Mum sits at the dining table with her laptop open in front of her, reading glasses on, a cup of coffee beside her, in an example of the most normal scene you could conjure up in our household.

‘Did you have a nice time at Chloe’s?’ She flips her glasses to the top of her head. I think she knows I lied.

‘Great,’ I say. Our potted palm needs watering, no one has stacked the dishwasher since yesterday, and nothing has changed at all in the world. I met a sex criminal, I yelled at a rapist and still everything is exactly the same.

‘I hurt my hands.’

I hold them out towards her. I’ve grazed both of my palms, close to my wrists.

‘Oh, sweetie, how did you do that?’ Mum gets up straight away.

‘Tripped and fell over.’ I have the vaguest memory of stepping off the gutter near Stockton station and flying, sprawling across the asphalt and bouncing up again.

‘Upstairs,’ says Mum and I follow her to their ensuite, where she washes, disinfects and bandages my hands. Her touch is cool, her presence soothing.

‘Mum, can we do delivery tonight?’ I ask.

‘Sure,’ she says and she lets me wear her slippers and dressing gown because somehow hers are so much softer and more comforting than mine.

CHLOE

DAY 58

I start Term Four locked in a toilet cubicle, the mature and reliable technique I used heavily in my first few weeks at Balmoral. Looking down at my hands, I can literally see the work I did on the holidays: paint under my fingernails, irritated patches from the glue, a tiny cut from my scalpel. I had to take a 7 a.m. bus here this morning, dragging my clunky artwork with me, and I’m already exhausted.

The illusion of bathroom calm holds for one moment, but then I picture the bell ringing at the end of form assembly and thousands of girls spilling into the corridors, funnelling up towards the Great Hall for all-school assembly. The entries for the school art prize, including mine, have been hung in the main corridor along the outside length of the Hall.

Everyone that enters the school will see them.

I spent the weekend in a frenzy of collaging, making a frame around my photo that hopefully gives some context to the piece. Adut recommended I look up a German artist called Hannah Höch, who used collage to comment on gender issues and criticise the government. It was just the reference I needed, so I put my doubts aside and went for it. I’ve used newspaper snippets about missing women, shreds of Devil Creek episode descriptions, excerpts from one of Mum’s crime books and a dozen tiny cut-out clones of me in my school uniform, standing or crouched, looking inside at Natalia.

I’ve called the piece Someone’s Watching, because the words seemed like they held a few different meanings.