After, they lay, her squelched up to the wall, him half hanging off the side of the bed. She wondered if she should say something, like she loved him, or thank you, or something stupid like that. She couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t unbelievably trite, and said nothing.

Finally, he rolled out of bed, pulled on his jeans, shirt, put his wallet back in his pocket, all without turning the light on or speaking a word. She rolled on to one side to watch him. “Aren’t you . . . Don’t you want to stay the night?”

A shake of his head. “I’ve got a class tomorrow morning.”

“I could set an alarm.”

Another shake. “I’m gonna go.”

“It was . . . I mean, it was really nice, I’m . . . we should . . . another time, you know?”

A half nod. “Yeah. That’d be . . . Yeah.”

He let himself out without meeting her eye, didn’t answer her calls for the rest of the week and finally blocked her on Facebook.

Chapter 3

This is Harmony Meads, nineteen years old.

Five foot eight, she is blessed with long blonde hair that she once tried washing in olive oil, because that was a thing you were supposed to do, until her mum caught her and hollered, “What the hell are you doing with my salad oil, girl?!” after which, and not without a certain amount of relief given what a mess it made, she went back to normal shampoo and conditioner.

Her hair, when worn loose, goes down to her waist, but it also tangles really quickly and takes a lot of looking after, so she usually wears it in a plait because that looks kind of assertive and practical, but also feminine, with what her friend Jenni would probably call “a promise of good things to come”.

Until she was seventeen years old she had to wear braces, and hated the feel of them, and hated that everyone laughed at her. As a result, she learned to smile without opening her mouth until the day they came off. Then she wasn’t sure how to smile – if she was revealing her beautiful, perfectly aligned white dazzler of a grin, or maintaining her delicate near-simper. For hours, she stood in front of the mirror, practising the contortions of her face, trying to find the combination of powerful, strong, funny, witty, droll, dry, sarcastic, knowing, excited, naive and charming that a woman’s smile ought to convey.

The effect was mixed, and even now, two years later, the joy that illuminates her face is tempered by caution, restraint, as if fearful of splitting her blushing skin with something ugly.

She is not fat; she is not thin.

She likes her wrists; she can wrap her thumb and little finger round them to almost halfway up her arm, but they’re not ill-skinny, not just hanging sticks off brittle shoulders. She doesn’t like the way her bum sticks out; knows it’s because she genuinely does have big hips, an actual genetic thing, but also understands that when she says it out loud people laugh, because “big boned” doesn’t mean “big boned” any more, even if you do, in fact, have big bones.