Later, when we’re in bed, I picture myself at the Greenwich Maritime campus, sprawled on the grass by the river, nose deep in a nineteenth-century novel. I feel myself drifting off. Then someone walks by the house in high heels. My eyes snap open and it’s like I’m thirteen years old all over again, fistfuls of duvet tight round my neck, waiting for Catherine Dawson to get bored with tormenting me and walk away.

I snuggle up to Ross. His muscular body is warm to the touch and the strength of it comforts me. I close my eyes. All the bad things are in the past. Catherine can’t hurt me now.

10

THEN: AFTER

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2007

We’ve been told to assemble in the refectory to meet our form teachers and collect our timetables. I usually enjoy the first day back after the summer holiday. Now I’m dreading it. Walking through the school gates on my own. Seeing Melissa Davenport and the others for the first time since Alice’s funeral. Everyone looking at me. And the worst thing of all is that I’ve lost my friend and ally. The one person who made everything all right. Who made me feel normal. I can’t believe she’s gone and that the last words I spoke to her were full of spite.

This time two years ago, we were giggling behind our hands at the form teacher’s wacky dress sense, getting lost together in the endless corridors as we searched for the art department or the science labs, bonding over our packed lunches. When Alice’s mum was ill, her dad just chucked a load of random items into her lunch box: half a packet of peanuts, a roughly peeled carrot, and a chocolate biscuit, or a Marmite sandwich made with two crusts. On Alice’s “bad lunch days,” we always shared mine.

I swallow the knot in my throat. I can’t believe we’ll never sit at the picnic benches in the playground again, trying to split a Mr. Kipling Bakewell tart in half with the handle of a plastic spoon. It doesn’t seem possible that she’s dead.

I see the girls in my class long before they see me. They’re halfway along the wide concrete path that leads to the main block and reception, gathered in a big group outside one of the prefabs.

“Try not to take any notice if they say anything silly or hurtful,” Mum said this morning, before I left the house. “Rise above it.”