Then he shrugged and put his hands in his pockets and walked out. I scampered after him, ducking around shelves. I followed him all the way through the shopping centre and out to the high street, which was where he finally spoke to me again.

“There you go.”

His hand came out of his coat, still holding the make-up. I looked down. There in his pockets were bottles of shower gel, deodorant, toothpaste. Who shoplifts toiletries?

He was smiling at me. I don’t think I’d ever seen the angry boy smile before then, but it lit his face up, it turned out, made him look far less angry and a lot more pretty.

This was Dean, of course. Dean who shoplifts toiletries. He has to because his family never buy them for him, and it’s not like he can afford them. I didn’t know that at the time.

He stole nearly everything and got caught far too many times. He has arrest records now. Court dates. Dropped charges. No guilty conscience about it whatsoever.

“You live in Grace, yeah?” he said on that first day,

I nodded. “I’ve seen you outside.”

“Come say hi next time.”

He told me his name and I told him mine, and the next time I saw him he was calling it, from the wall outside the tower, flanked by his friends and their clouds of cigarette smoke.

I froze again, like an idiot. His friends were looking me up and down, and glancing back to Dean for cues. They’d screwed up their noses as if they’d caught a bad smell.

Not Dean, though.

“Nicky, mate, come and chill with us.”

That’s all it took. Noses unscrewed and everyone let themselves be introduced. Someone called Jason offered me a cigarette and a light. Dean patted me on the back when I took a seat next to him and we talked about something we’d seen on telly the night before.

His friends, and everyone else, listened to him, you see. Dean’s word is law. He says they’re going to hang out in the park for the afternoon, they hang out in the park for the afternoon. He says he feels ill and no one should smoke around him today, cigarettes stay in packets for the day. He says his new friend Nicky is all right, that’s it, Nicky is all right and is now in fact one of their best mates.

We were pretty much inseparable from then on. We ran up and down the stairwells to each other’s flats, hung out with his friends, laughed together about the hot-and-cold natures of the old ladies downstairs. That was two years ago.

He wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with me. He wasn’t ashamed to be around the weirdo with the girly mannerisms and occasional make-up. More than that: he was proud of me. He walked around with me and introduced me as if I was a prize.

The first time he kissed me was on a Tuesday. Tuesdays were kind of our thing. We both had PE at school on Tuesdays in Year 11, making it the perfect time to slip out and disappear for the day. We’d put hoodies on over our uniforms and wander around town, or sneak through the wooded bit of the park, and one day he took my hand and pulled me towards him and that was it, we were people who kissed each other now. We added it to the Tuesday routine and grinned as we found more and more inventive places to hide away and do, you know, just a bit more than kissing. Sometimes I put make-up on – and sometimes a new lip gloss or an eyeshadow would magically appear in the pocket of my backpack.