Bessie gagged and swallowed the wave of sick rising in her mouth. She clapped her hands over her ears. ‘Stop talking to me! Just fuck off and leave me alone!’ Outwardly she raged, but inside it was as if her very fabric was dissolving, rendering down into nothing more than mush in the acid of his words. She closed her eyes for a second, wishing she could literally disappear.

‘I see how it is, and that’s a shame.’ Tony pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, drawing on it between his thumb and forefinger, trying and failing to look like a T-Bird in his plastic leather jacket. ‘You’re a slut, Bessie Worrall.’ His words were weapons and they wounded her so distinctly she could feel the pain of them in her chest. He exhaled and his second-hand smoke hit her in the face. ‘I know it, Lawrie knows it and you know it, and by tomorrow, everyone in that rugby club will know it.’ He pointed with his cigarette towards the low building where the music pulsed and the lights flashed, before removing a small fleck of tobacco from his tongue.

‘I am not!’ she croaked, her tears rising and with something close to panic in her throat. His threat was horrific, laced with venom, and worst of all from Bessie’s perspective, it was rooted in truth.

‘But you are! Having sex with someone you don’t even know – nine times?’ He tutted loudly. ‘That’s sluttish, you dirty girl.’

‘I want to talk to Lawrence.’ Bessie wanted to face the boy who had been as keen as her to get physical and had apparently done the worst thing he could: turn on her, lie to her, ridicule and use her! She needed to look him in the eye to confirm he had really done this because there was a chance, the smallest chance, that he had told Tony in confidence and was unaware of his friend’s behaviour. Maybe he would leap to her defence, take her hand and tell her it was all going to be okay . . . She wished with every fibre of her being that this might be so, still unable to think that the boy who had lived in her mind, stolen her daydreams, and by doing so helped mess up her exams and re-route her future, would be capable of such shitty behaviour.

Tony laughed out loud. ‘I bet you do, but he doesn’t want to talk to you.’

‘Yes, he does,’ she managed, her limbs quaking. ‘You don’t know what we share!’

‘Oh, you saddo – that’s priceless!’ He took a step closer. ‘And you don’t know what I do.’ He came closer still and she could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. ‘You see, there’s this girl he likes, I mean really likes – not just a hole, but someone he wants to go out with, someone he respects.’