They’d found an Army Surplus store. Even the fact that it didn’t offer a student discount hadn’t deterred Esther from purchasing half the stock. Struggling back to their hall, she was weighed down with bags stuffed with a rifleman’s jacket, desert boots, and weird strapping and belts and holsters with which she’d said she would modify some of the more tired items in her substantial wardrobe.

Susan was wearing a grotty arctic jacket and carrying a single expensively branded bag containing towels so luxuriously thick that they could have doubled as a mattress.

“Can’t you at least give me a hand?” Esther said, dropping her bags for a moment and staring at her bloodless fingers while they waited for the traffic light to change.

“No. I said I wouldn’t help you back in the shop, and I am a woman of my word—”

But Susan’s sanctimonious sentence was cut short when Esther body-slammed her into a bush. As Susan fell awkwardly, protecting her towels while spitting and cursing, Esther peered out between autumn-sparse fronds at something up ahead.

“There she is . . .”

“Who?” Susan hated whoever she was without even having set eyes on her.

“The Goth Girl,” Esther breathed, her whole face as reverent as if she’d seen a dark angel. “Look at her.”

“Thought I already was.” Susan shot a wry look in Esther’s direction before following her gaze.

She knew who Esther meant the second she saw her. Shorter even than Susan but delicate, like a twiggy little doll. The enormous headphones that rested around her neck looked especially out of proportion on someone that petite. She was walking with a group of smiling girls, all of whom chattered brightly while Goth Girl’s face remained impassive, a marble statue amid a flock of starlings. She had a permafrost expression and a pinched, pretty little mouth pursed in a perfect purple cupid’s bow.

“Why are we hiding from someone you want to be friends with?” Susan asked, starting to stand up. “We could just go and talk to her.”

“One does not simply approach a dark goddess!” Esther hissed, yanking Susan back into the bush. “Not looking like this.”

Susan cast a critical eye over Esther in an attempt to see what was wrong, but she looked as effortlessly chic as Susan did disheveled. It was like seeing a single beautiful bloom shying away from the sunlight.

“You look perfectly glorious. As always.”

“To you . . .” Esther said dismissively.

Smothering a twinge of hurt, Susan waited until Esther’s quarry was farther away before emerging from the foliage. Not bothering to say anything, she trudged toward Catterick Hall, regretting she’d ever mentioned that she needed a coat.