Kim heaved a sigh. “I hope Matt stares at me and thinks how fit I am this term. Did I tell you he said hello to me on MSN the other day?”

I caught Amy’s eye for the tiniest moment and we shared a silent decision to entertain Kim’s desperately fruitless crush. She’d been obsessed with Matt since he got overnight fit in Year Eight. Through osmosis, after many conversations, I knew Matt’s star sign (Aries), his favorite color (blue), his previous relationship history (he went out with Karly for two days in Year Seven, and kissed Gail at the Year Nine disco, but told her he wasn’t ready for a relationship), and his GCSE options. Yet Matt remained totally oblivious to Kim’s adoration, which was impressive naivety, considering last year she took to full-blown stalking him (“I just happened to be walking the same way as him and accidentally found out where he lived”).

“What happened?” Amy asked. “Did he write anything else?”

“Well, I asked him how he was, and he didn’t reply. So I logged out and logged in again, but he didn’t say hi again.”

As Kim spouted on about Matt’s bone structure, I realized I found it all quite relaxing. The banality of it—as if the last six months hadn’t happened. I caught Amy’s eye again and we shared a secret smile. The conspiracy of it glowed warm in my stomach.

“You OK?” Amy asked again when we reached the school gates.

“Remember, Fern,” Kim added, “we are here for you. If anyone says anything, tell us, right? We are your guardians.”

That was two uses of the word we for her and Amy. Kim’s battle lines really had been drawn. I stretched my arms up into a yawn, and the synthetic fabric pulled under my already sweaty armpits. I felt incredibly tired all of a sudden. I didn’t have the energy to fight for my best friend. Not right now. I just wanted to survive the next two years of school. Staying alive came first, friendships second.

I was yet to discover how much the two were entwined.

School smelled exactly the same. That was the first thing I noticed. The acrid itch tickled the back of my throat as we merged into a homogenous blob of uniformed students, waiting to get through the main doors. It smelled of BO masked with Lynx Africa. As we pushed into the Year Ten corridor, too much school came at me way too fast. The dull banging of locker doors shutting. The colony of fellow teenagers buzzing with first day back energy. The frenzied catching-upness and showing-offness before the bell rang. Everyone figuring out who’d got hot over the summer, or lost their virginity, or both. Everyone stared as I passed, their eyes glancing toward my long sleeves.

“Everyone’s looking.”