Sarah had been part dreading and part looking forward to Veronica’s visit. It had been ‘in the diary’ for months, requested by the girls but arranged painstakingly by their parents. Veronica’s father worked for the UN and that summer he was needed – so they were needed – for six weeks in Oman. Veronica had pleaded with her mother to stay, but the most her mother would agree to was a week with Veronica’s grandmother, and two weeks at camp. That left three long weeks unaccounted for. So they had concocted this scheme. “It’s really a lot of hassle you know,” Sarah’s mother had said to her after one logistics phone call with Veronica’s mother. “And Veronica is used, I think, to a fair bit more… space, and… stuff. Are you sure you’re not going to get fed up with each other after a day?”

“She’s my best friend,” Sarah had answered, in the superior tone specifically endowed to twelve-year-old girls.

Eliza, sitting in the corner of the lounge engrossed in a Sweet Valley High book, rolled her eyes. She did this frequently of late. She’d ‘started’ four weeks before her thirteenth birthday and since then seemed to think she was above everything, or at least everything to do with her younger sister. As though a knowledge of sanitary pads demarcated adulthood.

“And Eliza’s tedious these days,” Sarah added for good measure. “Veronica will actually do something with her life more adventurous than reading books we could have managed when we were six.”

Eliza rolled her eyes again.

“Oh, no comeback?” Sarah goaded.

Eliza didn’t even look up from her page.

It was true: as desperately as Sarah longed for her sister to delight in the games they’d once conspired in, she would these days have more fun with Veronica. But all this was before they’d broken up.

It was terrible timing, two days before the holidays. They’d been ‘in a two’ all term. The previous term there’d been talk about joining up with Jenny and Nicole to form a four, but Veronica didn’t like Nicole since she’d stolen her box of ink cartridges, so in the end they’d stayed as they were. Until Lisa Markozy’s sleepover.

There was always a danger with sleepovers that if you didn’t attend, everyone else would bitch about you, and come Monday you’d find that the whole social order of life had been rearranged. This is exactly what happened to Sarah, who had been at Grandma Sadie’s seventy-fifth birthday in Dorset, and not the sleepover, when Veronica had started sucking up to Beth.

Usually, they both considered Beth to be just a little too close to slaggy. All of the girls talked about what they had done with boys – snogging and laying on top of them and such; but nobody had really done any of that. Beth, on the other hand, had a real boyfriend she had not only ‘got off with’, but had let ‘touch her up’. She’d already ‘started’, the first one in their class, and had pert apple-sized boobs that needed a real bra where the rest of them still had uneven chicken nuggets. So that was why Beth’s boyfriend had wanted to touch her; but Sarah and Veronica had agreed that Beth should not have said yes.