Her mum stopped singing. ‘Shut up, Eddie!’ She elbowed her husband, who stopped playing abruptly, and stared at him as if he were all alone in his musical endeavours and she were not the driving force behind the whole welcome idea.

‘You can’t cry on your birthday!’ Her mum’s words only made Bessie cry harder. She had completely forgotten it was her birthday.

‘What’s the matter, love?’

For the love of God – what do you think might be the matter? I’ve just got my results and they’re shit! But she pulled herself together enough to talk softly and slowly, with a veneer of calm, other than the odd gulping breath.

‘I messed up, Mum,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I messed up really badly.’

‘Oh, come on inside, love. I bet you haven’t! It’ll all be okay. No need for tears.’

Bessie stepped over the threshold, and as she saw the three round plasters on her shin, they reminded her of Michelle’s words earlier and another layer of worry now settled in her gut – Michelle liked Liquorice Popcorn? How had that happened? Michelle knew how she felt about him and now she would have to come clean about the whole sex thing and have to deal with the fallout of her friend’s confession . . . on her birthday. It was all a bit much and she slumped down in one of the chairs at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Her elbow stuck to a lurking residue of gluey lemon juice, a reminder of the pancake fiasco of earlier. No good day started with bad pancakes, not even a birthday.

Her dad sat opposite her, while her mum hovered awkwardly behind, leaning on the work surface.

‘No one cares about exams, not really! There’s plenty of people who’ve succeeded without exams,’ her lovely dad piped up, ‘and as your mum says, they can’t have been that bad!’

‘So come on, Bessie, just tell us what you got?’ Her mum bit her bottom lip and gripped the sink behind her, as if bracing herself for the news.

Bessie coughed, her voice quiet, entirely different from when she had yelled upon waking to let everyone know it was her birthday.

‘I failed nearly everything – I got ungraded on most subjects and then a couple of E’s.’ She folded her hands into her lap and her shoulders drooped.

Her parents stared at her with their mouths slightly open, seemingly at a loss as to what to say. She quite understood – she was at a loss as to what to say, what to do . . .