‘My dad was thinking the same thing,’ Holly says. ‘I could see it. I was terrified he was going to say something smart-arsed when McKenna finished, but Mum stood on his foot.’

‘It totally was elitist,’ Julia says. ‘So? There’s nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it’s not doesn’t make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick. What made me want to puke was the fawning. Like we’re these products our parents shat out, and McKenna’s patting all their heads and telling them what a good job they did, and they’re wagging their tails and licking her hand and just about peeing on the floor. How does she even know? What if my parents never read a book in their lives, and they feed me deep-fried Mars bars for every meal?’

‘She doesn’t care,’ Becca says. ‘She just wants to make them feel good about spending a load of money to get rid of us.’

There’s a snip of silence. Becca’s parents work in Dubai most of the time. They didn’t make it back for today; the housekeeper brought Becca in.

‘This is good,’ Selena says. ‘You being here.’

‘It doesn’t feel real yet,’ Holly says, which is only sort of true but is the best she can do. It feels real in flashes, between long grainy stretches of dizzy static, but those flashes are vivid enough that they throw every other kind of real out of her head and it feels like she’s never been anywhere else but here. Then they’re gone.

‘Does to me,’ Becca says. She’s smiling up at the sky. The bruise has faded out of her voice.

‘It will,’ says Selena. ‘It takes a while.’

They lie there, feeling their bodies sink deeper into the glade and change rhythm to blend with the things around them: the tink tink tink of a bird somewhere, the slow slide and blink of sunbeams through the thick cypresses. Holly realises she’s flipping through the day, the way she does every afternoon on the bus home, picking out bits for telling: a funny story with a bit of boldness in it for Dad, something to impress Mum or – if Holly’s pissed off with her, which it seems like she mostly is these days – something to shock her into letting a reaction slip out: Sweet Lord, Holly, why would anyone want to say such a . . . while Holly rolls her eyes to heaven. It hits her that there’s no point in doing that now. The picture each day leaves behind isn’t going to be given its shape by Dad’s grin and Mum’s lifting eyebrows, not any more.

Instead it’ll be shaped by the others. Holly looks at them and feels today shifting, fitting itself into the outlines she’ll remember in twenty years’ time, fifty: the day Julia came up with the Daleks, the day Selena and Becca brought her and Julia to the cypress glade.

‘We better go in soon,’ Becca says, without moving.