‘What do you wish for, dreamer?’ I’ve never thought beyond this – beyond school terms and holidays and essay prizes and climbing trees and swimming in the river. ‘Are you writing in your notebook every day?’ she asks, looking at me closely. ‘You’re the best in school, everyone says so.’ That’s just because everyone else is so lazy. ‘You’ll win the essay competition again this year.’ I shrug, pretending that I don’t care. ‘You should be a teacher, like Miss Iliescu.’ I like this idea, for then I might not have to marry at all. ‘Ms Smith thought you were the cat’s miaow!’

My heart hurts thinking of her open face, always kind, even when the stupid boys fell asleep in her class, or pulled our ponytails, or wrote filthy notes and flew them as paper airplanes, aiming their pointy noses at the back of the girl’s head in front. ‘You have a bright future, Nicoleta,’ she’d said on her last day, before she returned home to America after volunteering at our school for two whole years. ‘Students like you make doing what I do worthwhile.’ My face tingles recalling these words.

Luca climbs out, his body strong and wet. He goes for a run, to warm up, the dog running alongside him. Maria laughs. ‘That dog is in love,’ she says.

2. Sammy

2

Sammy

Since it happened a year ago – I was a late developer, though I’ve wasted no time making up for lost time – the dog up the street won’t stop humping me, Mother looks like she wants to devour me, Dad looks (and goes) away, Brian and the lads want to do me, and men are craning their necks everywhere I go. The other day a taxi driver sped through a red light and almost caused a massive pile-up, horns honking furiously, as he kept his eyes fastened on me. That would be about right really, that I would be the cause of such commotion. ‘Havoc follows you wherever you go,’ Mother says. She seems to think I’m the reason she is the way she is – she wishes she’d pushed me back inside her the minute I slithered out, and demanded I be turned into a boy who would grow into a big strong man to worship the ground she walks on. Instead, she got this awful girl. Sometimes when I see her sitting on her fat ass, glugging her Chablis or her Sauvignon, or worst of all, her Chardonnay, I get the feeling she might open her greedy gob and suck me in, swallowing me whole. I can imagine Luce calling over and seeing my bony body pushing through her jelly belly, elbows and knees jutting through, my voice coming from far away. Luce would cut her open with a kitchen knife and free me.