“Here you go.” Susan pressed a blister pack into Esther’s palm. Had it really been worth Susan jeopardizing her degree for this? Worth another woman’s good health?

“Susan,” Esther croaked. “Did you just aid and abet Walters’s next heroin session?”

Daisy gasped in alarm. “Susan!”

“What are you going on about?”

“The syringes . . .” Esther mimed rolling her sleeve up and injecting something, eyes rolling back for effect.

Her charade was met with a burst of laughter. “Penny Walters? A junkie? She volunteers at a hedgehog rescue center. They use syringes for feeding the babies.”

“But the pills . . .”

Susan clamped a hand on each of her friends’ shoulders, steering them toward the entrance to the medical school.

“I put a call out on the phase 1 group chat asking if anyone else used Microgynon 30 and if I could have a pack. It’s not been filched from Family Planning or anything.”

“Do you have any more of those syringes?” Daisy asked. “They might be handy for Baby Gordon.”

The medical school canteen had the same whiff of industrialized catering about it as the dining hall in Catterick Hall, but Susan assured them the food was better—she was positively evangelical about the potato wedges.

“So . . . better than halls, then?” Esther teased.

“Believe me, there’s no way I’d be able to eat that crap for three meals a day. I’d make a sandwich or something.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Esther said with complete conviction. “You’d find some unsuspecting sap and steal their lunch instead.”

“You make me sound like a bully.”

“That makes it sound like it’s not true.”

“Daisy!” Susan reeled her into the conversation. “Tell Esther I’m not a bully.”

“Well . . .”

“Say it! ‘Susan Ptolemy is not a bully.’”

But someone from three places down in the queue leaned out and said, “You took my phone and deleted the number of the guy who’d sent me a photo of his penis.”

“That penis was diseased. And unsolicited,” Susan protested.

“Did you say Susan Ptolemy?” came a shout from a few paces back. “She spent the whole of Introduction to Embryology flicking me in the back of the head with a rubber band because I’d accidentally mistaken her for my friend Matt.”

“Hey!” A shorter, slightly swarthy, mop-topped young man wearing a red-checked shirt scowled up at him. “I look nothing like her!”

“She dumped a bottle of water over my head.”

“Your hair was on fire!”

“She told me I looked like my face had athlete’s foot.”

“I said you should see a doctor!”

“She made me repeat to my reflection that I have terrible taste in men and deserve better.”

“How is that bullying?!”

“There, there.” Esther put a condescending arm over Susan’s shoulders. “It can’t be easy admitting I’m right.”