Hey, God, please make this a good year for me. Please help me get out of this town. I want to see the colour of the sky in California. I want to chat to people who don’t know every square inch of this place like I do. I want to have a life like I see on TV, where people live with big, big kitchens, good tans and great hair. I want an amazing life – and I want Lawrence to fall in love with me, like I have with him.

Even the thought of Lawrence was enough to send her a little cuckoo, as if her excitement was more than she could contain. It burst from her like fireworks.

And of course, I also want world peace and an end to all hunger. Thanks. Oh, it’s me by the way, Bessie Worrall.

She kicked off her duvet, jumped out of bed and stood like a star with her hands over her head and her legs splayed. Filling her lungs, she shouted out, ‘It’s my birthdaaaay!’

‘Shut up!’ came the muffled reply from her brother, Philip, whose room was along the hallway. ‘No one cares!’

‘You shut up!’ she hollered in reply, with the express intent of irritating him. ‘And actually, you’re wrong – I care!’

Nothing, not even his foul mood, could dampen her spirits. She walked to the mirror above the chest of drawers in the corner of the room, where an irritating sticky splodge of glue from some long-discarded sticker sat in the corner. She studied her face, figuring she looked pretty much as she had done last night when she’d gone to bed, which was both a disappointment and a relief. Her boobs, she noted, were still no more than small buds, which she cursed, and there was sadly no visible improvement on the crop of spots fighting for space on her chin. She pulled a pouty face, very much liking the way her hair bouffed up when she first woke and disappointed at the prospect of it falling flat over the coming hours. The long-layered lengths with a hint of blonde, courtesy of a generous squirt of Sun-In, gave her a bit of a Bonnie Tyler vibe, although her brother, whose comments she largely ignored, said she looked more like Bon Jovi – but what did he know? She pulled it back into a scrunchie. Her eyebrows were freshly plucked into thin, high arches over her hazel eyes. She ran her finger over the little red dot of crusted blood where she had nicked the skin with a misplaced tweeze. Hours could be spent this way, staring at her face, prodding it, and comparing it to the pretty faces of the girls at school.