‘I don’t even mind,’ Faith had said, although the mascara tracks sort of undercut her point. ‘Like, we’re teenagers, we’re allowed to experiment. But did we actually need to go ahead and tell our families and shit?’ She stuffed another mini muffin into her mouth and spoke around the dough. ‘She came out, you know? I was slow and understanding and, like, I literally didn’t give a shit.’ She sighed. ‘She didn’t need to tell anyone she was with me. It could have been a secret.’

‘But, Faith—’ Betty stroked her hair ‘—would that have been better?’

I thought back to my own flicker of interest in Faith; how we agreed that no one needed to know – Rowan included. ‘A little,’ I answered, even though it wasn’t my place. ‘If no one knew that it had started then there wouldn’t be anyone to tell when it was over either.’

Faith let out a shudder-sigh again. ‘Exactly.’

There had been another girl – only one. She and I met while I was on holiday with my parents. We were in Devon, and she was the surfer stereotype who strolled out of the water with such grace that I would have fully believed anyone who told me she was born with a fin. She flicked her hair in one direction then the other and set droplets of sea flying around her; it looked like a special effect. It wasn’t until hours after I’d seen her like that that I saw her again in the restaurant we were eating in that evening; she seated us, and I spent the rest of the night looking for her. There had been another handful of times when I’d seen her over the trip. She started to say hello in passing and that was enough to turn my young heart into a maraca; loud and all shaken up. On the last day I upped the ante from a hello – ‘Be seeing you, then’ – and then I stashed her in the box of feelings that never happened, alongside Faith, my occasional doubts about Rowan, and how beautiful Mel C looked when she finally left The Spice Girls.

If no one knew, I recited as I rubbed the spot between Faith’s shoulder blades, then there was nothing to tell.

It was hours later when I was tucked up against Rowan in his parents’ living room. They were away again, and we were making the most of an empty house by pretending we were grown-up enough to own property. Rowan had sat on the kitchen counter while I’d cooked dinner; he’d set the places at the dining room table; I helped myself to half a glass of wine. We borrowed adulthood for evenings at a time.

‘I just can’t believe she’d be so brazen about it.’ I was still nursing ill feelings towards the girl from college: Ingrid. ‘Christ, even her name makes me angry.’