Am I? I’d hoped I had willed it away by ignoring it. When Alanna said she’d give me a week to decide what I wanted, a week felt like a very long time. And it does feel like she said it a very long time ago. Time is strange. I think I was awaiting direction or for her to change her mind. When she didn’t come to find me after seven days had elapsed, I’d allowed myself to hope it might all be forgotten. Ruth Beadle organizing a party: chronicle of an announced tragedy.

I can count on the fingers of my hands the number of parties I’ve been invited to. With the same ease, I can recall the specific hue of each humiliation. I still have bad dreams.

As a child, you could’ve described me as shy, though I never quite got the hang of it. Other shy children were discounted from feeling bad about themselves. It was always the very pretty ones, whose cheeks glowed pink when they were asked a question in class. Alanna and I didn’t cross paths until later, but it isn’t hard to imagine her as one of those children. Unable to speak, they emitted eagerness from the tops of their cutely bowed heads. They wore soft woollen jumpers and tentatively offered their hands to the outgoing kids in the playground.

I was never that kind of shy. My shyness was impervious, with electric edges, like a ball of yarned nerves: sharp, throbbing, veined with inadequacy and unwillingness. Other children steered clear of me like I was a lame animal. In turn I began to feel like an animal myself: a feral, shaky thing that could make even adults uneasy. On my eleventh birthday I insisted I wanted to hold a party – a ‘gathering’, my mother called it. I collected recipes from old magazines and took the free paper home from the bus so that I could pore over the ‘dinner-in-ten’ section. I made my own canapés, decorated with pine nuts and olive segments. The kids didn’t like them; olives and nuts were grown-up food. They lamented the lack of a face-painter. It was the first and last birthday I ever celebrated. I would never hold a gathering again.