‘Novel concept, ladies, but we could just ask Edi what she’s interested in.’ Faith stood up and groaned as she moved. ‘Shit, I’m old. Tea?’

‘Tea.’ Lily was the first to answer. ‘I’ll help.’

Their chatter trailed out of the room as they disappeared, leaving Betty and I behind to tick boxes and tell lies – ‘Put that you’re interested in the gym.’ I added details as quickly as she could come up with them, but I still couldn’t get my own head out of the drop-down menus – and why they’d been so hard to find answers for …

Chapter 15

Before

‘Should I tell Rowan?’ I could feel the heat of panic spreading up my chest and towards my neck. If I’d looked in a mirror, I was sure I would have been greeted with the blotched skin of a bad reaction. Only I couldn’t look in a mirror on account of not being able to stand the sight of myself. ‘I really think I should tell him.’

A fourteen-year-old Faith was perched on the edge of my bed. She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. ‘I don’t think you need to do that.’

‘But we kissed.’

‘I was there, you know.’ She laughed but she sounded sad, even as she was trying to smile. ‘Look, Edi, you’re with Rowan and you’re straight and now you know what it’s like to kiss a girl. So, what more is there to say? You tell him and it’ll cause – well, fuck knows. Maybe you’ll lose him.’

I was sitting on the window seat in my childhood room, trying to work out how it had happened. One minute we were on my floor making notes for an English presentation. Then the snow started. We stood and watched until an hour had rolled by, maybe more. Betty and Rowan had texted us both during that time and we’d ignored it. I’d even put my phone on silent – ‘They’re so needy sometimes.’ – and we’d laughed about it all. We later saw that they were texting us to check that we were okay – just in case we didn’t feel bad enough already. But into the second hour of standing there there’d been a flurry, and Faith had leaned over to point at a dog in the distance and—

‘Edi, it doesn’t matter how it happened. It’s just one of those things.’

‘But I cheated.’