Who had he ‘heard’ it from? Ellen felt suddenly panicked. Maybe she had done something really awful last night and Kate hadn’t felt able to tell her.

miss_BehaviourX91: yeah with my friend kate

miss_BehaviourX91: such a gd nite

nathan_harris_chelseaFC: ye i was gonna go but got 2 drunk at amars lol

Amar was another boy on her list.

miss_BehaviourX91: oh kl

miss_BehaviourX91: did he have an empty

nathan_harris_chelseaFC: ye we recked the place lol

This did not sound that funny. Ellen remembered Amber Outhwaite’s party.

miss_BehaviourX91: omg

nathan_harris_chelseaFC: ye his parents are gunna hit the roof

miss_BehaviourX91: lol

nathan_harris_chelseaFC: u gunna go out nxt wknd

She inhaled sharply. Maybe he was trying to engineer a meeting.

miss_BehaviourX91: yeah def

miss_BehaviourX91: lol

nathan_harris_chelseaFC: kl

Maybe not. He didn’t say anything else. For a while, she stared at the blinking cursor, and then minimized the chat screen. Only 13 of 157 contacts were online, and Nathan was the only one on her target list. Ellen sighed and signed out. Not a successful evening. Still, at least news of her and Kate’s night out at Pulse had travelled around the Rainham Boys network, although she could not shake the pervasive anxiety that this must mean she’d disgraced herself in some way. Either way, she would bring it up with Kate tomorrow. She retrieved the camera and flopped on to the bed. Maybe she’d take Nathan off her mental target list.

For most of sixth form, Ellen’s approach to MSN was scattergun. She would be speaking to a roster of maybe four or five Rainham or St James’s boys at any one time. Their MSN names were passed around her girls’ school like a swot’s pot of Tippex. Sometimes, Ellen knew the boy in question in real life; usually, she hadn’t met him. She preferred it that way. This allowed her to create a story around the person at the other end of her stuttering broadband connection.

Of course, there were stories. When girls offered up MSN names, they’d also offer up titbits. ‘He asks you to talk dirty,’ the legend would run. ‘He comes on too strong,’ the warning would go. ‘He’ll ask you to meet up and then he won’t turn up,’ was a forlorn, well-worn story. Ellen had never had a dramatic tale to tell. Often, boys would disappear without warning, only to pop up again about a month later, without an explanation. But there were always other boys to talk to.