They seemed baffled when I suddenly asked them to dump me miles from anywhere. The massive oak tree we had just passed, with a branch striking one of Stef’s super-queeny dance poses, had given me a jolt of familiarity. I waited until they had bumped out of sight before wandering up and down the road, looking for something else to recognise. If a car approached, I looked earnestly up at the sky, the world’s least convincing bird-watcher.

By a mile further up, my calves felt like they were on a medieval rack. The new boots were so heavy. My map flapped in the wind, a great big clumsy bird. Then a deep bank of forestry trees, one trailing a loose white ribbon, as I’d seen before. I wondered what that meant. Trees to chop down? Trees to save because they were just too pretty? Didn’t people tie ribbons around trees in America for their sweethearts or prisoners coming home or something? Those were yellow ones, though.

In the middle of the long line of trees was a gap. Just enough, maybe, for a jeep to squeeze through, so long as the driver didn’t care about it getting scratched by pine needles. There were two dips in the ground running through the trees and small, regular diagonal marks pressed into them. This was it. A track to someone who didn’t want to be found.

I looked at the cactus in my hand. I couldn’t just go down there, knock on his door, Jehovah’s Witness-style. Please accept my thanks in the form of this extremely ugly plant. A megawatt smile. I knelt down and shoved the pot into the mud, right in the middle of the path. On a torn-out blank page from the back of my copy of The Yellow Wallpaper I wrote Thanks (sorry) and automatically put a kiss on the end, which I crossed out and tried to make into a filled-in square, which looked stupider still, so I drew little triangles around it, and then it looked like a bizarre witchy pentagram symbol. Jesus.

I walked back down the road, giving it the big thumbs-up again, my note left impaled on a few spikes. Yep, classy as hell.

Boom. One essay tweaked and in, somehow, fuelled by a packet of Jammie Dodgers and three sports drinks that tasted like neon. Liza sent back a curt Thanks, Polly. All I deserved, I guess.

I kept thinking about my plucky little cactus, waiting among the trees. He’d either pick it up and crush it to his chest, perhaps weeping a little, or just be extremely befuddled and kick it away. Or maybe he’d not even notice and it would be crushed to bits under his wheels – that was if he ever drove up there again, which was unlikely, seeing as he probably didn’t have to cart home dribbling girls too often.

That night, I woke up to find moonlight rimmed around the petals of the orchid. A little movement, like water running down the edges. Ringing. I swore I could hear it. High and pure, someone running their finger around the top of a wet wine glass. Wind in the grass, far away. I felt like I was being tuned, sounding my own note as I lay there, dead still.