hug, and feel the dirt and the rawness of it.

Ash was the queen of it all. When she smiled it was adulthood beckoning. She was experienced. Everyone said so. She was tough. She was old, even though she was only sixteen.

Graeme screws his eyes shut, panic rising inside him.

Driving. Rose shifts smoothly.

‘Well done,’ Graeme says. He watches the road, alert for dangers Rose might have missed.

‘Left,’ he says. ‘Good.’

They’re circling the roundabouts at the edge of the industrial estate. The roads are barely used and empty. The sky is grey.

‘Right.’

The car turns. She’s wearing the halterneck. Her arms are like her mother’s.

‘Right.’

In the photos, she jumps, lies, pouts.

‘Left.’

The car turns.

‘Pull in.’

The car stops.

Rose turns to him. He keeps his eyes on the smooth road ahead, the rough verge. He knows he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t quite know what.

‘You know,’ he starts.

But he gets no further.

Really, it’s Ash he wants to speak to. He wants to say sorry. He wants to say that he knows now that she was not who he thought she was.

He lowers his head forward into his hands.

‘What?’

He doesn’t look up at first.

‘Should I go home?’

He sits up. Shakes his head.

‘What’s the matter?’

He looks at her.

‘You need to watch out,’ he says, clumsily.