The mirror was the strangest thing. The bath wasn’t really that unfamiliar. The shampoo and soap smelt nice, which I wasn’t used to, but the bath just involved getting wet and covering myself with water, and I’d done that every day on the Jellyfish whether I wanted to or not. I hadn’t looked in a mirror, though.

It took me a while to work myself up to it, and I decided to have the bath first. I hadn’t spent much time looking at myself naked on the Jellyfish, so that was weird. Not crazy weird, as I did know what I looked like, but it had been hard to get privacy, so it was more that I hadn’t seen myself naked all in one go.

And I’d rather not talk about the colour of the water either, but if you imagine a sort of brown soup, the type with little slices of thin onions and cheese in it, well the water looked like that. No, I don’t know what the floating bits in the brown water were either, but they can’t have been anything good. My hair felt amazing afterwards, though: soft, and light, and silky. I loved the smooth way I felt and smelt. I know what you look like is not important, and you should judge people by what’s inside and by their value as a person and that kindness and personality matter more than anything. But that’s also just rubbish, isn’t it?

When I was on the Jellyfish, and we had all that time to think, I had thought about what I looked like now, and I’d asked Kate and Lana, and sometimes James, to tell me. But I knew that what they said would always be based around what they thought of me and, do you know, they were always really nice. But vague. In any case, despite them telling me that I had light brown hair and freckles, I’d imagined myself anyway with long, blonde, perfectly curly hair and gorgeous green eyes. I knew that wasn’t true, of course, but the thing with not knowing for definite is that you can always make your own reality. So if I wanted my reality to feature myself as an amazingly beautiful woman with extra-special ninja skills, then I could.

In the mirror I was younger than in my imagination. My face was thinner, and my lips fuller. I did have those freckles the others had kept on mentioning, and I did have that light brown hair, but it wasn’t a bad face. It wasn’t an ugly face, and it wasn’t a gorgeous face like Kate’s. It was an average, forgettable, blending-in sort of face. It felt like a stranger’s face, and I knew I’d need to look at myself a lot more before I really believed it was me.