Zadie shushed her gently. ‘Coco, it’s not going to happen. When is this meeting?’

‘Thursday.’

‘Okay, so you just turn up looking like shit, tell them that you’ve been struggling, that you need to stay enrolled otherwise you don’t know what you’ll do – make a big deal about that bit – and then look all teary. They’ll make you get some counselling and check in with your tutor a bit, and you’ll be fine.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Everyone does it, it’s fine.’

Chloe did as she had been instructed. She fought every one of her instincts, which told her to arrive in a neatly ironed blouse with her hair in a ponytail, and turned up wearing a lumpy jumper and jeans, unwashed hair loose over her shoulders. Most of the work was done for her, if she was honest. As she finished getting dressed, she looked at herself in the plastic-rimmed mirror above her sink. She had to admit that what looked back at her wasn’t good. The skin under her eyes was inky and the rest of her face was milk-pale. There were three livid red spots on her jaw line, and her hair had gone sort of floppy. She was thinner than she used to be, but not in a way she could feel pleased with. Her skin was soft and tissue-papery. When was the last time she’d eaten properly? The halls of residence put on dinner every night, safe, school-style food like sausages and mash or pasta bake. In her first weeks she had diligently gone every day, filling up on carbohydrates, making polite conversation with the people on her table. But as she had grown closer and closer to Zadie, she’d stopped. Zadie didn’t seem very interested in food. Coffee in the morning. Diet Coke in the afternoon. Whatever outlandish cocktail she’d decided to make any given evening. Olives, sometimes, a handful of crisps. The fridge was full of lean protein, cooked and eaten by Max. But food seemed too pedestrian, too prosaic for Zadie. But everyone did this at university. Everyone knew that students weren’t supposed to eat much, that drinking every day and being permanently hung over was how it was supposed to be. She had the whole of the rest of her life to eat vegetables and get eight hours of sleep a night.

The panel at her meeting was made up of her academic tutor, a middle-aged woman who she had met a couple of times in the first weeks of term but hadn’t seen since, another slightly younger woman from the university who said she was ‘in HR’ and wore a necklace that looked as if it was made from pasta, and Jules, the graduate student from her halls who had moved her in on her first day.