Shaun grabbed my hand again, squeezed it and it hurt a little. My dad was the only one who held my hand or put stupid rings on it. But I would let Shaun do whatever this ‘chicken’ thing was. ‘OK,’ I said.

‘Lean back and close your eyes,’ he growled. I was already leaning back. I pressed my back further into the stinky rust, knowing my Blondie T-shirt would probably be stained, but it was OK, as I had been stained all my life. The smell of kerosene caught at the back of my throat; I wanted to cough but I wasn’t going to. Nothing would spoil this moment. Shaun liked me, didn’t he? If he wanted to do stuff with me?

Shaun placed his forefinger in the middle of my forehead. I could smell it, above me; it stunk of cigarettes and something pungent I couldn’t identify. He moved it very slowly down the centre of my forehead, his other fingers and thumb splayed out, like the prongs of a fork, and his palm descending like a red road map over the top part of my face. The finger journeyed between my neat and iridescent eyebrows (I was the furthest from the pages of Vogue I had ever been) and slid down on to the bridge of my nose. It reeked, but I didn’t want it taken away. I wanted it to keep going. The finger moved further down and Shaun held it on the tip of my nose for a few seconds, giving me cause to repress a giggle, before he ski-jumped it off to land in the cleft above my top lip. I held my breath. This felt so strange and intimate. I could have reached out with my tongue and touched that finger if I had wanted to. Tasted how bad it stank. He paused for a few seconds. I wanted to open my eyes and lock them with his, to see what that felt like, but I didn’t dare. The finger dragged down to the space between my top and bottom lips and I was still not breathing. He pushed my bottom lip down slightly, let it softly ping back. This was sexy, wasn’t it?

‘OK?’ he said, gruff.

‘Yeah.’ My breathing was laboured, I felt giddyingly out of control.

‘Want to say “chicken”?’

‘No.’