Kate spent most of her weekday evenings chatting to Ryan, a guy two years above them from Rainham Boys who now worked as a bartender at the gastropub near the station. It wasn’t one of Ellen and Kate’s regular haunts, mainly because it was favoured by parents from their school celebrating anniversaries and birthdays or just escaping their taciturn teenage charges. Occasionally, though, Kate and Ellen would risk it – on a Thursday afternoon, when they had a free period. They’d change into their civvies in the loos, which were straight on the left as you went in, and then they’d go to the bar and sit on the high stools. Kate would chat to Ryan while they both sipped an illegal vodka cranberry. In person, Ryan had dimples and close-cropped, yet strangely greasy, curls and was almost bashful. Online, he asked Kate to tell him – in detail – what she’d like to do to him.

That evening, Ellen went up to her bedroom after dinner. She sat down at her desk, then opened her laptop, waited for it to creak to life – whirring like a propeller – and signed into MSN. Then she added him as a contact. Ellen was blasé about this stage; certainly, she would agonize about conversations and pauses, and the wait when someone would type for ages but no message would appear. But she didn’t mind adding strangers. Everyone knew that the girls swapped the boys’ names on MSN. It didn’t mean anything to add someone. What mattered was what happened next.

Fleetingly, she worried that Holly Stanley was playing an extravagant joke on her. Perhaps rainham_romeo1991 was, in fact, Holly herself, or one of her forgettable friends. This was rumoured to have happened to a girl in the year above, Alison Kay. A group of St James’s girls had done it as revenge, to get back at Alison for chatting to one of their ex-boyfriends. Apparently, they’d tricked her into talking dirty and then printed out the conversation and posted it to Alison’s home.

Still, while Ellen conceded that she did not know Holly Stanley at all, it seemed fairly unlikely that she would be trying to blackmail her, or deceive her for sport. Ellen had never wronged Holly, and vindictiveness for vindictiveness’s sake seemed way too pedestrian for her. Also, Ellen supposed that Holly probably had other things to do on a weekday evening. Like throw paint at a canvas in the studio she imagined the Stanleys had in their three-bed maisonette, or stare into a mirror at her own face. Holly was probably happy to relinquish a contact because she was sort of over MSN. Maybe she had a boyfriend in a band, or one who attended an art school.