I look to my dad for rescue, but he’s been led off by Greg to a crowd of men holding bottles of beer.

“She doesn’t want to play with your dolls, sweetie. I’ll just get the boys to…Jack? Sean? Come over and say hello to Tess,” she calls.

Oh no. Oh please.

They walk over, the older one still grinning.

“Boys—this is Tess, one of our neighbors. Why don’t you take her to hang out with you?”

The younger one is still staring at me, unsmiling, and my face is getting hotter.

“No,” I say, too loudly. “I want to play Barbies.”

The older one—Jack—laughs again. “Of course you do.”

Three weeks later, one chilly, bright Saturday morning at the start of half-term, Julia Lewis pays us a visit. It is the day after Ben Matthews kissed me at school. He walked back to his gang of friends afterward and I heard one of them ask him how it was and he said, “She tasted fat.” It was my first kiss and it was coated in humiliation.

Julia brings more than her three kids. She brings Max and Lena, the children of her best friends. “They work abroad,” I hear her say to Dad in a hushed voice. “Poor things—they hardly see their parents.”

My plan to stay with the adults and keep little Ellie company is stalled by the sight of the boy, Max. Forget the Insanely-Hots, he’s the handsome prince, the white knight, the happy-ever-after; he’s all of them. He smiles at me and it melts away the humiliation, it melts away the elephantine layer of imaginary fat that has settled on me like a real weight. His smile makes me feel I can stand next to Bella and not in her shadow.

Then the spell is broken as Bella bounds up. “Come on,” she says. “We’ll show you the woods.”

Bella leads us through the woods to the fallen tree at the top of the embankment by the stream. “Look,” she says, laughing, pointing to our names carved into the wood. “We did this last year, made it our tree.” She pulls a penknife out of her jeans pocket and holds it out to Max. “Want to sign?”

I frown. It’s supposed to be our tree. Our woods. Our place. I want to snatch the penknife out of Max’s hand, but…But. I also want Max to carve his initials next to mine. I’d have added a love heart around them in my imagination. Tess and Max, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

But it’s Bella’s name he carves his own next to and Lena adds hers on the other side, so the three of them are huddled together, not enough space between them so it’s like one name—MaxBellaLena—a solitary, wobbly-lettered Tess alone three inches away.