Scott smirked and gave her that salute again. In the time that she was gaping at them, open-mouthed, a woman stepped in beside Ellen and got served immediately.

She couldn’t remember getting home when she woke up in Kate’s double bed the next day. There was a glass of water beside her, and a washing-up bowl that Ellen was relieved to see she hadn’t made use of. She didn’t feel too bad. Kate was sleeping beside her. She was still wearing her fake eyelashes, and it looked like she had a spider resting on each eyelid.

Propping herself up on her elbows, Ellen reached for the glass of water and took a grateful gulp. Thankfully, she could see her bag on the floor, and she swung her legs out of the bed and crawled towards it, to retrieve her BlackBerry and her camera. Her mum had texted, asking when she was coming home. There were no other messages. Dispirited, Ellen locked the phone and put it back in the bag. She returned with the camera to the bed, and started to swipe backwards through all the photos from last night.

Luckily, filling in the blanks of Ellen’s memory wouldn’t be too hard: they appeared to have taken more than a hundred photos. Most of them were of Ellen and Kate posing on the dance floor. There were a few from the bathroom, and several that featured a girl whom Ellen swore she had never met before. Still, in one of the pictures she had her arm around the girl, whose fake tan had seemed to protect her from the spectral effect usually delivered by Ellen’s 4x optical zoom. There were also a number of pictures from the centre of the roundabout on the A road, which had clearly been taken at the end of the night. In several of them, Ellen was holding a traffic cone.

The camera bleeped every time she scrolled through the photos.

Eventually, the bleeps stirred Kate, who turned on her side to face Ellen. ‘Hi,’ she said, one eye still closed. ‘How are you feeling?’

Ellen spent most of the rest of the day at Kate’s, doing an edit of last night’s pictures to upload to a new album on Facebook (‘ellen and kate go 2 pulse … AGAIN’), while eating stacks of toast and Nutella. It turned out they had actually spoken to the Rainham boys for a few minutes.

‘Shit, was I really weird?’ Ellen moaned.

‘No, you were fine,’ Kate said, impatiently. ‘You were drunk, in a club, under-age. They thought we were really cool.’

Ellen wasn’t certain she believed that, but decided she didn’t want to know any further details.