‘Come on!’ Bessie pulled her friend from the bed and they ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind them. She ran a shallow bath. Both whipped off their dungarees, discarding them in piles on the bath mat and perching now in their knickers and T-shirts on the flat corners of the tub opposite each other. Bessie grabbed her dad’s shaving foam from the little shelf over the washbasin and squirted a sizeable puff into her friend’s hand before doing the same in her own. They each slathered it on to a leg and then carefully, hesitantly, pushed the guard from the blade.

‘I guess it’s like when we first plucked our eyebrows – remember how much it hurt?’ Bessie laughed, thinking of how they had tweezed one hair and screamed! ‘And now we’re used to it,’ she said, to reassure her friend.

‘I guess so. I’m just worried that it’ll grow back like whiskers, like my dad’s beard.’

‘No, I don’t think it works like that. I think the hair on your legs is different.’ Bessie went first, confidently sliding the razor along her shin, aware of the moment, the rite of passage. Michelle followed suit until they were twisting their legs at odd angles to reach them with the razor before rinsing the blades in the warm, ankle-deep bathwater to unclog them of suds and fine hairs.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ Michelle said, holding her defuzzing weapon aloft. ‘We’ve been at school all these years and in less than an hour we’ll know if it was all worth it.’

Bessie laughed. ‘Well, of course it was all worth it! First, I met you . . .’

‘Your best friend in the whole wide world ever, ever, ever,’ Michelle interjected.

‘Yes, that. Plus, we’ve learned lots of stuff that’ll be useful, and our grades are our ticket to the rest of our lives.’

‘And by that you mean being an air hostess?’

‘Yep.’

She looked at the toothpaste sitting in a little plastic beaker next to her mum’s toothbrush by the sink. She wanted a more exciting life than her mum’s, that was for sure.

‘It’s weird, but there’s nothing else I can think of that I’d like to do. I want to go up in that aeroplane, Michelle. I want to put on that red uniform and I want to go to California. America!’

She, like everyone else at school, had a fascination for the place where big skies, big burgers, big cars and big hair were the order of the day. A country whose culture she soaked up via the medium of TV and her favourite programmes: Dallas, Dynasty, Hart to Hart and Miami Vice. The closest she could get to the US of A, however, was sitting in McDonald’s.