I’m her good girl, good when I’m sweeping the food waste into the bin, good when I’m washing cups in the sink and burning myself on the water from the tap. I came home brandishing my exam results, Mum, Mum, look at this, and this, I feel sweaty just thinking about it, I fill the basin and start washing up, I played handball and took ballet lessons, went running on my days off from training, and in class I spoke up about politics and the EU and female inequality, and the boys groaned and said shut up, fucking hell, Ida, and so I was asked to give the end-of-term speech in ninth grade, in the gym hall in front of all of our parents and my class and the parallel class and the teachers and the headteacher. I spent weeks preparing, sitting up at night writing my speech, practising in front of the mirror, trembling whenever I looked myself in the eye, Ida, the grown-up. I was planning to say that our late teens lay ahead of us and the time had arrived to discover things and have experiences of our own, but that it was also important that we have the chance to make mistakes, because everybody has to make mistakes, it’s how we learn, 74that was something I’d read somewhere and I thought it sounded good, I’d even found a quote: Try again, fail again, fail better, that’s how much of a bloody nerd I was. I imagined letting the last part, fail better, linger in the air for a few moments while the mothers and fathers and teachers and headteacher and everybody in our year thought about what that might mean, failing better, what kind of wise and unusual fifteen year old might come up with that kind of thing, and I imagined someone from my class standing up as they all clapped, and then the whole gym hall would follow suit as I stood on stage looking shy but satisfied, bowing a few times with my hand on my heart, and there in the middle of the audience would be Mum and Marthe, clapping hard, and Mum would begin to cry.

Right before the assembly, Marthe got stomach ache. I stood in the hallway at home with my smart shoes on, all made-up, my dress freshly pressed, not a crease to be seen, not a single wrinkle, but Marthe sprawled out on her bed and cried and squirmed, she just lay there, and I thought not now not now not now, not right now, Marthe, you can’t, not now.

‘Do you think you can make it?’ Mum said.

‘No,’ Marthe said, she curled up and talked into her pillow. ‘I can’t.’