Rav held up two bottles of fancy-looking Malbec. He’d clearly slunk off somewhere impossibly grand in Mayfair on his lunch break yesterday. Between the wine and the bunch of flowers she’d bought that morning they’d already spent a decent £75 on this evening. She wanted to tell Rav that he should stop bothering, that Max would never be impressed by something as mediocre as a bottle of wine, and that Rav would lose points in his eyes for doing something as pedestrian and middle class as bringing two bottles to dinner. But she couldn’t bring herself to. There was a fizz to Rav’s mood, the same excited bounce he always got when they were doing something new, when he felt he was about to break new ground. So she smoothed her hair instead and picked up the flowers. ‘I suppose we’d better go, then,’ she said.

‘You never know,’ said Rav as he closed the front door behind them. ‘You might even enjoy yourself.’

No fucking way, thought Chloe, as she walked to the taxi.

5

Then

‘Who’s the boy?’ asked Lissy, putting a fistful of Bacardi Breezers down on the pub table, two for each of them. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the deafening Rihanna song.

‘What?’ replied Chloe. She took a long drink of the sugary pink liquid, hoping that if she drank enough of it she would forget that she was having the exact same night out she used to have at home.

‘You’ve been staring at your phone all evening,’ said Lissy. ‘There’s definitely a boy. Right, Sam?’ She raised her eyebrows at her friend Samantha, a sweet, plump girl with a moon face who also lived on their corridor.

Chloe shook her head, watching as Lissy counted her change back into her wallet, which had a picture of a puppy wearing a tiara on it, then zipped it back into her sensible bag. In their second week, Lissy had tried to talk all the girls on their corridor into going to a talk about staying safe on campus. Chloe had said no, and been subjected afterwards to Lissy going on about putting your keys between your fingers as an anti-rape method and carrying hairspray to use as mace on anyone who attacked you.

‘So, who is he?’

Chloe shoved her phone into her pocket. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘It’s not a boy.’ Which was true. The person she was waiting to hear from, the person she’d woken up every morning praying to have a text from, was Zadie. There was no way to explain that to Samantha and Lissy.

‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,’ Samantha assured her. ‘They’re all the same. Ian still hasn’t messaged me.’