He slammed on the brakes. “Isabella, are you out of your mind?”

“I know exactly what I’m doing. Don’t you dare call me crazy. I’m not the one who’s crazy for their ex-girlfriend, now am I?”

He said he wasn’t, but how was I supposed to know if he was telling the truth?

I miss Sergei’s hands. Big, strong, warm. They were always warm on my body, moving so slowly. My Russian love machine, I called him. I can see his hands when I close my eyes, his hands open like fans, spread like sea stars on the sand.

He was always wanting me. But I only let him when he was good, when he behaved, when he did my chores around the house, when he arrived exactly when I told him to and left when I said so, when he called me exactly when I told him to. Then he’d get his reward.

I mean, he wasn’t doing much with his life, just looking after his grandmother all the time, but anyone can look after an old Russian lady. What’s the big deal? I told him he was a loser, that he’d let his life just rot. He got so angry, so hurt. He wanted to get married, but I told him I couldn’t marry him like he was. And who gets married when they are fifteen? But Lulu, I bet she wanted to marry him. She would probably be into teen marriage, just to get her claws in him, to get Sergei away from me. She’d probably get pregnant right away and he’d be stuck with her for the rest of his life, and it would be just fine with her.

My father didn’t even know Sergei and I were seeing each other, that’s what he told the police. He’d forbidden it. He forbid a lot of things, but it’s hard to rule the castle when you are never in the kingdom. That’s what I told him when he came to see me here for the first time three months ago, after they called him and said I’d been arrested. I remember my father sitting there, all tired-looking, rumpled. We were in a little room and there was a youth worker sitting outside the door.

“But I told you not to see him anymore,” he said, looking at the bruise on my face, putting his head in his hands.

“Yes, I know, Daddy. But I was lonely.” I looked at him and then down again. It was easy to start crying. I used to practise in my bedroom with a stopwatch to see how quickly I could make my eyes tear. I would think about starving children in Africa, their bony bodies and bloated stomachs, things like that. I would sit on my bed, holding my pink princess mirror in one hand and the stopwatch in the other, and I would picture poor little children, all alone, children in those refugee camps with no parents, and then the tears would slip over my eyelids and run down my face. Just looking at myself was amazing, how my eyes filled up like fish bowls and the tears slid down in a perfect oval shape, how blue I looked. It was like watching a star in a movie, this really beautiful girl who no one understands and she’s all alone all the time, her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend trying to steal him away.