In the living room someone had set up a speaker and sickly dance music pumped into the rooms. The house was detached and ancient, but the music still travelled. Chloe wondered how angry the neighbours must be and then immediately hated herself for it. The kitchen, where she had been standing for longer than she wanted to admit to herself, had been transformed, drowned in students drinking from plastic cups, every surface littered with bottles.

The party might have been different, but the feeling that she had no idea where to put herself was exactly the same as it had been back in Surrey. She couldn’t see Zadie or Max, both of whom had disappeared into the crowd an hour or so earlier. They’d pointed at a few people and shouted their names at her before they’d gone, clearly assuming that Chloe had a far better grasp of herself than she did. Term had only been going for a few weeks. How did all these people already know each other so well? She took a long slug from her drink and steeled herself.

‘Hey,’ she said to a pretty girl with auburn hair who was pressing her back against the fridge.

The girl raised an eyebrow. ‘Hello.’

‘How do you know Max and Zadie?’ she heard herself ask. As if this were one of Greg’s golf-club mixers. The girl cocked her head. Perhaps she would think it was a satirical remark. Maybe it was such a pathetic thing to have asked that it would seem funny.

‘I went to school with Max,’ she replied, still seemingly uncertain. ‘I have to pee.’

She had left a cigarette – a rollie – on the counter next to where she had been standing. Chloe picked it up. Really, she shouldn’t take it, but it was only a cigarette, and the girl had been unfriendly enough that Chloe sort of hated her. Plus, she knew from watching people at school that smoking was the quickest and easiest way to make friends. She put the cigarette between her lips and went into the garden, looking for someone with a lighter. A group of boys were gathered, watching the tallest of them down a giant bottle of Magners. ‘Have you got a light?’ she asked one of them. He turned and she drank in his dark hair, dark eyes, dark blue polo shirt.

‘Sure,’ he said.

She took a long, heavy drag as he flicked the flame, grateful that, if nothing else, she did at least know how to smoke properly. The thought evaporated as the acrid stream filled her lungs, and she coughed, an embarrassing, hacking cough.

‘You might want to go easy on that,’ the boy said, smiling. ‘It smells fucking lethal.’

Chloe held the cigarette out, looking at it sideways, as the realization dawned on her.