On the last night, at the campsite outside Calais, the French were back. And so were the Germans, who’d spent their entire trip with a curfew in place for the graffiti. The seniors of all three factions ended up in the car park, shoving one another, calling one another names. Pretty pathetic. Someone threw a can, but that was as violent as it got. And suddenly, there was Marianne grabbing Bee’s arm, pulling her away, and once out of earshot saying something about it being personal, about her being the reason Bee was in Calais in the first place. Bee’s greatest fear wasn’t that everyone would find out, it was that every time the capitaine’s daughter beckoned, Bee would come running. That she’d be one of those girls.

And then the lights in the car park came on and everyone split, but Marianne wouldn’t let her go and Violette wouldn’t leave without Bee, and Eddie wouldn’t leave without Violette. Charlie Crombie was there too, so the five of them hid under the stilts of one of the cabins until the shaps were gone. Then, instead of walking back to her cabin, Marianne told them she knew how to hot-wire a car and they could head down to the coast for the night.

That was how they came to be pushing the security guard’s car through the woodlands surrounding the camping ground and finding Fionn Sykes, who was out searching for night herons. And then the six of them were in the car, heading nowhere in particular.

It was the longest night of Bee’s life. The best night of her life. They talked about everything. It’s why sometimes she thinks she hates Violette, because Bee trusted them with all the stuff that keeps her awake at night. Stevie’s death. Her parents’ divorce, her father’s drinking. How petrified she is that one day there’ll be a phone call saying he’s done himself in, because he’s headed for the edge. And how she had sex with a boy over Christmas at a party, just to prove to her friends she wasn’t a lesbian. She cried when she said that. She had come out to Violette days before, but this was different. She knew there would be no turning back.

Charlie talked about the cheating episode. They couldn’t see one another in the dark but she knew from his voice that he was crying. Being expelled for drugs would make you cool in years to come, but cheating was different. Everyone hated a cheat. Eddie talked about his mother’s death and how his father didn’t want a bar of him now that she was gone, and Fionn also spoke about his mum. She didn’t leave the house ever, because she was one of those people you read about in the Guinness book of records. At Easter Fionn finally got the guts to bring friends home to meet her, and the girl he thought he could trust told everyone that his mum was so fat she couldn’t move out of her room. Like Gilbert Grape’s mother.