At least three minutes slowly ticked by before Veronica started to giggle. “You idiot, you look like a pretzel,” she laughed, slapping Sarah’s leg playfully. “You’re such a doofus.”

“Too sad for you?” Sarah prickled. She lifted her legs away from Veronica up onto her bed.

“Oh Sawah, you know I didn’t mean it,” Veronica soothed in a sing-song baby voice. “I’m so-wee. You know I don’t think you’re sad.”

“Stop doing the voice,” Sarah admonished, though she knew Veronica was aware that she found it hilarious, especially when she did it to teachers. “If you don’t think I’m sad, then why did you–”

But Veronica had now leapt onto Sarah’s bed and was nuzzling her face into her shoulder. “Sa-wah, don’t be cwoss Sa-wah…”

And it was difficult and not entirely practical to keep the argument going.

She supposed she could ‘forgive but don’t forget’. (There were a number of phrases like this that Sarah’s mother had doctored, unintentionally, and passed on in their distorted state to her daughter.)

“I’m so-wee Sa-wah. You’re my BFF Sawah. Sawah–”

“Oh fine,” said Sarah, pushing Veronica away, though struggling to remain aloof amidst the infectiousness of her affection. “Fine.”

Veronica grinned then, kissing her smack on the cheek. And Sarah could not help but bask in her enthusiasm, and feel glad that Veronica was here for three whole weeks.

And so their days at the swimming pool began. Punctuated by games of swing-ball in the garden, and trips to the tennis club, and occasional dinners out. One night, after a dinner at TGI Fridays, Veronica arrived back home bursting with excitement, and even after an hour making up a dance routine to Bon Jovi’s ‘Always’, and after an ‘extension’ downstairs so they could watch a 15 rated video, she was incapable of calming down. Even an hour later, after Sarah’s mother had been in twice to tell them to go to sleep, and Eliza had screamed at them from across the corridor, Veronica still kept leaping out of bed to tickle Sarah’s feet or chuck something across the room at her, and in the end Sarah herself went past sleepy, and they sat together on her bed, listing in reverse order first the prettiest girls in their year, then the cleverest, then the ones most likely to get off with somebody first, until they ran out of ideas for lists and Veronica suggested a midnight swim.

Sarah’s parents’ home sat in its semi-detached plot of suburban greenery, with open windows and unbolted doors. A gleaming ‘top-of-the-range’ alarm system had been fitted a year or two earlier, but since the dog was likely to set it off in the middle of the night, it remained gleaming and unset.

Saranveronica slipped quietly out of the lounge door and padded gleefully across scorched, crunchy grass, down the steps to the sunken pool area. It was still warm, with just the faint chill of night-time. They were already in their costumes – Sarah’s a multicoloured two-piece with a frill around the knickers; Veronica’s a matching neon pink version. They hadn’t dared open the linen cupboard in case of a squeak, so carried damp towels that they’d used earlier, and made a great show of stuffing them over their mouths to stifle their laughter. If anybody was looking, the far right corner of the pool could be seen clearly from Sarah’s parents’ bedroom, but the rest of it was shielded from sight and together they darted through the dark, down the steps, and to the pool house. As suspected, the key had been left in the lock, and Sarah swiftly turned it, allowing them to fall into the changing room and right through to the room at the back before releasing their guffaws against the closed door and wooden walls and tiny window. The single light bulb illuminated a moth that seemed to flutter on the rise and fall of their sniggers.