She doesn’t have a clue what she’ll say when they come. As far as she can see, she has two options: spill her guts about how she wasn’t the only one meeting Chris, or deny everything and hope her parents get her a good lawyer. A month ago she would have said she’d go to jail before she’d throw Selena under a bus, no question; but things have changed, in ferocious tangled ways she’s having trouble getting a grip on. Lying awake late, she runs through each scenario in her head, tries to imagine each one playing out. They both feel impossible. Julia understands that doesn’t mean they can’t happen. The whole world has come apart and gone lunatic, gibbering.

By the end of the week she thinks the cops are playing mind-games with her, waiting for the suspense to break her down. It’s working. When she drops a binder – she and Becca are in the back of the library, collecting binders full of old Irish exams for the class to practise on – she almost leaps through the roof. ‘Hey,’ Becca says. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I’m actually smart enough to decide for myself whether it’s OK or not,’ Julia snaps in a whisper, scooping dusty pages off the staticky carpet. ‘And believe me, it fucking isn’t.’

‘Jules,’ Becca says gently. ‘It is. I swear. It’s all going to be totally fine.’ And she runs the backs of her fingers along Julia’s shoulder, down her arm, like someone calming a spooked animal.

Julia, whipping upright to rip her a new one, finds Becca looking back with steady brown eyes and not a hint of a flinch, even smiling a little. It’s the first time in weeks she’s looked at Becca properly. She realises that Becca is taller than her now, and that – unlike Selena and Holly and, Christ knows, Julia herself – she doesn’t look like shit. The opposite: she looks smoothed, luminous, as if her skin’s been stripped away and remade out of something denser and so white it’s almost metallic, something you could shatter your knuckles on. She looks beautiful.

It makes Julia feel even farther away from her. She doesn’t have the energy to rip anyone anything; she just wants to sit down on the disgusting carpet and lean her head against the bookshelves and stay there for a long time. ‘Come on,’ she says instead, heaving up her armful of binders. ‘Let’s go.’

After another week she realises that the cops aren’t coming. Finn hasn’t given them her name. He could have used it to bargain down the expulsion into a suspension, thrown it to the cops to get them off his back, but he didn’t.