“Lightweight!” she declares, then she taps a man on the shoulder and points at Kara: “She’s a lightweight!”

Kara does not really know Simone yet, they’re not really friends, she doesn’t feel the weight of obligation. So she leaves.

Left, Simone orders another gin and tonic, and then another. Music sings in her spine. The too-loud laughter is contagious and she sets about giggling. The barman asks her if she’s alright, and she shouts back to him: “I’m laughing!” He nods, that you are, love, that you are. “I’m laughing,” she repeats to a table of people nearby. And they find this hilarious. They laugh with her. Or maybe at her. They hear what she has said and they laugh in response. One of them moves up on the bench and invites her to join them. They are only a few years older than she is, mainly men, but there’s a girl on one of their laps. Somebody orders her another drink. That too feels good; it blurs things. She laughs again. And the group laugh again. One of the men puts his hand on her thigh, and she points at it: “Look what he’s doing!” And everybody laughs again at that.

It might have been minutes or hours later that she feels movement in her stomach, a curdling of something. She runs to the door of the pub and throws up outside it. One of the men from the table joins her. He puts his arm around her waist. “You want me to take you home?” he asks. She shakes her head and stumbles away. She is unnerved suddenly, weakened by her stomach’s frailness, alerted to the realisation of something shifting inside. She wobbles, slipping off the pavement. “You sure?” the man asks again. But she nods convincingly, and he doesn’t follow, and somehow she finds her way back home, where nobody is waiting.

That night she doesn’t even register the silence in the house. She sleeps without waking, well past the single, persistent sound of her alarm for school. When she hobbles into the kitchen for breakfast, still nobody is there.

It is almost two months before she starts singing on the doorstep. They can’t ignore that, can they? Neighbours complain. But by then she has met Noah and she only wants her parents to notice so that she can tell them it’s too late.

Noah is six foot tall, skinny, his hair long and locked in dreads. He is more reserved than his friends, but he notices everything. He noticed her. On the night they first kissed, he ran his thumb over the bumpy tracks on her forearm, then he covered them with a strong, large palm, as though he was bandaging her, shielding her with protective wrap. His mother is a nurse in A&E. His father works in retail. She discovers later that this means he is a sales assistant in Dixons, but Noah is following neither of his parents’ paths, and they don’t want him to. He is studying for his NVQ in accounting, and he writes songs that he is beginning to gig. That is his passion, he tells her, his dream if ever he can afford to pursue it. His friends believe he will. They raise him up as special, a towering talent in their midst, only there among them until the world discovers his gift, although each of them have whispering aspirations too, growing louder. He plays his creations to Simone and she wants to cry for the way in which she feels he knows her. He thinks she is special too. He tells her to stuff her parents, but not to stuff up herself and urges her to do her exams that summer. She won’t. They’ll notice that. And besides, Noah is doing fine without A Levels. Exams aren’t what matter. Money isn’t even what matters. ‘What matters then?’ asks Noah.