Sam didn’t notice me that night. Why would he? I did my best to blend into the background. I watched as others approached him. Men, women. Some that he clearly knew, some that he was only just getting to know. He was an interesting creature. I watched him snake a hand around the back of a thin blonde girl in an electric-blue shift dress, her spaghetti straps falling off her tanned shoulders. I watched as others gave him admiring glances from afar. The thing about Sam was, he wasn’t even my type.

Neither is Carrie.

I haven’t had many close friendships, with men or women. They seem to burn intensely like an oil fire, and then they are doused hard and fast, with barely a flutter of ash to remind anyone that they ever existed.

I need to do things differently this time. I don’t want Carrie to be extinguished too quickly. I need to feed this one more carefully, stoke the coals, add in just the right amount of accelerant to keep things exciting.

I lie back on my cushion, arms behind my head, staring up at the sky through the chimney hole. It’s a deep, bright blue, with perfect puffs of white cloud moving slowly away from us. I think of that song that all the stoners used to play in the nineties. The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ with that piece of hypnotic sampling about the skies in Kansas, and I feel myself drifting into a trance. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear the rhythmic sound of drums. The party is starting.

14

The sun is still high in the sky as we set off across the sparse grass and packed mud towards the festival. I feel strangely excited, a weird fluttering in my chest that could in other circumstances signal the start of a panic attack; but in this case it feels like something big is about to happen. Something significant.

Or maybe I’m overreacting.

I’m tired and a bit wired from lack of sleep and food, and there’s a painful ache in my muscles from the awful trek with the horses.

Carrie has changed into a dress, with leggings and her hiking boots. Her hair is pinned up roughly with clips, she says to hide the greasy roots, but it looks sexy and tousled and I get a squirming jolt in the pit of my stomach when I see Rory staring at her with undisguised lust.

I’ve changed, too, wearing a pale-blue vest that I took out of Carrie’s bag before we left UB. She looked at me a bit strangely when I took off my jumper to reveal it, but I smiled back – giving her a ‘you said I could borrow it’ look, and she obviously decided not to question it. I should be a bit more careful though. I don’t want her getting annoyed with me over something so insignificant.