I didn’t have to accept his invitation. But I found myself walking to the tower. Yes, I’d been a diver, but our school only had a five-metre platform. The ten-metre was a vastly different thing. The ladder was dull, dark iron and so hot it burned my hands and the soles of my feet. Once I was at the top I remember shivering – big, involuntary, full-body shivers – despite the heat. There were palm trees whose fronds skittered in the wind. There was green mildew on the wide platform, and tiny winking fragments of quartz throughout the concrete. They prickled my arches as I walked to the edge. I looked down to the green water.

I knew that hesitation would only make the fear worse, so I did what I’d seen those boys do – I retreated to the back of the platform, then took a running jump off the end.

The dive was not an elegant thing. I probably shouldn’t have attempted a double somersault. In fact, what I did was called a smack, which is exactly what it sounds like. I smacked the whole back of my body on the water, because I had overreached, overbalanced, and couldn’t correct. I’d let lapse the skills that would allow me to pull myself into a vertical, self-preserving line. By the time I realised this, it was too late.

But the length of the drop was exhilarating; I heard my own gasp in my ears. And the feeling when I hit the water was like nothing else. It hurt at first; it was a shock. There was a moment of total disorientation, when things went dark and cold and quiet. Nothing existed except me and the deep water, now seething with fine, moussey bubbles.

After a moment that water returned me to the surface, unharmed, intact. I’d never been so serene, even though my head rang, even though my skin was stinging.

At home that night, Lou came into my room while I was getting undressed. She never knocked. I spun and said, ‘Hey!’ my hands covering my chest.

‘What the fuck is that?’ she said.

I twisted my head so I could see myself in the mirrored panels of the wardrobe. I’d hit the water so hard that it had left a broad white blot on my back. The blot was the shape of the water as I collided with it, the shape of the splash I was in the process of making.

‘Sunburn,’ I said.

‘Bullshit,’ said Lou.

I don’t know why I lied. But I also didn’t tell her about the man who’d come up to me as my friends and I were leaving the pool.

‘Nice smack,’ he said.