‘What was that song?’ she says suddenly. ‘It used to be on the radio all the time, last year? Some girl singer.’

‘What’s it go like?’ Becca asks.

Holly tries to sing it, but it’s been months since she heard it and the words have gone; all she can find is Remember oh remember back when . . . She tries to hum the melody instead. Without that light speeding beat and the thrum of guitar, it sounds like nothing. Julia shrugs.

‘Lana Del Rey?’ Becca says.

‘No.’ It’s so totally not Lana Del Rey that even the suggestion depresses Holly. ‘Lenie. You know the one I mean.’

Selena looks up, smiling vaguely. ‘Hmm?’

‘That song. In our room one time, you were humming it? And I came in from the shower and asked you what it was, but you didn’t know?’

Selena thinks about it for a while. Then she forgets it and starts thinking about something else.

‘God,’ Julia says, shifting her arse on the dirt. ‘Where is everyone? Didn’t this place use to be, like, interesting?’

‘It’s the weather,’ Holly says. Her itchy feeling has got worse. She finds a Crunchie wrapper in her pocket and twists it into a tight ball.

‘I like it like this,’ Becca says. ‘All it used to be was dumb guys looking for someone to pick on.’

‘Which at least wasn’t boring. We might as well have stayed inside.’

Holly realises what the itchy feeling is: she’s lonely. Realising makes it worse. ‘Then let’s go in,’ she says. Suddenly she wants the Court, wants to stuff herself full to the seams with synthetic music and pink sugar.

‘I don’t want to go in. What’s the point? We have to go back to school in like two minutes.’

Holly thinks of going inside anyway, but she can’t tell whether any of the others would come too, and the thought of dragging through the grey rain on her own swells the loneliness. Instead she launches the Crunchie wrapper into the air, spins it a couple of times and hovers it.

No one does anything. Holly floats the wrapper temptingly towards Julia, who bats it away like an annoying bug. ‘Stop.’

‘Hey. Lenie.’

Holly practically bounces it off Selena’s forehead. For a second Selena looks bewildered; then she gently plucks the wrapper out of the air and tucks it into her pocket. She says, ‘We don’t do that any more.’

The reasons hum in the air. ‘Hey,’ Holly says, too loud and ludicrous, into the wet grey silence. ‘That was mine.’

No one answers. It comes to Holly, for the first time, that someday she’ll believe – one hundred per cent believe, take for granted – that it was all their imagination.

Julia is texting again; Selena has slid back into her daydream. Holly loves the three of them with such a huge and ferocious and bruised love that she could howl.