Who knows whether TCR would have continued to house their pre-pubescent dalliances if Eliza had not had her evening in. But the day of the party, instead of camping out again in the pool house, Sarah’s mother took them shopping and bought them each a new ‘body’ – bodies being a glorified leotard with poppers at the crotch, the uniform of the teenaged cool. Veronica’s was pale peach, complementing her tanned skin and bright blonde hair. It had been Sarah’s first choice too, but her mother insisted that it washed her out and steered her towards a deep red. Eliza had selected an electric blue one, ribbed with a low neckline that showed the brimming contents of her push-up bra. Veronica expressed her admiration at this. Sarah rolled her eyes.

She rolled her eyes again when Eliza appeared that evening fully dressed, her beautiful dark hair curled in a variety of spirals and crimps, her newly pierced ears sporting dangly blue earrings, her eyelids delicately shaded to match. Suddenly Sarah wished she had borrowed the lipstick Veronica had offered her, and dried her hair properly after her shower, and not chosen a body that was quite so flattening. Not that there was anything to flatten.

She rolled her eyes a further time when Eliza’s friends arrived, coolly excited, chewing gum and flicking their hair. And again, when the boys turned up on mass. Amalgamated sharpness quickly over-scented the living room. Puffy bomber jackets and curtain-cropped hair clustered on one side of the room, bodies and jeans on the other. Pizza, coke and crisps – and nothing else Mum, really, please don’t – stood brave in the middle, occasionally luring a couple of opposites in. Saranveronica stood in a two on the edge of Eliza’s huddle.

Until, halfway through the evening, one of the boys meandered over and said hi to Veronica. And Veronica didn’t seem to notice Sarah roll her eyes at that, or at least she didn’t respond to it. And by the time the games began and the lights were turned down, and they were spinning bottles and declaring themselves ‘nervous’ and engaging in an array of other pastimes that brought lip to lip, and hand against padded bra, Veronica was altogether part of Eliza’s coven, and Sarah had either to join in or not, and found herself retreating upstairs with a ‘headache’, to climb into bed with her parents who were watching TV, every now and then her father declaring it ‘a load of rubbish’, her mother hushing him, and Sarah tearing the crusts off his pizza.

When Veronica finally came up to bed, with Eliza, Sarah was back in her own bed and heard the two of them whispering feverishly outside her door. She strained her ears until at last her friend entered the bedroom. For a minute or two Sarah allowed Veronica to believe her asleep, fumbling around in the dark for her pyjamas, but after a while she switched on her bedside light and sat up, and waited for Veronica to talk.