I smile and wave goodbye as Troy turns up after all. It’s easy to see him coming because he’s much taller than everyone else and has bright red hair. I always grin at the sight of him. He said once that he knows he looks like an illustration of a cheeky boy from a children’s book, and he does a bit, but that doesn’t keep model-agency people from stopping him in the street. He’s a quarter Dutch, and reckons that’s why he’s so tall.

‘Wazzup?’ he says. ‘And what are you doing chatting to that old perv?’ I’m so glad Troy isn’t pissed off that I laugh a bit too hysterically.

‘He is not a perv!’ I manage to say. ‘He’s a nice old man. He was married for years. I bet he’d only perv at girls.’

‘Yeah?’

‘He wanted to give me his French money.’

‘Old man offers teenager money on a street corner?’

I know I should give him back that trophy right now. I want to do it, but maybe he hasn’t even noticed it’s gone, and then he starts talking French, so I go with that instead. Troy is brilliant at French. He’ll be fine with his host family. He can’t wait to go.

It takes about fifteen minutes to get to school. Troy makes me laugh all the way. We talk about France, and wonder whether we’ll have to eat frogs’ legs. I feel myself coming back.

‘Remember when we caught that frog on the playing field?’ he asks. ‘At primary school?’

‘We tried to use it to scare the girls,’ I say, remembering. ‘But they thought it was cute.’

‘They made it a hat out of a leaf and called it Froggykins.’

We gather more hangers-on as we walk, like people in a musical, but without the part where we burst into song and dance. By the time we get to school our crowd has dissolved into the tide of teens going into the building.

Lucas comes over to me, as usual. He was new last year, and he tries so hard to be my friend that I can’t help taking the piss. I’m tall, and Troy’s taller, but Lucas is massive. There was a story a while ago about a thirty-year-old who went back to school, pretending to be sixteen, and got away with it for ages: that feels like Lucas to me. Troy and I are kind of skinny, but Lucas is built like a shed. He doesn’t look like a teenager. He makes me feel uncomfortable.

‘All right?’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘Shame you’re not coming on the French trip,’ I say, laughing as I speak because he knows as well as I do that I don’t think that.

‘Yeah,’ he says again. ‘Too expensive. Dommage.’