Cecelia keeps messaging lewd things to me and Dad even leaves a note on my pillow telling me not to do anything he wouldn’t do, and it’s difficult to pretend that today is normal.

I practise what I might say again and again in my head, and it never goes quite right. The Illness is a difficult one to explain to someone – even to Cecelia, who’s been seeing it right in front of her for years and years.

She’s right, though. It’s time for Rowan to see me for who I really am. And if he’s really going to see Me, then I’m going to need to use something a little bit different to Stream Cast. I’m going to have to turn my own camera on.

Cecelia races out of school at lunch to help me get ready. She’s packed what looks like the contents of her entire bedroom into one beach bag and, before she’s even all the way in the room, she’s throwing out brightly coloured cardigans and what look like torture devices.

Mum follows at her heels. ‘Cecelia? What the hell is –’

‘Sorry, Sophia, I love you, but –’ She closes the door on Mum’s rather shocked-looking face.

I scowl at her and she throws her hands up.

‘We. Don’t. Have. Time! I only get forty minutes for lunch and have you seen you lately? Dude.’

She jumps on to my bed and hands me a mirror and I make a point of not looking at it.

‘I just need to look presentable, okay? I don’t need a makeover. I don’t need whatever you’re planning on doing with those.’

She stops unwinding the hair curlers and sighs. ‘Mate – and I say this with all the affection in the world – but you are absolutely clueless.’

I go to argue, but she’s suddenly on me with a brush. ‘Shut up now. The master is working.’

So I close my eyes and I let her work.

She mutters what I think may well be insults about my ‘stupid pale face not matching her tones’ and how she ‘really has her work cut out’, until I sneak an eye open and she stops talking.

She must be able to find something, though, because she rubs a sherbet-smelling cream into my skin, and dusts me for fingerprints. She pokes at my eyeballs with a brush and makes me blink on to another.

And then she kisses me. Right on the lips. I look at her, surprised, and she smiles.

‘That, Alice, is how hot you look.’ She sits back and holds up a mirror.

I’m expecting to see someone completely different. Or perhaps just myself looking a mess. But I don’t look like that. I just look like me. Only a bit more even.