But that won’t happen. The bonnet urges her on. She is standing more steadily than she thought possible on the bike frame. ‘Sorry, but I have to.’ She tosses the bonnet onto the dresser. Keeping her eyes on the hook, she reaches across and gets a firm grip on the mirror. One foot up on the seat, waits a beat then squishes the other beside it. She wobbles and her heart is going nuts, but she breathes calmly and keeps hold of the mirror, eyes on the hook. Go on. Go on now. And she does, just steps out, and her foot connects with the wood and then the other follows and something clicks in her hip and she stumbles a step and loses her stomach, but then there she is, up on the dresser, eye level with the hook, the bonnet at her feet.

A simple thing from here: she picks up the bonnet, brushes away invisible dust, runs her fingers over the satin ribbons one final time. ‘Welcome, beautiful,’ she says and drapes it over the hook. Her whole body hums with the rightness of it. Like it’s 1996 and she’s in the back seat of Tony’s Datsun again. Like it’s 1999 and she’s holding Lena for the first time. Like it’s 2003 and she’s being held by her dying mother and the fear that she is unlovable even to the woman who gave birth to her dissipates and is replaced with surety of her worth. Some things your body just knows.

Her body, humming like this, alive and delighted, missteps. She is on the dresser and then she is not. She is falling backwards, twisting. On the ground, fast. So much blood so quickly. The sound of the lamp smashing must have been muffled by her flesh, but smashed it has, under her. Into her. Her right ankle screams differently to her gouged arm. Her left leg different again. So many varieties of pain to feel all at once. She thinks about what to do next and then doesn’t think at all.

LENA

LENA

After two months of perving at Josh from across the lecture theatre, Lena finally managed to speak with him on the way out of Education in the Twenty-first Century one Wednesday afternoon. ‘Nice presentation,’ she said, and he smiled like someone used to receiving praise and said, ‘Thanks. Can’t wait to see what you come up with.’ She’d done her presentation the week before and had made eye contact with him several times throughout, so his response was a bummer, but on the following Friday he approached her after class and complimented her on an answer she’d given earlier and they small-talked all the way out to the east lawn, where she turned left towards the bus stop and he right towards his college. Every Wednesday and Friday for three weeks they repeated the ritual, exchanging slightly more information each time.