‘Well, what the fuck?’ Chris’s hands fly up, frustrated. ‘I’m not asking her to cut her arm off. I’m like, who cares if you actually want a dumb bracelet? You definitely don’t want to be that girl who no one will go near her and everyone’s texting around stories about how she eats her snot and pees herself in class. So just do this one tiny thing that everyone else is doing.’

‘Did she?’

‘No. I bought her the fucking bracelet, and she binned it. And if she pulls something like that in Kilda’s? People like Joanne, if Carly swans in here like it doesn’t matter what any of them think, they’re going to . . . Jesus.’ He rakes a hand through his hair. ‘And I’ll be in college by then; I won’t even be around to do anything about it. I just want her to be happy. That’s all.’

Selena says, ‘Has she got friends?’

‘Yeah. She’s not super-popular or whatever, obviously, but she’s got these two girls who’ve been her best friends since they were all in Junior Infants. They’re coming to Kilda’s too. Thank God.’

‘Then she’ll be OK.’

‘You think? They’re two people. What about everyone else? What about all them?’ Chris jerks his chin at the hall doors, the muffled jumble of beats and screams. ‘Carly can’t just ignore them and hope they leave her alone. It’s not going to happen.’

He sounds like they’re one great bristle-backed creature, laser-eyed and dribbling for throats to rip out, never sated. Selena realises that Chris is afraid. For his sister, for Becca, but bigger than that. Just afraid.

There are things stronger than that creature. There are things that could rip it limb from limb if they felt like it, spike its head a hundred feet high on a cypress tree and use its sinews to string their bows. For a second Selena sees the white arc of a hunting call flash across the sky.

‘Not ignore them,’ she says. ‘Just . . . not let them matter.’

Chris shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ he says. For a second the full curves of his lips harden; he looks older.

Selena says, ‘Becca’s happy in there, right? In her jeans.’

‘She can’t exactly be happy about those geebags bitching about her.’

‘She’s not. It just . . . like I said. It doesn’t matter.’

Chris stares. ‘If that was you. If they were bitching about your dress. That’d be fine with you?’

‘I bet they are,’ Selena says. ‘I don’t care.’

He’s turned towards her on the steps. His eyes are hazel, a cool hazel speckled with gold. Selena knows if she could just touch him she could draw out the fear like snake venom, roll it into a glistening black ball and throw it away.