So Serena is religious. Her whole family is. Her father goes to meetings and he serves Communion at Mass on the Sundays when he’s not on duty. He’s a member of some secret religious group, like Opus Dei or something idk a tight little male group of pious wankers. Even Serena didn’t know the name. Her father’s hands were blessed by the Pope. I wouldn’t care who blessed his hands if he was operating on me, I’d rather have someone else. He is like totally creepy, you have no idea. He wears these silent shoes. When he comes into a room if you’re not looking you don’t know. Like when my dad comes upstairs you can hear him starting in the hall before he even puts one foot on a step, but Serena’s dad could be opening the bedroom door and you wouldn’t hear. Serena says she never heard her dad and mam fight, not once, not even raised voices. Her mam never disagreed with her father while she was there. In fact, she said, they never discussed anything. I told her about the terrible rows my parents had. I said someday someone is going to kill my mam. She said she’d do it for me and for a bit we used to pretend that we were planning it and we’d keep coming up with brilliant ideas. Like one idea was that we’d electrocute her in the shower. And another time we thought what if we fed her to the pigs. It was something we saw in a film. But we didn’t know anybody with pigs. Well, Holly’s dad kept pigs but only two and we didn’t think two would be enough to eat a whole human being. Serena said she could get one of the boys to fix the brakes on her car, but that would involve a boy and we couldn’t trust them. And I didn’t want to ask what Serena would do to the boy to get him to do it. I thought it was a bad plan. Our whole problem was that we couldn’t work out how to get away with it and we decided in the end that people who really kill other people aren’t worried about getting away because being in prison isn’t as bad as living with them. And I wasn’t there yet.