Science. Of course. I turn the pages and find the summary I wrote on dissecting a heart, my childish handwriting so familiar and yet so different from the way I write now. It’s funny, reading this again. The time Mr. Chatterjee asked us all to choose a partner and bring a pig’s heart in so we could dissect it in pairs. Except Alice’s dad, who was a butcher, thought he’d go one better and gave us an ox heart.

I couldn’t believe it when Alice took it out of the plastic bag and brandished it in front of me. I had to hold on to the bench for support while she stuck her latex-gloved fingers into the slab of wet, raw heart that was three times the size of everyone else’s.

“There’s still some dried blood in the chambers, sir,” Alice had said. She always loved the practicals.

“Well, rinse it out, then,” Mr. Chatterjee snapped, and since Alice was doing all the cutting, it was me who had to carry the huge, slippery mound over to the sink and hold it under the tap. As the pink water swirled down the plug hole, I retched over it. Nearly fainted. Alice couldn’t stop laughing and Mr. Chatterjee got really cross.

We laughed so much, the two of us. If only I could blank out all the dreadful things that followed. The terrible way Alice died. The hatred in her sister’s eyes. The rumors and the bullying.

My heart beats furiously at the back of my throat. One moment of idle curiosity about what lay between the covers of an old school exercise book, and the past has come reeling back. I drop the book into the bin bag along with the others and squash the memories down. This ends now.

Outside, it’s sunny and bright. I tip the contents of the bag into the blue wheelie bin that stands outside the front door like a sentry box. Soon, all those sentences and diagrams and sums, all those verb conjugations and clumsily sketched maps will be carted away and turned into pulp, ready for spreading and rolling out and starting all over again. If only memories could be recycled so easily.

Above the hum of traffic I hear birdsong and a peal of distant laughter. In the garden of one of the slightly bigger houses on the other side of the street, a magnolia tree is just coming into bloom, the tightly coiled flower buds like pink flames against the sky. I take a minute to stand on the doorstep and fill my lungs with air. Now that I’ve got rid of this lot, I feel freer. Lighter. I turn to enter the house, galvanized by my decision to apply for a place at uni. I’m going to surprise Ross and make a nice chili for supper. We’ve been eating too many ready-meals lately.