But maybe I’d been wrong. It was hard to know; Lou never seemed interested in men. She’d never had a boyfriend, at least not one I’d met. Sometimes she would go to a bar, find a man, go back to his place and roll out of there while it was still dark, never to speak to him again. She’d taken the morning-after pill so many times that she had chronic rashes and her period had become unpredictable. But that was the extent of her love life.

On the bus, she and Aleks kept talking. At one point Lou threw her head back and laughed. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself on the ten-metre platform, everyone else far away and too small to matter.

Perhaps it was due to these distractions that I performed so disastrously. I ranked outside of the top twelve in my event, getting nowhere near the finals. In the hotel room that night I sat on the shower floor with the water running for half an hour, imagining how it would feel to punch through the shower screen. Then I wrapped myself in the scratchy hotel robe and joined Grace, who was flicking between channels.

She was drinking a Gatorade.

‘Good shower?’

My reply was a grunt. I could smell the Gatorade – an off smell somewhere between grape juice and seawater. Grace had somehow made it out of that competition with a bronze medal, which she now wore over her own hotel robe. This only added to my indignation. Grace was a decent diver; I was better.

‘Do you think he’s mad at me?’ I asked.

‘Who, ballsack?’

This was her name for Aleks.

‘Yeah. Him.’

Grace burped.

‘Probably,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the TV. ‘You bombed.’

On the closing night of the competition, there was a dinner for the athletes and their families. Lou was running late, as always. She arrived in a flurry, wearing a dress made of a dark, stretchy, spangled material which showed how thin she was. It had a dip in the back where you could see the sharpness of her shoulder blades, the sun damage she’d collected.

She sat with the parents. I was on a table with my teammates. Usually we’d be sipping mineral water and refusing the bread and butter, but I was sulking and ate everything in sight.

Dinner was an alternate drop. For dessert I was given chocolate cake. Next to me, Grace had lemon meringue pie. I ate my cake unselfconsciously. It was as sweet and stodgy as I’d hoped it would be. It stuck to the roof of my mouth and I sucked it down. I wrapped my tongue around my spoon to collect the last flecks of cream.

‘Good?’ Grace asked.

She’d pushed her pie away. I didn’t know how long she’d been watching.

‘It’s okay.’

‘Looked like you were enjoying it.’