I don’t stay long. What’s the point? I pull up a few weeds, cut back a bit more of the bramble jungle. I’ve been coming here for nearly a year and you can see progress. It’s nowhere near finished—that would take years. But I’ve turned it from a weed-filled mess to something beautiful, a riot of climbing roses and wildflowers. Maybe the new family will like gardening. Maybe one of the insanely hot boys will carry on my work and one day he’ll find out it was me who was the secret gardener and we’ll fall in love.

Yeah, right.

I brush compost off my jeans and pack my stuff away. It’s another hot day. I close the side gate and walk back out onto the lane, stopping dead when I see Bella walking toward me flanked by Nicole and Caitlin, her two best friends.

“Jesus, Tess—what have you been doing? Crawling in the mud? Rolling round in the bushes?” It’s Nicole who says it, and Caitlin laughs. Bella, in the center, doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t laugh at me like the other two, but she doesn’t support me, either.

“Come on, Tess, fess up. Who have you been rolling around in the bushes with?” Nicole says.

“Tess with a boy? As if,” Caitlin says.

Nicole finds this hilarious. And Bella? She isn’t laughing. But she still. Doesn’t. Say. Anything.

My hand squeezes the carrier bag. I want to get out the clippers and hack off their stupid flicky hair, silence their mocking words with a trowel in the face. Instead, I keep walking, head down, shoving Nicole with my shoulder as I march past.

My eyes are swimming with hot tears as I round the corner.

“Tess—wait.”

I can hear Bella running up behind me, but I don’t slow down.

“Hey,” she says, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

“Am I okay?” I turn to face her, letting her see the tears.

“Look—I’m sorry, okay?”

“Why didn’t you say anything? Why do you let them be such cows to me?”

She raises her hands and lets them drop. “I…I don’t know. But Tess, come on. You don’t help yourself, you know. Look at the state of you—you’re not eight anymore, a chubby tomboy in dungarees.”

Chubby. She actually said chubby. Yes, I know I’m a state—my T-shirt’s too tight and my jeans are filthy. No makeup, hair a halo of frizz. But I’ve been bloody gardening, not going to a goddamn nightclub.

“You’re embarrassed by me,” I say, my voice flat.

“No—of course not,” she says, but there’s a pause before she says it and no conviction in her voice.