Head down, cheeks burning, Beth moved quickly through the crowd. It was easier to just keep walking, to concentrate on the motion of her feet, counting out her steps, counting out the number of cracks in the paving, counting, counting, counting. The same way she counted when barrelling down the school corridors, briskness masking her loneliness. Distantly, she heard Corinne calling her, but she was propelled by something bigger now, the swell of her humiliation carrying her across the street and on to rocks, moving closer to the sea until she found a flat slab to sit on, something to anchor her shaking limbs.

‘Hey! Why did you run from me like that?’ Corinne demanded once she had caught up with Beth. ‘Did you not hear me calling?’

‘I heard you,’ Beth said quietly, her eyes fixed on the mass of water in the bay.

‘So why did you not stop?’ Her voice was crisp with annoyance but Beth, for once, didn’t care.

She kept thinking about Lisa back there with the others. She hadn’t joined in the mocking laughter, but still. Her presence among them made her complicit. Lisa had been her best friend and might be still if it hadn’t been for Sasha.

Perhaps Corinne saw it in her – the surge of sadness – for the sharp rise of her anger seemed to dissipate, and she came and sat by Beth, close enough for their arms to touch.

‘What is it?’ she asked softly. ‘What happened with you and those girls?’

Beth looked down, picked at a scab on her knee. ‘You saw what happened,’ she said mulishly.

‘No. Not that. Why do they hate you?’

The reluctance was there like a wall between them, but then Corinne reached for Beth’s hand, held it gently in hers. Beth felt the soft sweep of Corinne’s thumb over the flesh of her palm. A thrill of nerves went through her.

‘It was Sasha,’ she began quietly. ‘Sasha and her stupid party.’

How easy it was to summon the memory – girls giggling in their pyjamas, the smell of popcorn lingering in the air. Sasha’s fourteenth birthday. Over a year ago now but each detail remained vivid. All the girls from their class invited for a sleepover in Sasha’s house – a massive mock-Tudor mansion with a home cinema, tennis courts in the garden, a hot tub on the deck.

They’d watched Zac Efron movies back-to-back while eating hot dogs and pizza and shovelling popcorn into their mouths. Beth remembered feeling light and floaty, the Baileys she’d stolen from her parents’ drinks cabinet coating her tongue. She’d grown bored and then sleepy. It was almost three a.m. when she drifted from the home cinema, leaving the others playing Truth or Dare. She stumbled into the sitting room and fell face-first on to the sofa.

‘As soon as I woke up, I knew something was wrong,’ she told Corinne.