“You into her?”

“Her?”

“Reeba Shah.”

“Reeba Shah,” I say slowly as though I’m tasting each letter.

“You like her?” “I don’t even know what she looks like.” I shrug. When it hits me – Did I just out myself to Mal? – it’s all I can do not to run out of the shop. All that time I’d spent agonizing over how I was going to say it. All the times I’d almost said it to Meredith while she painted her toenails and told me about the bloke she’d got off with outside the Twisted Lemon. All the times I’d almost said it to Mum when we were stuck in traffic and she was trying to get me to sing along to the Ed Sheeran song on the radio. All the times the words were right there and I swallowed them back, and in the end, I didn’t even think about it, it just came out.

If you pardon the pun.

I can feel my whole face burning – my face, my ears, the back of my neck – but when I’m brave enough to look at him, Mal just smiles. Not smugly, but a quiet, knowing smile that lets me know he heard what I said and it’s OK.

“Reeba Shah,” he goes on like it’s nothing, like he can’t see the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes, and even though I hadn’t planned it that way, in that moment, I’m so glad that he was the first person I told. “She was in a punk band called Lavender Menace. God, they were awful.” He shakes his head and sighs. “Now she’s gone solo. She plays that plinky-plonky acoustic shit you love.” He tugs the poster from the wall and hands it to me. “She’s playing the Hope and Ruin next week. You should go.”

*

I wonder sometimes (OK, a lot) how you’re supposed to know whether you’re into boys or girls. I mean, I’ve never been in a relationship with a girl so how do I know? But then I’ve never been in a relationship with a boy, either. Does it only count if it’s reciprocated? If so, I’ve had it because unless a girl comes up to me and says Hey, I think you’re cute, I’m almost certain I’ll never have the guts to tell someone I like them.

Instead, when I see someone in the street or on the bus, usually someone I’m unlikely to have any real contact with, I become obsessed with them. Like the Girl with the Blue Hair and the Girl from Infinity Foods. So that’s what I do with Reeba. I google everything I can find about her. She’s eighteen. Eighteen. She’s already been in a band and had her artwork in Wonderland magazine. I googled Lavender Menace as well, but there was just a load of stuff about a group of lesbian radical feminists in the early seventies, and I feel the flicker of something. Hope, I realize. I don’t know why. So what if she’s gay? That doesn’t mean she’d be interested in me. But then I find a clip of her music on SoundCloud and when I hear her voice for the first time, a window in my heart I didn’t even know was there opens and I feel something fly out.