Alien Girl, he used to call her. He would draw cartoon aliens with goggle-eyes and pinched faces, leaving the sketches on her desk or sticking them to the back of her school sweater. They really did bear an uncanny resemblance to her—Emma could see it and so could their sniggering classmates. Sometimes he would point at her braless chest, in front of everyone, and declare that her species obviously didn’t have tits. Maybe all your species are actually lads, even the ones pretending to be chicks. What have you got down there, Alien “Girl”? She recalled how his eyes had dropped toward the hem of her skirt, how he and his two mates had roared with laughter when she’d hovered a protective hand in front of her crotch.

One lunchtime—and Emma’s stomach still liquefied at the memory—he’d crept up behind her while she was eating sandwiches with her small group of friends, and she’d felt something cold and wet touch the back of her neck. She’d let out a shriek of surprise, but her bully had stayed silent for once, his fingers delving into her hair, spreading slimy wetness. She’d tried to pull away but he’d pushed her head forward and ground the gunge into her roots. Only as he’d extricated his fingers had she heard his familiar guffaw, cueing the obedient snickers of the other two.

Later, she’d discovered that it was a large blob of “alien ectoplasm” from a joke shop. Green and sticky with a strong rubbery smell. She’d spent the rest of the day in the toilet trying to get it out of her hair, crying as she’d snapped her friend’s comb and the knotted, gluey mess had just got worse. Eventually she’d been forced to hack into it with a pair of blunt school scissors, leaving bald patches that she’d covered with a hat for months.

She’d felt powerless, not wanting to tell her mum or the teachers, even assuring her friends it was all fine, quite funny, really. But whenever she reached the limits of what she could laugh off, he would decide to be nice to her for a while. Perching on her desk, calling her “Em” and asking if she knew what this quadratic-equation bollocks was all about. After months of humiliation, one friendly word could melt her into a puddle of gratitude. She’d never known how long these interludes would last, though, could never predict when she’d next find her chair drowned in black ink (“Alien Girl blood”), or adorned with a dead frog that had been squeezed to make its eyes bulge like hers.