I turned to look at him, finding his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. I briefly wondered if the same memories were tumbling through his mind as mine. The shame and regret clogging up my throat made it hard to speak. ‘I thought you didn’t like me.’ I paused, tried to come up with a better way to explain it, because I knew that wasn’t completely true, and Henry deserved my honesty.

‘At least, I wanted to believe that you didn’t…’

‘Because then it made it easier for you to not like me?’

I thought a bit harder. ‘Okay, so here’s the truth. And this is the first time I’ve realised this, so bear with me. I was jealous of you.’

Henry jerked his head back in surprise. ‘What, because I always beat you in the physics tests?’

‘No, nothing like that. You know what people thought of me in school.’

‘What, that you were clever and nice and were interesting enough to not care about fitting in with the crowd?’

‘That is not what people thought about me!’

‘It’s what I thought.’

‘Okay, so to almost everyone else I was the strange kid with the embarrassing parents and even worse clothes. And I really cared about not fitting in. I spent so much time and energy avoiding any more attention than necessary so I wouldn’t provoke more mean jokes or bitchy comments. It’s like I adopted this general air of apology for sullying the school with my dweebiness.

‘And then there was you, Sir Henry of Nerdville, hand straight up every time the teacher asked a question, perfect crease in your school trousers, insisting you had no idea who Ant and Dec were. You were far worse than me, and you didn’t even try not to be.’

‘You were jealous of me being more of a nerd than you?’

‘I was jealous that you seemed oblivious to your position in the pecking order. I was angry that you didn’t have the decency to be ashamed of who you were, when so often I felt like my shame would consume me.’

‘Wow.’

‘How did you not care?’

Henry considered that for a while. ‘I suppose I didn’t care what people thought about my fashion sense, or taste in music, because those were trivial things that said nothing meaningful about me. I did care about being trustworthy and kind. A decent person.’

‘And being right,’ I couldn’t help adding, smiling to soften the tease.

‘Yes.’ He screwed up his face. ‘That, too. Maybe I also considered myself to be above all that popularity guff, and therefore above most of the other kids. Which I freely admit made me a pretentious little twazzock.’

‘Do you ever regret not being a normal teenager? Missing out on the parties and the flirting, all the guff?’