A breadth of darkness away in Kilda’s, snow brushes at the dorm-room window, small fitful flakes, not sticking. Winter has clamped down hard: early sunsets, petty sleet and the streaming cold that’s been going around mean it’s been a week since Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca felt daylight, and they’re jiggly with confinement and leftover sniffles. They’re arguing about the Valentine’s dance.

‘I’m not going,’ Becca says.

Holly is lying on her bed in her pyjamas, copying Julia’s maths as fast as she can, throwing in the odd minor mistake for authenticity. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I’d rather burn off my own fingernails with a lighter than wiggle myself into some stupid dress with a stupid micro-mini skirt and a stupid stuck-on low-cut top, even if I owned that kind of crap, which I don’t and I’m not going to ever. Is why.’

‘You have to go,’ Julia says, from her bed, where she’s face-down reading.

‘No I don’t.’

‘If you don’t, you’ll get sent to Sister Ignatius and she’ll ask if you don’t want to go because you were abused when you were little, and when you tell her you weren’t, she’ll say you need to learn self-esteem.’

Becca is sitting on her bed with her arms around her knees, clenched into a furious red knot. ‘I have self-esteem. I have enough self-esteem that I’m not going to wear something stupid just because everyone else is.’

‘Well, fuck you very much. My dress isn’t stupid.’ Julia has a shimmy of a dress, black with scarlet polka dots, that she spent months saving for and bought in the sales just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the tightest thing she’s ever owned, and she actually kind of likes the look of herself in it.

‘Your dress isn’t. Me in your dress would be. Because I’d hate it.’

Selena says, through the pyjama top she’s pulling over her head, ‘Why don’t you wear whatever you like best?’

‘I like jeans best.’

‘So wear jeans.’

‘Yeah, right. Are you going to?’

‘I’m wearing that blue dress that was my granny’s. The one I already showed you.’ It’s a sky-blue minidress that Selena’s granny wore back in the sixties, when she was a shopgirl in cool parts of London. It’s tight on Selena’s chest, but she’s wearing it anyway.

‘Exactly,’ Becca says. ‘Hol, are you wearing jeans?’

‘Ah, bugger,’ Holly says, scrubbing at a mistake that turned out bigger than she expected. ‘My mum bought me this purple dress for Christmas. It’s actually OK. I might wear that.’

‘So I’d be the only loser in jeans, or else I have to go buy some stupid dress I hate and be a total compromise coward liar. No thanks.’