All their eyes have gone to Holly. She has a flash of her dad, his grin as he sideslips when you try to pin him to an answer: never get tied down, not till you’re beyond sure, not even then.

The others, blazing white against the dark trees, triple and waiting. The soft curve of shadow under Selena’s chin, the narrow back-bend of Becca’s wrist where she leans on her hand in the grass, the downward quirk at the corner of Julia’s mouth: things Holly will know by heart when she’s a hundred, when all the rest of the world has been scoured away from her mind. Something throbs in the palms of her hands, pulling towards them. Something shifting, the smoke-spiral ache of something like thirst but not, catching her in the throat and under the breastbone. Something is happening.

‘Same here,’ she says.

‘Oh, God,’ Julia says. ‘I can hear it now. They’re gonna say we’re some kind of lesbian orgy cult.’

‘So?’ Selena says. ‘They can say what they want. We won’t have to care.’

A breathtaken silence, as that sinks in. Their minds race wild along its trail. They see Joanne wiggling and giggling and sneering in the Court to make the Colm’s guys fancy her, they see Orla howling helpless into her sodden pillow after Andrew Moore and his friends ripped her apart, they see themselves trying desperately to stand right and dress right and say the right things under the guys’ grabbing eyes, and they think: Never, never ever, never never never again. Break that open the way superheroes burst handcuffs. Punch it in the face and watch it explode.

My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.

The power of it, buzzing inside them to be unlocked, makes their bones shake.

Becca says, ‘We’ll be like the Amazons. They didn’t touch guys, ever, and they didn’t care what people said. If a guy tried to do anything to them, he ended up . . .’ A second that whirls with arrows and flares of blood.

‘Whoa,’ Julia says, but the small smile is back and it’s her own smile, the one that most people never get to see. ‘Chill. This isn’t forever. It’s just till we leave school and we can meet actual human guys.’

Leaving school is years away and unimaginable, words that can never turn real. This is forever.

Selena says, ‘We need to swear it. Make a vow.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Julia says, ‘who does stuff like . . .’ but she’s only saying it out of reflex, it spins faint and dizzy away into the shadows, none of them hear.

Selena holds out her hand, palm down over the grass and the hidden trails of night insects. ‘I swear,’ she says.