Ling has stopped giggling. The only sound is of a bird, just outside the kitchen window. It’s delicate and pretty, high and thin. I bet it’s a girl. The music fills the kitchen and for a moment no one moves. The girls stop eating and listen, their eyes glistening. The notes fill me with something I don’t want to feel.

I go the bathroom, turn on the shower and step into it, letting it all flow out of me, until every part of me is wet.

27. Nico

27

Nico

A tall girl with stretched limbs and long dark hair and eyes that dart all round – searching for something – stands at the kitchen door. The air around her seems to crackle with some kind of energy, electricity, excitement.

Ling lights up when she sees her. Instantly, I feel excluded from their secret world, which consists of giggling about nothing at all. I have not felt like laughing since before the day of the sheets and the staining. The girl tells me she is my roomie, which I take to mean she is sharing my room. I tell her my name is Nico.

‘Hello, Neekoh!’ she says. ‘That’s an unlikely name for a girly girl like you.’

I nod, not knowing exactly what she means – she speaks so fast, and in a strange voice with its own tune.

A bird sounds outside, but I strain to hear it through the noise Sammy’s jaw makes chomping on the dried flakes of corn. A question seems to hover in the air around us, in the song outside the window, in the silence between the bites … as if in answer, Sammy belches, pretending to be a man, rubbing her belly the way Sergiu and Victor would after dinner. Ling thinks this is hilarious, and for a moment these two have become my elder brothers, egging each other on. I feel myself shrinking around this girl as she fills all the corners of the room and sucks up all the air. I get up to go and brush against the flowers with my elbow. A withered pink petal falls onto the table.