Freak was too strong a word but there was something about Corinne that wasn’t right, like she’d been dropped on the head as a kid. It wasn’t a cultural difference; it was more that her neurons fired and sparked in a different way to other people’s. Despite her facility with the English language, she had a habit of staring that Eva found unnerving.

At school, Eva steered clear of both Beth and Corinne, which wasn’t hard. As a senior, all her classes were taught in a different part of the school to the junior years. It was only during assembly on Thursday mornings when the whole school gathered in the hall that they were forced to mingle.

Assembly, that Thursday morning, began as usual with a droned recitation of the school prayer.

‘Come, Holy Spirit, open our hearts,

Bestow on us the gift of faith …’

The voices of five hundred girls rose in unison.

The chairs for assembly were arranged in giant rings around a central space where the principal, Mrs Bracken, stood at the microphone. A small woman with an owlish look, she wore a black academic gown over her clothes, her sharp gaze passing over the uniformed rows of girls in front of her.

‘Grant us strength when we are weak,

Courage when we are afraid …’

The words came out of Eva’s mouth automatically. She slumped in her chair and stared down at her shoes. Patent leather brogues, a little scuffed at the toe.

‘Wear different shoes next time, okay?’ Ross had told her.

This was at the end of their lesson the previous evening, when she’d turned the car into the narrow driveway, and he’d reached for the wheel to correct her steering. She’d glanced down at his hand, noticed the tiny blond hairs pushing through at the backs of his fingers. He had big, powerful hands. She had watched from her bedroom window as those hands tinkered with engine parts under the bonnet of a car. His instruction was calm and measured. He teased her about the boots she was wearing, the heel inappropriate for driving. ‘No one can see your feet when you’re in the car, you know,’ he’d said, and she’d heard the grin in his voice. You can see them, she’d thought, and felt the heat at her neck.

Now, as Mrs Bracken’s voice crackled through the speakers, Eva found her mind replaying the lesson once more, every word of their conversation unspooling in her head in all its delicious detail as she slipped down in her chair, her eyelids lowering.

He told her it was admirable that she wanted to get her driver’s licence before she started college. ‘Everyone should, in my book,’ he’d said. ‘It should be part of a person’s education. Far more practical use to you than the Pythagorean theorem or reproduction in plants.’