I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want to talk about The Incident. To my mind, I hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. It had only been a joke. It was during a school play, a production of The Crucible. Everyone in my drama class had to take on a role in the cast or crew. I’d volunteered to be costume assistant, the job I thought would require the least amount of commitment.

The girl who played Goody Proctor was a serious type with ambitions of becoming a Shakespearean actor. She spent her lunchtimes pacing back and forth memorising monologues, and had dandruff all along her centre part, like snow scraped to the sides of a road. During the production, she treated me like I was her personal attendant. She’d do breathing exercises with her eyes closed while I buttoned her into her gown. While I helped her into the black boots she wore on stage, she’d put a hand on my head and lean her weight onto my skull. ‘My apron isn’t steamed!’ she said to me once, in a panicked voice, and when I said no-one would care she threw it on the floor – not being quite brave enough, I think, to throw it at me.

All things considered, what I did wasn’t that bad. During a scene change I started pulling a dress down over her head, and then on impulse pulled it back towards myself, twisting it so the dark wool covered her face. I remember her stark, denuded body, her thin arms with their visible network of blue veins. They waved around, grappled at her throat, then grasped at the empty air. One breast flopped out of her bra.

It was just a prank, over in seconds. And I wasn’t the only one who laughed; the other girls in their gowns and glued-on beards had seen how funny it was. She’d looked so comic, so clumsy, lurching around in her panic.

But someone told, and the school didn’t look kindly on The Incident. My record there was hardly pristine, and the only reason I wasn’t expelled was that Lou went down to the school and stayed for hours, negotiating my punishment down to a suspension, a probation, and a letter of apology, which Lou wrote for me.

I am so deeply ashamed… she wrote.

‘But I’m not ashamed,’ I said, looking over her shoulder at the computer.

‘You’re telling me,’ she replied. She reached back and absently patted me on the cheek. I watched the cursor flash. The words This experience will make me a better person appeared on the screen.