The girls were talking fast, gesticulating wildly, as if all the words they hadn’t been allowed to speak during the three-hour exam were now spurting out of them in a saved-up torrent. I probably couldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if I’d wanted to. They usually made me laugh with their intense diatribes on boys, but today I felt too spent to engage. Or perhaps I felt that I’d grown apart from them, since Greenham and Samantha and Dad’s death. I really didn’t care whether Neil Hart got the highlights in his hair done at a salon or just used Sun-In like the rest of us.

I drew a short way away and was idly watching the hypnotic dark-green swirl of the river weed under the surface as I walked, trying to spot the minnows and occasional freckled trout darting through it.

Someone was cycling towards us, and I instinctively moved closer to the riverbank to allow the cyclist to pass between us. She was almost upon us when the sun suddenly glinted on her hair, like a celestial arrow pointing her out to me. I gasped so hard and stopped so suddenly that Julie ceased mid-sentence in her impassioned rant about how much it hurt to get highlights, especially from her hairdresser, who seemed to take pleasure in snapping on the thick rubber sieve-hat, then dragging the hair strands through with the metal crochet-hook.

It was Samantha.

‘I swear she’s trying to stab me with that thing … What’s the matter, Meredith?’

I ignored the question. Samantha screeched to a halt beside me, the edge of the wicker basket on her handlebars touching my right breast, her eyes greedily latching onto mine and holding me in her amber gaze. She looked astonishingly beautiful, red hair streaming, like a Valkyrie on two wheels; an angel of death who would rip me away from my old life forever. I felt a slow smile spread across my face and wanted to run into her arms, yelling with joy. But then I saw Julie and Charlotte gawping first at her, then at me, then at each other, and I felt gauche in my rolled-up skirt, jumper tied round my waist, ankle socks and – the shame – I even had a naff flowery hairband in my hair, the one I’d had since I was eleven years old. I wanted to rip it off and throw it in the river. I couldn’t have looked more like the schoolgirl I was unless my hair had actually been in pigtails and I’d had ink splotches all over my fingers.

‘Hiya,’ I said, grinning at Samantha, questions tumbling over themselves behind the dam of my mouth. I immediately firmly closed it to prevent myself either kissing her or giving her the Spanish Inquisition.