“Well, er …” I shuffle my feet. “I’m going to form now.”

“No, no, wait!” He jumps up so we’re facing each other.

There is a significantly awkward pause.

He studies me, squinting, then studies the photograph, then back to me, then back to the photo. “You cut your hair!”

I bite my lip, holding back the sarcasm. “Yes,” I say sincerely. “Yes, I cut my hair.”

“It was so long.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Why did you cut it?”

I had gone shopping by myself at the end of the summer holidays because there was so much crap I needed for sixth form and Mum and Dad were busy with all of the Charlie stuff that was going on and I just wanted it out of the way. What I’d failed to remember was that I am awful at shopping. My old school bag was ripped and dirty so I trailed through nice places – River Island and Zara and Urban Outfitters and Mango and Accessorize. But all the nice bags there were, like, fifty pounds, so that wasn’t happening. Then I tried the cheaper places – New Look and Primark and H&M – but all the bags there were just tacky. I ended up going round all the shops selling bags a billion bloody times before having a slight breakdown on a bench by Costa Coffee in the middle of the shopping centre. I thought about starting Year 12 and all the things that I needed to do and all the new people that I might have to meet and all the people I would have to talk to and I caught a reflection of myself in a Waterstones window and I realised then that most of my face was covered up and who in the name of God would want to talk to me like that and I started to feel all of this hair on my forehead and my cheeks and how it plastered my shoulders and back and I felt it creeping around me like worms, choking me to death. I began to breathe very fast, so I went straight into the nearest hairdresser’s and had it all cut to my shoulders and out of my face. The hairdresser didn’t want to do it, but I was very insistent. I spent my school bag money on a haircut.

“I just wanted it shorter,” I say.

He steps closer. I shuffle backwards.

“You,” he says, “do not say anything you mean, do you?”

I laugh again. It’s a pathetic sort of expulsion of air, but for me that qualifies as a laugh. “Who are you?”

He freezes, leans back, opens out his arms as if he’s the Second Coming of Christ and announces in a deep and echoing voice: “My name is Michael Holden.”

Michael Holden.

“And who are you, Victoria Spring?”