‘And I don’t know about you, but being the genius I am, I figure James Gillen didn’t feel like telling the rest of Colm’s that all he got out of his afternoon was a bruised ballsack, so he told them I was a slut who couldn’t get enough. And that’s why Marcus fucking Wiley feels I’d just love a photo of his dick. And it’s just going to keep on coming, isn’t it?’

Selena says, but there’s a thread of uncertainty flawing her voice, ‘They’ll forget about it. In a few weeks—’

‘No. They won’t.’

Silence, and the watchful moon. Holly thinks about finding out some disgusting secret about James Gillen and spreading it till everyone laughs whenever he walks past and finally he kills himself. Becca tries to think of things to bring Julia, chocolate, funny poems. Selena pictures some yellowed book with curled writing, a low rhyming chant, knotted grass and the smell of burning hair; a shimmer closing around the four of them, turning them impermeable. Julia concentrates on finding animals in the clouds and digs her fingernails through the layers of grass into the ground, till clumps of dirt stab up into the quick.

They have no weapons for this. The air is bruised and swollen, throbbing in black and white, ready to split open.

Julia says, hard and final as a slamming door, ‘I’m not touching any guy from Colm’s again. Ever.’

‘That’s like saying you’re never going near any guy ever,’ Holly says. ‘Colm’s guys are all we meet.’

‘So I won’t go near any guy ever, till college. I don’t care. Better than having another of those stupid pricks telling the whole school exactly what my tits feel like.’ Becca goes red.

Selena hears it like a single ding of silver on crystal, shivering the air. She sits up. She says, ‘Then me neither.’

Julia shoots her a ferocious stare. ‘I’m not just being all, “Oh, my ickle feelings are hurt so I’m giving up men forever.” I mean it.’

Selena says, unruffled and sure, ‘Me too.’

In daylight it would be different. In daylight, in indoor light, this would never come to them. Powerless and stifled, the rage would turn ingrown. The stain on their skin would burn deeper, branding them.

The clouds are gone but the moonlight is speeding faster, turning around them. Becca says, ‘Same here.’

Julia’s eyebrow flicks, half wryly. Becca can’t find how to tell her that it’s not nothing and that she wants it to be more, she would bring the biggest thing in the world to put in the middle of their circle and set it on fire if she could, so that she’d deserve this; but then Julia gives her a small smile and a private wink.