I had the distance between my house and the corner to feel my own anxiety rather than absorb my mother’s. I paused at the end of my road and grasped my narrowing throat as the hugeness of this day engulfed me. I panicked about how people would stare at me. I panicked at how hot I was going to be in my uniform. I panicked at the sheer impossibility of getting through a school day without panicking, let alone managing to learn anything. I panicked Kim had got her desperate, pathetic hooks into Amy and taken away my best friend. I panicked my spots still showed through my thickly applied Rimmel concealer. Then I panicked all this panic would make me numb out again, and tip me back down into the mental hellhole that I’d been so carefully scaling my way out of. Already sweating into my synthetic jumper, it became abundantly clear that living my life was a complete impossibility. Dragging myself every day across a bed of shattered glass...for what? GCSEs? Uni? A job? A life? What kind of pitiful life? A life where every day was determinedly difficult, and unrelenting, with only minor pockets of happiness to break up the misery. Surely, I thought, that’s not worth the effort? Surely I should just surrender? Tap out...? Surely oblivion was better than surviving...

...And then I caught myself. I noticed my thoughts spiraling and my breath catching, and noticing was the most important step. They’d told me that in therapy. I patted my own chest to comfort myself.

I recognize I’m thinking about killing myself again, I told myself.

I notice that I’m assuming the worst.

I’m underestimating my ability to cope and overestimating how hard the world can be.

And, because I was, at that point, still highly medicated, I rubbed my heart through my jumper until my fingers were full of static, and it worked. I managed to short-circuit the path to oblivion.

Just in time, because, as I wandered around the corner, I found Kim waiting with Amy.

“Oh my God, Fern, aren’t you boiling?” Kim grasped me in a friendly hug she definitely didn’t mean. “I can’t believe you’re wearing your jumper. It’s, like, a trillion degrees today. It’s so shit it’s finally boiling on the first day back.”

“I’m fine. I’m not hot,” I lied.

Amy and I hugged while Kim watched on anxiously. As we started the familiar path to school, none of us mentioned Kim’s presence. She lived twenty minutes in the opposite direction. I sneaked a sideways look at her, noting Kim’s brand-new fringe, and raised my eyebrows. They both were wearing their hair in scraped-back ponytails—cemented with gel to their scalps, with only their wispy fringes left out to oxygenate. “Nice fringe,” I said.