‘Well, I didn’t, like, take Julia’s word for it, if that’s what you mean. I’m not stupid. That’s why I got the video: just in case she needed a little nudgie. We watched the corridor for weeks after, and Selena never went out on her own. The four of them still went out together, to do whatever they did out there – I heard they’re witches, so maybe they were like sacrificing a cat or something, I literally don’t even want to know?’ Exaggerated wiggle of disgust. ‘And Julia went out a couple of times – she had this thing with Finn Carroll, which, I mean, nobody actually wants to be with a ginger but I guess if you look like Julia you take whatever you can get. But Selena had stopped going. So obviously her and Chris had broken up. Like, surprise?’

‘Any idea who did the breaking?’

Shrug. ‘Do I look like I care? I mean, obviously I hoped for Chris’s sake that he’d suddenly got some standards, but . . . Guys: they only care about one thing. If Chris was getting it off Selena, and he didn’t have to, like, be seen with her, why would he dump her? So I figure it had to be Selena. Either Julia knocked some sense into her, or else Selena copped that, hello, Chris was only using her for an easy you-know-what and a pig like her was never going to be his actual girlfriend.’

Chris’s face bent over Selena’s, holy with wonder. He’d been good, but that good?

‘Why didn’t you want them going out together?’ I asked.

Joanne said coolly, ‘I don’t like her. OK? I don’t like any of them. They’re a bunch of freaks, and they act like that’s totally OK; like they’re so special, they can just do whatever they want. I thought Selena should find out that it doesn’t work like that. Like you said, I was actually doing her a favour.’

I did puzzled. ‘You were fine with Julia and Finn, but. Any particular reason why Selena and Chris was a problem?’

Shrug. ‘Finn was OK, if you go for that kind of thing, but he wasn’t a big deal. Chris was. Everyone was into him. I wasn’t going to let Selena think someone like her had a right to get someone like that. Hello, Earth calling whale: just because you do whatever disgusting stuff you did to even get Chris to look at you, that doesn’t mean you get to keep him.’

I said, ‘It wasn’t because you’d been going out with Chris, just a few months earlier.’

Joanne didn’t miss a beat. Gusty sigh, eye-roll. ‘Hello, haven’t we been over this already? Am I imagining things? Am I out of my mind? I never went out with Chris. Only in his dreams.’