It was the not knowing, of course. For the first week after he went AWOL she remained hopeful, believing – naively – that he could still come back with some fantastical but entirely legitimate excuse. (‘My entire family was kidnapped and held in an underground bunker and I’ve only just managed to dig us out using a ladle.’) On the bus home that Friday, she even desperately scanned a local newspaper for any deaths or disappearances of boys called Benjamin around her age. But as the days passed, she gave up on even the most outlandish of excuses.

The chasm he’d left invited her to fill in the gaps. Was it something I said? she wondered, endlessly. It must have been – because he didn’t know what she looked like, beyond a small avatar on a screen. And they’d never met, so it couldn’t have been something she’d done. And so she obsessed every night, replaying every conversation they’d ever had.

It cast a shadow over the rest of that final summer term – and the summer beyond. She felt detached, a beat behind everyone else. She was also mortified. She’d been dumped by a boy from the internet – her first and only approximation of a boyfriend.

For much of the summer, the prospect of university in September felt shapeless. Ellen had no idea if her exams had gone well. But they were done, and the die was cast, and now she’d play the waiting game until she found out whether she’d be going to York. Her family were going to France the day after she got her results, and, daily, her mother would make impertinent enquiries about whether or not her ‘cossie’ still fitted.

She still went on MSN, though less frequently. She’d have half-hearted conversations with the same old cast of people, and it would be distracting if a little unfulfilling, like eating junk food when you really craved a proper sit-down meal. Still, she had vague designs on losing her virginity that summer, and needs must, even if it all made you feel rather cold. She spent a bit of time talking to a guy called Charlie Seeley – or slayer_chucks90 – whom she did know in real life. They went on a few dates, one of which culminated in him fingering her at a screening of The Hangover at the Odeon in Gravesend.

It sort of fizzled out when she got her results, which were exactly what she needed to get into York, and at that point she realized she’d been holding her breath for months. They texted a few times – Charlie prematurely wished her ‘happy 18th’ the day before her actual birthday – but the texts cost a lot and Ellen would rather use them on Kate, detailing the mundane humiliations of her family summer holiday to Brittany.