The reason was when we had to take our clothes off in PE, Emily was allowed to keep her vest on and the shiny, scaly skin on her neck went down both sides of her shoulders. It swirled in flows of pinks and whites down her arms and sides into the back of her knickers. It was a burn she got from an iron pot of water when she was little. She had to be careful to keep it covered up, so I only ever saw glimpses of it moving and changing under her vest. It was like watching splashes of paint turn into skin. She didn’t mind me looking, it was her skin, she lived in it. She said it didn’t hurt. It was her quick body, the way she threw herself around, I liked. The way she drew her legs up under her chin and looked around at what we were doing and enjoyed being her. It was the way we got on. She knew I was there and let me see where the burn went down the back of her vest, but she never said anything.

It was only when her older sister came up and took her away with her lip cut and bleeding and her hair pulled out of place she looked at me. I was standing there like I’d called her a fleabag, and people were looking like they weren’t sure what I’d caught.

I told my mum about it, the way I felt about stopping the fight. She looked at me sideways and shook her head, ‘Ah, no,’ she said, ‘you’re barking up the wrong tree. Those people will take from you, but they won’t owe you a kindness.’

I didn’t care. I showed Emily how to do the sums and carry the numbers across with 77 and 99 ... 9 and 7, 16. Put down 6 and carry across 1. 7 and 9, 16, add the 1 you carried across, 17 ... 176.

I wasn’t sure that was a clear example. People were looking at me, I was sat next to her, helping her with her sums, but they were the sums my dad was showing me and we hadn’t done them in class yet. I was giving her everything I could think of. Maybe she thought I was showing off because she blinked, like that wasn’t what she was thinking about and she wasn’t getting it. I put my hand up to scratch the back of my head and the girls on my table started giggling. I looked at Emily, she was going back to being blank in her eyes, like she wasn’t there and I was calling her fleabag. The teacher looked up from her desk and frowned.

‘What are you doing?’