I sit up, and reach for my phone. I tap on the Facebook app and search for Alanna’s profile. I expand her timeline. The blue page unfolds into micro events: her whole life, all public, time sprawled out like a ribbon messily uncurled. I scroll all the way down. I realize I have missed out on most of it. Her little sister’s birthday, the monstrous pink flowers from Paul on Valentine’s Day, being upgraded to first class on the plane to New York for her twenty-fifth birthday. Some people I recognize from school, but I can’t remember their names. This is unsurprising because I have spent the last ten years trying to forget the ten years before that. The Lolitas are a prominent presence, mainly because they chronicle Alanna’s life themselves. There are several three-way selfies taken in the care home. None of me. Only one picture features us both: a festive shot from last year’s party with Santa hats superimposed on to our heads. It makes me sad, like a pin has been dropped in time, at an arbitrary point, marking the fact that I have always been there, existing on the periphery of Alanna’s life, but my presence was not worth documenting. Yet there I am, standing to the left of the group, with my specifically ugly body, bird legs, the tired slope of my shoulders. I am there.

I pick myself up and walk to the bedroom still holding my phone. I scroll further down: her graduation, her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, then she’s nineteen, on holiday with her best friend. I make eye contact with ‘Tracy Dunn’. Tracy stands in her bikini, one arm around Alanna’s waist on a Marbella beach, and returns the stare. Familiar face. The original photo is old, a picture of a picture uploaded. In the right-hand corner Alanna’s freckly thumb is visible, holding it. I scroll all the way down to the bottom, but her feed trickles out quickly, with fewer and fewer pictures, and sparse status updates in which she talks about herself in third person. ‘Alanna Hallett is very happy today thanks to a very special person.’ Alanna smiling in a picture in which she looks extremely young. I remember her looking like that. Her chipmunk grin as a girl. I’m still here – I have been here for her. She picked me. My body feels heavier, the phone is warm in my hand. My thumb slips, zooming into her picture, one blue eye blown out of proportion.

I fall asleep.