I thought she wanted to kiss me back. It seemed implied. Because of the idyllic setting, or her hand on my knee, or the way her lips looked like they were searching for something every time I shifted my weight against the dewy late-July grass. She had told me she liked boys and girls and that she liked my freckles and the way my voice trailed off sometimes, so I leaned all the way in, in, in, until there was no more room to lean. Her lips parted, and so did mine, but she knew what the whoops and hollers coming from the tree line meant before I did, so she pushed me off. Shouted. Made a real good show of it. That was the first time I was ever called a dyke, because it was the first time anyone had enough information about me to conclude that I was one.

It was too late for me. They had already seen. Bea had managed to deflect part of the blow away from herself with her initial hostility, so they weren’t quite as relentless with her as they were with me. I had this fantasy after the fact, that she and I could have faced it together – but that’s not what happened, of course. She hated me. Freshman year, I was the only girl out in Pleasant Hills. People smacked books from my hands. Just looked at me and laughed. Thankfully, they seemed to get bored of me by winter break, with help from the demeanour I’d adopted to make myself as invisible as possible.

That continued for a while, but now I worried that all the work I’d put in had been for nothing.

When you live in a fishbowl, everything seems bigger, magnified, and no one was safe. People said that, in Pleasant Hills, everyone got their scandal. Fifteen minutes of infamy.

I was to get more.

Do not go gentle into that good night. It was Dylan Thomas’s most famous poem, a villanelle, which has something to do with the number of lines – nineteen of them, I think – and the rhyme scheme. Normally, I wouldn’t have remembered that, but everything that happened in class that day was branded on to my brain.

English was the last class of the day. It was also the one class I shared with Olivia, so I thought I was safe. How naïve of me. She had warned me at lunch that we were starting our poetry unit – she couldn’t stand poetry, but I didn’t mind, really; the idea of losing any sense of self between the lines of something abstract seemed comforting.

Mrs Farr introduced the poem as easy and relevant, which should have been my first clue. She had Jamie Uren, an unfortunate name for the girl who we all remembered had pissed herself during the fourth-grade spelling bee, read it aloud.