Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Katie Lowe 2019

Cover photograph © Lysandra Coules/Arcangel Images

Cover layout design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Katie Lowe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008288976

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008288990

Version: 2019-11-08

Dedication

For Maria

Epigraphs

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1868

Observe these generation of Witches, if they be at any time abused by being called Whore, Theefe, &c, by any where they live, they are the readiest to cry and wring their hands, and shed tears in abundance & run with full and right sorrowfull acclamations to some Justice of the Peace, and with many teares make their complaints: but now behold their stupidity; nature or the elements reflection from them, when they are accused for this horrible and damnable sin of Witchcraft, they never alter or change their countenances nor let one Teare fall.

Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches, 1647

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraphs

The strange thing …

Autumn

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Winter

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Spring

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Summer

Chapter 17

Autumn

Chapter 18

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The strange thing, they said, wringing their hands and whispering as though we couldn’t hear, or weren’t listening through extension phones or cracks in the walls, was that there was no known cause of death.

Inconclusive, they said, as though that changed the fact of it, which was this: a sixteen-year-old girl, dead on school property, without a single clue to suggest why or how. No unexplained prints on the body, the forensic examination finding no trace of violence, nor rape, nor a single fibre that could not be linked to the girl, her friends, or her mother, whom she had hugged for the last time that morning as she left for school. It was as though her heart had simply stopped, her blood stilled in her veins, preserving her forever in a single moment, watchful as the dawn.

The papers blurred it out, took suggestive photographs of the screen the police erected around the scene, an implicit acknowledgement of the horrors that lay within. But by that time, I’d already seen it. I see it now, sometimes, when I’m struggling to sleep. It’s etched there, in my mind, not because it was horrific, nor due to some long-standing, unresolved trauma. No, my feeling is quite the opposite: a thrill, cold and sweet, in the recall.

I think of the scene, now, because it was so perfectly composed, like a Renaissance painting, the girl’s neck angled slightly, like La Pietà, though I did not see that, then. It was over a decade later, on a tour of the Vatican, that I first realized the likeness. My students, for obvious reasons, thought that my solitary teardrop as I explained the history of the sculpture belied some exquisite taste on my part, a visceral response to the beauty of Michelangelo’s work; I did nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

She was beautiful when she was alive – a child just discovering her power, knowing herself, all collarbones and blooming flesh – but death, it must be said, gave her something of the sublime. A little like the poem, ‘La Gioconda’ by Michael Field: ‘Historic, side-long, implicating eyes; / A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek; / Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies / Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest / Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek / For prey …’ An underrated duo to my mind. How I love those words, even now.

In this pose they found her, eyes open, sitting upright on a swing. Immaculately put together, alive but for the blue threads of deoxygenated blood in place of youth’s blush; the impossibly delicate silver threads that tied her hands to the chains, the stiffness of her back, the result of rigor mortis, by the time she was found on the still gently rocking swing. Feet crossed at the ankles, ladylike, though one of her shoes had fallen to the ground below. All this, in a thin, white dress, turned almost see-through by the morning dew. A modern masterpiece, precise and profound.

‘So tragic,’ they said. ‘Another angel taken home,’ written on cards taped to store-bought bouquets, ink dripping in the rain. In the markets, beet farmers and fishermen muttered under their breaths; the local newspapers – whose usual focus was limited to the town’s growing seagull population and the many, endless failures of the one-way system – were filled with photos of her for weeks, her school photo tacked on their banner, ‘Never Forget’, in an incongruously jaunty font beneath. The news reporters – the real reporters, national, international, such was the allure of the image – lurked among the townspeople for weeks, listening for hushed conversations, searching for clues. Hotels saw a dramatic uplift in room occupancy; restaurateurs joked grimly that death should visit more often. That it had been, by all accounts, a very good year.

‘Every possible measure will be taken to get to the bottom of this case, and to prevent anything like this happening in our community again,’ the police chief said, chest puffed, parading peacock-like for the camera. I watched it with my mother, first, and then years later, at home, alone, after an unknown voyeur uploaded it online, grainy in a way that echoed the great tragedies of the TV era. Something about it reminded me of a video I’d found of the Kennedy shooting, the solemn delivery, the echo of the head thrown back. ‘We will investigate every angle, every lead, and every person in contact with this young lady to ascertain the exact circumstances leading up to her tragic death,’ he said.

They didn’t, of course. They ruled out the usual suspects – boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, a deranged parent – all to no avail. Even now, if you search for her name, you’ll find amateur sleuths on message boards posting their own theories – sometimes unhinged, sometimes surprisingly accurate. In the small hours of the night curiosity leads me there, when the darkness falls heavy and my need to see her swells. I’m grateful to the voyeurs of the internet, to the stranger who uploaded the crime scene photos, decades after the fact. They turn my nerves electric, the memory radiating white hot, clear.

For, despite all that followed – the investigation, the questions, the on-camera tears and plaintive words wailed at drooling reporters – even after all these years, I struggle with this one, unspeakable truth: I don’t feel bad about what we did. Any of it. Somehow, I can’t. It’s a crime, of course, and the fear of retribution naturally haunts me. But still, guilt is not the feeling I associate with her death.

Because, in the year I knew her, and in all the events leading up to her death – her murder – I felt more alive than I ever have, before or since. ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame—’ a quote I repeat to my students regularly, though it never seems to capture their imaginations as it did ours – that, Pater said, is success in life. And in the memory of her, I feel that flame burn, hard and bright.

We were close to the divine. We touched gods, felt them flow through our veins. Felt lust, envy, greed, quicken our hearts – but for a while, we were truly, spectacularly alive. It might have been any of us, sitting there like the Madonna on the gently rocking swing. Sheer luck made it her, not me.

Autumn

Chapter 1

Visitors joked that it was the kind of place people came to die. A town at the end of the world, at the end of the century: the absolute end of the line.

The population ageing, sick and tired: the remains of the old brickworks hollowed by the wind. A little south, a well-known suicide spot, white cliffs that drew the despairing up and then over into the cool, grey sea. Train tracks that stopped abruptly, roads that led to no place but here … These were the obvious signs, I suppose: the root of the joke. But it wasn’t just that.

It was the rain-battered shop fronts with peeling signs; pavilions caked in bird-shit and graffiti. The grey beaches, equal parts sand and shards of glass, crumpled beer cans and plastic bags. The arcades on the promenade, Caesar’s Palace, Golden Ticket, Lucky Strike, carpets damp with beer and bleach, copper coins rattling on tin; men smoking in the fruit machines’ lurid glow, hypnotized by the roll and ring. The pale fields of burned grass, barbed wire and brick. The shipping yards, great metal tombs arranged by mechanical beasts; the wilful, leering stench of the fish market. The corrugated bomb shelters, the stone mermaid, face worn away by the wind.

This is where I spent my youth, and found myself fixed, like a figure painted in oils; decay still rolling on, the shore dragged away by the sea. One day it will all be gone, and the world will be better for it.

There is little to tell of the years before I turned fifteen, my childhood quiet and dull, days and years blurring without consequences. My mum stayed home, taught me to read, watched me grow; my dad ran a small shop which, as far as I could tell, sold everything. I would hide in the cool, dark storerooms, plucking neon pens and glittering pencil sharpeners from scratched plastic trays and damp cardboard boxes. Board games, tested by me, playing my shadow. Books read, carefully, spines unbroken, pages held lightly as ancient runes. It sounds lonely, I imagine, but it was a comfort.

When I was eight, Mum said we’d been blessed with a special Christmas gift, and rubbed her swollen belly. I went to the encyclopaedia. Imagined her insides stretching, fists clutching tendons, amniotic sac bursting, tiny fingers crawling out. It’s one of the only Christmases I remember now, as an adult.

It was a girl. A writhing, red-faced, screaming girl with a mass of black hair and cold, grey eyes. She was possessed, her whole life, with a look that suggested she knew more than she let on, little keeper of secrets. She was seven when Dad’s car slipped under the wheels of a truck as he drove us to the beach. He died instantly, she lingering for four days, though she barely looked like herself. Barely looked like a person at all, really, her skin mottled blue, wet stitches carved into her skull.

I, for my part, climbed out of the car, a smudge of blood on my arm (not mine), plucked a damp fragment of bone from my hair (nor this). Brushed away the frost of glass that clung to my skin. Walked away, feeling like I’d woken from a long, dull, dream.

And that, I suppose, was the end. Or the beginning, depending on how you look at it.

Their lives ended, and Mum’s life stopped. Even decades later, when I returned to clean the house after her death, everything remained as it was that day. Wallpaper greying, carpets scorched with wear. The same books on the shelves, same VHS tapes unboxed under the old TV, still emitting a low, static hum. Same tie hanging in a loose knot on the bedroom door, same crumpled papers in the bin, the same last words abandoned mid-sentence on a yellowing page.

‘Perhaps we might consider an alternative approach,’ my dad’s last recorded thought in smudged, black ink. Everything was placed there with memories attached, my dad’s fingerprints and sister’s laugh still covering everything, like a skin that wouldn’t shed.

I, however, felt nothing. Leaving the hospital, nothing; throwing a clod of damp soil into the pit, soft thump on varnished pine, nothing. Mum weeping on the sofa, clawing at my hair, pressing damp, hot palms to my face, clinging to my life: still, nothing.

Weeks later, I woke on the sofa to find her staring at me as one might take in a half-expected ghost, lip bitten to the jelly beneath. ‘I thought she was … I thought you were gone too,’ she said, her eyes wet with tears, pointing at a face on the screen that looked like mine, but for the details. Hair dull blonde, hers shining, mine textured, split, like old rope; eyes close as one might find to black, but for a chink of amber in her left iris; lips round, always a little too full for lipstick, which gave me the distinct look of a circus clown. Mine were chipped and ridged white with medicinal balm, a compulsive picking I couldn’t shake, hers blush pink, smooth and smiling to reveal white, un-chipped teeth. I thought, watching her face flicker on the screen, that she was a better version of me – the one I longed to be. The artist’s ideal, brush softly smoothing my faults, delicate touch between the lines.

‘Renewed concerns for the missing teenager Emily Frost, who disappeared exactly one month ago today. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and her family have issued a new appeal for any information relating to her disappearance.’

I watched the stock footage, the familiar cliffs, the too-familiar edge. Nobody bothered to count the suicides these days. Emily had last been seen walking there, at the highest point.

‘Mum, I’m here. That isn’t me. She’s just a jumper,’ I said, reaching for the remote. ‘They always are.’

‘We just want you to come home,’ her dad said, staring down the lens. ‘We miss you, Emily. Please, please come home.’

I changed the channel and went back to sleep.

If there can be said to be an up-side to miraculously surviving a car wreck, apart from the immediately obvious, it’s that nobody expects you to go to school.

‘Not until you’re ready,’ Mum said. The therapist nodded sagely behind, a cornflake stuck to his moustache, a fat fingerprint smudge on his glasses. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just take your time.’

And so I did. I took my time: skipped school right through to my final exams, declaring myself ‘home-schooled’. I sat in a silent hall, surrounded by people I knew, my former classmates whispering as I walked in and right out again: ‘I thought she was dead,’ one said, pointing at me with a bloody, bitten nail.

I had already planned my future, or at least, had drawn a basic sketch. I would leave – though where to, I wasn’t sure. I’d get a job. A waitress in a quiet café, where interesting visitors would tell me thrilling lies. A bookshop clerk, offering new worlds to bored children; an assistant in a gallery, maybe. I could learn to sing, or play guitar. I could write a book, life ticking quietly along around me. It wouldn’t be glamorous, sure, but it would be enough. Anywhere, really, would be better than here, this town in which the greys of the old houses, sky and sea seeped into your heart and turned irreparably it black.

But on the day of my results, I came home to find Mum at the kitchen table, papers clenched in white-knuckled fists. ‘It’s what they would’ve wanted,’ she said, handing me the entry forms for Elm Hollow Academy – a private girls’ college on the outskirts of town. ‘It’s a privilege,’ she said: one afforded to me by the unspeakably large settlement offered by the haulage company under whose articulated truck our car had been crushed.

School, to me, was all taped-up windows, boxy buildings cracking at the edges, grey even in sunlight; freezing portacabins, graffitied bathroom mirrors and the loamy stink of teenage sweat. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said, and left.

She didn’t argue. But the papers sat on the kitchen table for weeks, and each time I passed I found myself drawn to the glossy pictures on the cover of the brochure: looming, red-brick buildings set against a too-blue sky, sunlight needling through pearly clouds behind a Gothic arch. There was a decadent, honey-sweet richness to it – one that I knew wasn’t for me, but seemed, in the flickering kitchen light, the stifling damp in the air, to be another world entirely.

And so – reluctantly, at least as far as my mum was concerned – I agreed to give it a try. Our dilapidated Volvo purred behind me at the gates, and I turned to wave her away, though she – thinking herself unobserved – was staring down at the steering wheel, grin a steely rictus beneath strings of dirty hair. I winced, and turned away, catching the eye of a passing girl watching, embarrassed for us both.

I walked towards the school quickly, looking up at the looming clock tower – the Campanile, I would soon be corrected, inspired by the reds and creamy whites of Tuscan cousins, gleaming in sunlight – and dipped under the arches, into the main building. Students gathered on the steps in clusters, whispering.

I passed wholly unnoticed, and told a stout, grey-haired woman – Boturismo made flesh – my name three times. She stared at me, blankly, through the glass partition, muddy with prints and unsettling scratches. Without a word, she slid a sheaf of papers through the gap and pointed to a row of seats. As I sat staring numbly at the endless list of extra-curricular activities and advanced classes, none of which I had any interest in taking, a girl loped by, hair bottle-red, ladders torn artfully into her tights. She waved with two fingers and smiled, a rolled-up cigarette teetering on the edge of her lip. I stared until the last second before she disappeared into the crowd, when I at last mustered a weak, lost smile.

She must’ve been smiling at somebody else, I thought. But as I looked around, back to the wall, this seemed unlikely. I sat, dazed, among the marble busts and gloomy portraits of long-dead headmasters until the bell rang, and the crowd dispersed. I waited, peering down the empty corridors, wondering whether I might have been forgotten.

A door creaked behind; I heard my name, and stood. The man in the doorway was tall, though not imposingly so, a little pot-bellied; tweed and sweater, horn-rimmed glasses; skin possessed of the waxy paleness common to those who spend too much time indoors. He stared at me, blinked, coughed; held out a hand, fingers clubbed and ink-stained. ‘Come on in,’ he said, softly.

He moved a stack of books and spilled papers from a wide, worn armchair next to the desk and I took a seat. The office was warm, if a little stuffy, books piled high under sediment layers of dust, framed prints of medieval etchings covering the walls. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. Caught staring, I shook my head and picked at a loose thread on my folder.

‘So, let me begin with my usual spiel, and then we’ll get to know each other,’ he said, taking a seat by the desk and leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He took a deep breath: tang of stale coffee on it, sour.

‘On behalf of the faculty of Elm Hollow, I’d like to welcome you to our student population.’ He paused, smiling. ‘We’re a small school with a varied and prestigious history, and we’re proud to have among our alumni leaders across a range of disciplines, including the sciences and the arts.’ There was a brief pause as he waited for me to respond; I nodded, and he went on, his smile the kind one might offer to a well-trained dog.

‘Our teaching staff includes many of these professionals, and our students are given the opportunity to follow in their footsteps with a wide array of curriculum-based and vocational courses. My name is Matthew Holmsworth, and I’m the Dean of Students here at Elm Hollow. I teach among the Medieval History faculty, primarily, but I’m also responsible for ensuring welfare among the student body, and, of course, welcoming new students such as yourself. You can call me Matthew – though I’d suggest calling the rest of the faculty Dr Whatever-Their-Name-Is until you’ve reached that level of informality, though, to be quite honest, that isn’t likely to happen with all of them … I, however, prefer to be called Matthew.’

He paused, drew breath, and smiled again. I looked away. In the weeks and months after the crash, I’d become somewhat accustomed to people looking at me like this, the ‘tragic miracle’ look, as though the fact of me confused them. I found it nauseating. ‘So what brings you here, Violet?’ he asked, though judging by this look, he already knew.

‘I need to get my A-Levels,’ I said, flatly, voice little more than a croak.

‘Great. That’s great. I’m told you were self-taught last year – is that right?’ I heard the creak of his chair as he leaned farther forward, and looked up.

‘Yeah. I … Yeah.’

‘That’s a very impressive achievement. You must be quite proud.’ I nodded. He looked down at my file, and almost imperceptibly raised his brow. I knew, for all my teenage claims of apathy that I’d done well; better, certainly, than anyone had expected. ‘Well, I can see you’ve got an interest in the arts,’ he continued, apparently choosing not to comment. I blushed at having expected more, a knot of shame coiling, sharp.

‘We have an outstanding arts faculty – our English programme is second to none, and most of our Music students go on to spectacular things at various conservatoires here and in Europe, so both of those would be solid choices. You might also consider one of our Fine Art courses, too – Annabel is highly selective, but I’d be happy to recommend she review your transcripts, if you’re interested …’

As he spoke, he ran a finger absent-mindedly over the glass of a framed etching lying on the desk. I followed the path, black ink on creamy paper: a woman tied at the stake, staring into the eyes of some great hulking beast with curling, twisted horns and broad wings. Behind her, three ghouls, arms reaching for her neck.

A silence fell. I realized he was waiting for a response. ‘That sounds … Great.’

‘Super,’ he said, with all the brightness of a department store Father Christmas. ‘And do you have any questions for me?’

‘Can I have a look at that?’ I said, reaching for the picture. I caught myself and pulled my hand away.

‘This? Well, of course.’ He paused. ‘It only arrived this morning. I’ve been wanting to procure a copy since I joined the faculty.’ He handed me the frame, and I placed it on my lap, leaning in to examine the beast’s feathers and scales, his mad, wild eyes, his used-car salesman smile. The flames curled up and around the woman’s feet, rising to meet the hair that fell long down her back. ‘Margaret Boucher,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the history of Elm Hollow, haven’t you?’

I looked up. ‘I’ve read the prospectus.’

‘Oh, no. The prospectus is the sales brochure. Accurate, of course,’ he said, with a wry smile. ‘But it’s the rather sanitised version. Most of the faculty are drawn to this place for one reason or another from our school’s history – it’s tempting ground for the academic.’ He lowered his voice, a confidential whisper. ‘My interests, for instance, lie in the witch trials that took place on the grounds in the seventeenth century. Quite possibly in this very spot where we’re sitting now.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Oh, quite serious, yes. The wych elm you passed on your way in marks the spot where she was burned.’ I stared at him, but he went on, cheerfully. ‘It was believed – though I’d stress that this is medieval belief, not fact – that this was fertile ground for all kinds of sorcery. Many well-known folk myths originated here, though the references to Elm Hollow have faded away with time. A very good PR job on the school’s behalf, I think.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. It was a real frenzy, for a time. And occasionally, so they say, since – though that’s not really my area, being a medievalist and all. Still, it’s not uncommon for curious guests to arrive on the grounds, seeking an audience with the Devil himself.’ He chuckled, and leaned back in his chair. ‘Instead, they meet Mrs Coxon on reception, and they don’t seem to hang around long after that.’

He let out a sudden cough, as though catching himself. ‘Anyway – this piece is one I’ve been trying to procure for quite some time. A copy, mind, but a very good one. But don’t worry,’ he said, with a smile. ‘It’s not all devils and roaming beasts around here, at least as far as I’m aware. Let’s get your timetable sorted and find out what the future has in store for you.’

I left the office clutching an oddly sparse timetable. ‘We expect our students to fill these free hours with pursuits which will help them to become well-rounded young women,’ the Dean had said as I stared down at it, confused.

I’d enrolled in both the practical Visual Arts class, and Aesthetics, a more theoretical module – as well as English Literature and Classics, a subject not offered at my previous school, but which I’d loved as a child, when Dad would fill my mind with tales of Medusas and Minotaurs as I drifted into sleep. I had taken the maximum four courses students were permitted to study, and wondered what I’d do with all that spare time; imagined myself friendless, hiding behind books.

The corridor stretching towards the English department – a class for which I was by now a good twenty minutes late – was an area where the school showed its age, though it seemed still to possess a shabby dignity, an almost sombre blankness, as though pulled from another time.

Gone were the sex-ed pamphlets in wire racks, the sugar paper displays in childish lettering; gone were the painted breeze-blocks and papier-mâché displays, the keyed lockers and scuffed linoleum floors. Instead, I walked a warm, low-ceilinged corridor with step-worn carpets, passing wooden doors with office hours taped beneath each tutor’s name.

It was far too warm for September – but the heating, I would soon discover, was turned on only from September to Christmas, leaving us to spend the first few months of the academic year sweating through our shirts, the second peering at teachers through the mist of our breaths.

Finding the class, I was uncomfortably aware of a thin sheen of sweat on my brow, jumper stuck grimly to the skin under my backpack. I knocked on the door, and peered inside.

The students stared at me, eyes assessing, judging my place in the natural order. I gripped the door a little tighter, fingers turning red, then white. The tutor – Professor Malcolm, the only tutor I have encountered before or since who insisted on such a title, though with what qualification I am still yet to find out – was a squat, balding man with oddly tiny features, a button nose top-and-tailed by thin lips and black, bird-like eyes.

‘I’m … I’m new,’ I said, nervously.

‘Well, sit then. And try to learn something.’ He turned back to the board, resuming his talk, as I shuffled between the rows and took a seat. I tried to catch up, glancing at the open books and scrawled notes on the desks beside me. ‘And, as Blake concludes, “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” What do we think this means?’

Met with silence, he sighed. I raised my hand. He sighed again. ‘Yes?’

‘… Blake finds morality and religion too … Too restrictive. He thinks it goes against the spirit of man.’ I blushed, furiously, realizing as I spoke what I’d done. The silence was cool, relentless – one of the many weapons, I would learn, that the students of Elm Hollow possessed.

He paused. ‘And you are?’

‘Violet,’ I whispered, my betrayal hanging heavy on the air.

He cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Excuse me?’

‘My name is Violet,’ I said again, a little louder: a croak.

He nodded, and went on, as I shrank into my chair.

‘Man is a wild and occasionally savage, sexual thing,’ he said, affecting his previous drone which seemed designed to counteract the content of his words, the emphasis falling always on the wrong beat. I looked around, surprised at the absence of titters or comments in response to the mention of sex, but the class was silent. Only then did I see the girl from before – the girl with the bright, red hair – three seats away, staring back.

I looked back down at the desk, names and doodles carved into the wood. When I finally met her eye she raised an eyebrow and smiled. I felt myself about to become a punch-line – but, unable to see anyone else watching, braced for the laughs, I returned a dim half-smile, a weak attempt at nonchalance.

She pointed at the tutor, rolling her eyes, and smiled; mouthed ‘dickhead,’ and turned back to face the board. She slid lower into her chair, and began rolling a cigarette from a tin hidden on her lap beneath the desk, perfectly still, but for the dexterous, whipping movement of her pale, thin fingers, chipped black nails catching tobacco scraps beneath.

I lost myself in thought, the class dull, air growing thick with impatience. By the time the bell rang, I was in something like a trance. As I slid my notebook and pen back into my backpack, I looked around, feeling myself watched. But it seemed I had been forgotten, my presence no longer of interest – and the girl with the red hair was gone.

Wednesday afternoons were reserved for extra-curriculars, and as I had none, I spent the rest of the day exploring my new campus, wandering by the grand Great Hall where the choir practised some mournful, gorgeous song.

I walked the long, high-ceilinged corridors of the Arts building, where drama students lurked in thickets, launching into soliloquies, echoes overlapping. In music rooms violinists practised beside pianists, the same rippling passages played time and again, while the warm autumn breeze whistled through the trees outside, shaking leaves which fell in lazy arcs. I can still see them falling like outstretched hands, hear them crunching underfoot. It is a scene, a mood, still fresh and bright in my mind, recalled with the bittersweet taste of youth, of lilacs and lavender in the air: the campus entirely idyllic, and utterly charming.

Except, that is, for the dining hall. There is good reason why this area is never shown on the prospectus or to visiting parents: it is the underbelly of the school, necessary and crude, one of the few parts of campus where function is allowed to outweigh form.

The fluorescent-lit canteen rattled and hissed, emitting the rancid tang of meat in rendered fat; the vending machines rang and rattled with constant use. Students gathered in heaving clusters around laminate tables, surrounded by an odd mixture of cheap plastic chairs and a repurposed pew dragged up from the basement for a drama rehearsal several years before. It is still in place now, decades later, more cracked and bruised still.

I settled into a corner, watching my classmates hungrily, mining them as one might an anthropological study – this approach perhaps indicative of one of the many reasons why, while not entirely isolated at my previous school, I had still found it a struggle to make friends.

I looked at the casual way they’d adapted their uniforms – all made, it seemed, from materials designed to scratch and needle the skin beneath – Doc Martens, black, red and tan; butterfly clips in pastel shades holding fraying braids. Tartan, denim jackets tied tight at the hips. Velvet headbands, earrings, strings of beads and silver chains, all signifying personalities and secrets which I – wearing my uniform simply as the handbook prescribed – seemingly did not possess. I felt woefully underdressed, and hid lower behind my book (a novel whose simpering heroine I had begun to find irritating, and which I would soon abandon, never to be finished).

Still, it seemed I had not gone entirely unnoticed. I felt the eyes of the girls on me, though each time I looked up, they’d already looked away; heard, too, the whispered words ‘She looks like …’ passing from one group to the next. I could imagine their thrust. Some creature, a farm animal: dog, pig, or cow. As the clock tower rolled one slow minute to the next, the whispering seemed to grow louder still, a growing hiss, a menace, as I blushed and sat lower, longing to disappear.

As I blinked away tears, staring blankly at the words on the page, three figures passed by the large windows at the other side of the cafeteria. My eyes followed the shock of red hair as the girl bobbed alongside two others, who smiled and talked as they kicked the fallen leaves underfoot.

I imagined them turning back to look at me; willed the girl to give me the same, playful smile she’d offered earlier, and shuffled in my seat, my pose determinedly relaxed.

But she didn’t turn back, and they walked on, disappearing into the sunlight, their shadows trailing tall and proud behind.

Chapter 2

The studio was covered in creamy paper, pastel drawings crawling from corners like creeping clouds of smoke. I felt a cool smudge at my elbow, a violet stain smeared across the cuff of my shirt.

Over the course of the week, those of us in the practical classes had filled the space, until it was impossible to leave the room without a coating of pink and blue chalk on our uniforms. Our hands left pastel prints in homage across the school: library books with green thumbs, a peach palm around a test tube, blue lips printed on coffee cups and each other’s cheeks. The lesson, I suppose (Annabel, the art tutor, rarely leading us to an obvious conclusion – or any conclusion at all) was that the artist leaves her mark on everything she touches. It would be many years before I would realize just how true that would turn out to be.

She sat on the edge of the desk, feet swinging just above the floor, while those of us in her Aesthetics class sat breathless, waiting for her to begin. Dressed entirely in black, her hair in silvery curls that hung heavily over her shoulders, she seemed drawn from another world. Even in memory, she seems possessed of a wordless authority: the power of one who could silence a room with a single breath.

‘Oscar Wilde,’ she began, at last, ‘described the discipline of Aestheticism as “a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” And that is what we are here to do. Make no mistake. You may be young, and time may seem to be endless, but you’ll learn – hopefully before it’s too late – that those singular moments of illumination are what make life worth living. It is up to you to seek them out, to see them for what they are. And the sooner you begin, the richer your life will be.’

The door clicked open, a short, blonde girl in sports colours muttering a hushed apology as she entered. She sat in the empty seat beside me, mouthing ‘hi.’ I smiled numbly back, surprised to be greeted at all. Annabel looked at her coldly, and the girl looked away, abashed.

‘You should be developing your aesthetic appreciation of what is beautiful, or worthy of your attention,’ Annabel went on, ‘by creating your own philosophy – your own theory of art – that serves to explain your tastes, and the way these intersect with the rest of your life experience.’ She leaned back, rolling her shoulders; her silver pendant sparkled in the light.

‘After all, this is not a course for the lazy student who wishes to sit around and have me talk at them for four hours a week. Quite the opposite, in fact. I expect you to posit your own judgements, and explore your subjective appreciation of art. Those of you taking my practical course – which I believe is most of you – should take the opportunity to develop these ideas beyond what Wittgenstein called the “limits of language”, which, I am sure, you will grow familiar with in this class.’

A ripple of excitement ran through the room. For all their bitterness and dramatics, it is a fact known only to the very best of educators that teenagers are uniquely susceptible to the poignant phrase, the encouragement of their own, individual talents. It may be a cliché – but I am sure a great many creative spirits have been forged through the power of a single glimmer of inspiration at this age.

Certainly in the moment, it seemed as though each of us was alive with potential, though none of us knew, for instance, who Wittgenstein was (even now, I will admit my knowledge is rudimentary at best, his theories a little esoteric for my tastes), or why such a limit to language might exist. Or, for that matter, why a group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds might be somewhat unqualified (to say the least) to create our own theories of art. No – in the light of this encouragement, we saw ourselves anew, thrilled with the sense of possibility.

‘Marie,’ she said, turning to face a dark-haired girl – recognizable as she spoke for her reedy, high-pitched voice, the shadow of a nervous laugh familiar from the canteen. ‘Give me an example of a work you find beautiful.’

‘Michelangelo’s David,’ she said, confidently.

‘Why?’ Annabel said, wry smile revealing gums almost white, fading into teeth.

‘Because it’s a symbol of strength and human beauty.’

Annabel said nothing, the silence deathly, yawning like a trap.

‘Is that what you think, or what I think parroted back to me?’ she said, finally, as she leaned over the desk and peeled away a sheet of paper, her book on Renaissance sculpture open underneath. The girl stared down, turning pale. ‘Though other members of the faculty may enjoy it when their students mindlessly repeat phrases they do not believe, the point of this class,’ she said, turning her back on the girl, ‘is not to give me the answer you think is right. It is to tell me what you really think. I already know what I believe, and I don’t need you to remind me.’ She looked around the room, eyes cast on each of us in turn. I felt my stomach lurch as she settled her gaze on me.

‘Violet.’

‘Yes, Miss.’ My breath caught a little, nerves shaking through. It was the first time she’d spoken to me directly in either class. There was some brightness to her, that seemed almost to glow from within; as though her blood ran silver in her veins, instead of blue, lighting her skin from below. When I look back, now, I wonder if she could ever have been quite as we saw her, or whether we simply imposed the light upon her, the force of our wanting turning her into something half-divine. On cool days – rational days, when the grey hush of autumn seeps into everything – the obvious occurs. It might simply have been a trick of the light.

‘Annabel, please,’ she said, without smiling. ‘Tell me, what would you choose?’

I felt the class turn to face me, expectantly. Marie glared, her fury at Annabel boring into me. I thought of things I’d read about, seen, their names lost to me in my panic. Finally, I alighted on an image: women laughing, raving furiously, at a town far below; the wild-eyed devil gnawing limbs. ‘Goya’s Black Paintings,’ I said, the words catching on my tongue.

She drew three circles in the air with her fingers, teasing out my meaning. ‘There’s just … There’s something about them I really like.’

‘You really like?’ Annabel said, eyebrow raised. ‘Surely you can go a little deeper than that.’

I felt my heart tumbling in my chest. The truth was, I’d seen them in a book when I was five, maybe six years old, and felt a strange thrill at the horror of it all. Mum had ripped the book from my hands almost immediately, but the images had stuck. Years later, I’d stolen the book from a second-hand shop, too ashamed to admit how much I wanted it, cruel faces grinning deathly from the cover. Three days after that, wracked with guilt, I’d returned with a stack of my dad’s old books – a donation that would cover the cost several times over.

‘Well, it’s not really an aesthetic thing,’ I said, slowly. ‘But he painted them on the walls of his house, just for him. So, even though he was known for his portraits, which are nice, but … Well, kind of boring …’ At this a flicker of a smile crossed her face, willing me on. ‘When he was on his own, he wanted to paint these horrifying things, like the devil eating a man, or the descent into madness. It was like a release he could only get when he was alone.’

She nodded, brushed a curl of white hair behind her ear. I almost felt as though she turned a little towards me, as though the better to hear something unsaid. ‘I assume you know The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters?’

I blanched. ‘Sorry?’

‘The etching. From a very similar period.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No. I haven’t seen it.’

‘Look it up. You’ll like it.’ She turned away. ‘In fact, bring a copy with you next time, and we’ll discuss as a group.’

As she went on, I felt the girl’s eyes on me; tried, but failed to resist the temptation to look back. The red-headed girl from my English class chewed thoughtfully at a thumbnail, grimacing as the chalk covered her tongue; catching my eye, she laughed, and I laughed too, an echo.

She turned back to face Annabel, and I did the same, though the rest of the class passed in a haze, the fact of having met Annabel’s approval – a least briefly – leaving me dazed with relief.

The bell rang, and I began to pack my bag, while the red-headed girl and her friends gathered by Annabel’s desk, voices lowered in hushed conversation. The tall girl glanced at me, pointedly lowering her voice further. When it became clear the three of them were waiting for me to leave (my cheeks flushing hot with the realization) I scooped up my bag and walked towards the door.

‘Hey, wait,’ a voice called after me. ‘Fancy a smoke?’ I turned to see the red-head grinning at me, slyly; the other girls – and Annabel – looked at me, their expressions blank, mask-like.

I didn’t smoke, but – taken by surprise, I would later claim, though in fact merely desperate to make a friend – I nodded.

In the corridor, we walked in step. ‘So how do you like Elm Hollow?’

‘It seems okay. Everyone’s been pretty nice so far.’

She pushed the door, the fresh air outside exhilarating. I felt the sweat droplets freeze and dry on my brow as we walked in silence to a graffitied smoking shelter hidden behind the main building, away from the car park, and away from disapproving eyes. A cheer drifted by on the wind from the playing fields; swallows circled overhead in bursts, as though catching themselves mid-flight.

‘So … I’m Robin, by the way – thanks for asking.’ She grinned, waving away my clumsy apology, the words still unspoken. ‘Where are you from?’ she said, clicking the lighter repeatedly before giving it a firm shake. Finally, it lit.

‘Well, I was at the Kirkwood before,’ I said. ‘But last year I stayed home.’

‘Like, home-schooled?’ She raised a pencilled brow sharply, red pinpricks blooming beneath.

‘Kind of, I guess. But I sort of taught myself.’

‘No way,’ she said. ‘How come?’

‘I … Well, my dad died. They said take as much time as I needed, so …’

‘Hey!’ she said, brightly. ‘My dad’s dead too.’ She paused. ‘I mean, so, you know. I get it.’

‘Oh. That’s horrible. Sorry.’

‘No, no, it’s cool. I didn’t really know him. Mum says he was kind of an asshole.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well … Sorry anyway, I guess.’

She smiled, looked away. In the daylight, she was freckled and long-lashed, cheeks flushed feverish in the cool autumn air. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, flinching as the cigarette burned to her fingers. She threw it on the floor and stamped it out with a silver-toed boot. From inside the building, the bell rang.

‘Wanna hang out some time?’ she said, turning to me.

‘Hang out?’

‘Yes, dipshit, hang out. You know. Pass time. In company. Among friends.’

I said nothing, dumbstruck. In my silence, she went on. ‘I’m going to assume that’s a yes, because anything else would be unspeakably rude. Bus stop. Friday. 3:15. Sharp.’ She turned and walked away without another word, a cluster of sparrows scattering as she strolled across the grass, while I stood, left behind, paralysed by the encounter.

It couldn’t possibly be that simple.

I’d never really had friends, though I hadn’t been entirely unpopular, either. I drifted in the background, a barely-noticeable side-player, while my fellow classmates turned rebellion into a competitive sport. I, too shy, too nervous, too slow, simply lingered behind, clutching books and feeling the soothing roll of my Walkman in my pocket, pretending not to care. It wasn’t that I was incapable of making conversation, or that I was disliked, per se. I simply couldn’t work out how one crossed the boundary line from classmates, to friends, as though there were some secret code or sign one had to give to join each little group.

And yet, mere days after joining Elm Hollow – the new girl, late in the semester, with nothing special to recommend me, no gaudy quirks or stylish clothes – I had a friend. A friend, who wanted to ‘hang out’. I wondered if I was being set up; became convinced of this, over the hours that followed, when there was no sign of the girls, nor of Annabel, whose studio was empty when I passed, the following day.

Finally, Friday afternoon arrived, and I began the march towards the bus stop, among the hordes of fellow students, who had already focused their attentions elsewhere, now seeming not to see me at all. At the top of the hill, an old playground stood silhouetted in the afternoon light: the younger brothers and sisters of those students being collected squealed and swung, ran circles around their weary parents. I imagined my sister’s moon-white face among them, the rubber texture of her swollen skin; shook my head, searched for Robin in the crowd.

‘Wasn’t sure if you’d show,’ she said, grabbing my shoulders from behind, callused fingers brushing my cheek.

‘Why?’ I stood, frozen. It had been a long time since I’d last been touched, though I hadn’t realized it until now. My mother’s collarbones pressed against my neck, days after Dad died. That was the last.

‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘You just didn’t seem all that into the idea.’

‘Oh, no, I was – I just—’ I stopped, grateful to be interrupted by a cheer from the crowd by the bus stop; a girl dancing, whirling in circles, so fast she’d become a blur.

Robin and I followed the thinning crowd on to the last bus, her hand still tight around my wrist. She slid in by the window, guitar pressed against her knees; I sat beside her, pressed close as the bus filled up, packed with pale limbs and stale breath.

‘So,’ she said, turning to me, eyes wide, an exaggeration. ‘Where’d you come from?’

‘Kirkwood,’ I said, again.

‘I know that. Let me rephrase. Tell me everything. Tell me your story.’

I looked at her, my mind empty of all history, memory erased. ‘I … I don’t know.’

‘Interesting,’ she said, grinning, a smudge of mulberry brushed under stained lips. She saw me looking, raised a hand to her mouth. ‘You’re from round here?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Makes sense, then. Boring, boring, boring.’ She paused, narrowed her eyes. ‘Not you, I mean. The town. Is boring.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, leaning back against the seat. ‘Okay, let’s try something else. Pop quiz. Violet’s not talking because a) she’s shy, b) she’s got super interesting things to say but she doesn’t want to tell me, or c), she’s not that interesting after all and I’m sorely misguided. Go.’

‘Not c,’ I said, though I felt the sudden flash of a lie. I’m not that interesting, I thought. She’s right.

‘I guess a) and b) aren’t exactly mutually exclusive. So you are interesting, but you’re shy and you don’t want to tell me your secrets.’ She looked at me, smiled. ‘I guess that’s okay.’

I searched for another way, an easier line of conversation. ‘Let’s try the other way around. Tell me about you.’

‘Oh, me? I’m super interesting. Fascinating. A one-woman Pandora’s box. But I’m also a lot like you. I don’t give it away for free.’ She grinned. ‘We’ll just have to take it slow, huh?’

I smiled. ‘You play guitar?’

‘Horribly,’ she said, squeezing the neck of the case between her fingers. ‘Still, it makes me look cool. That’s a start.’

‘You are cool,’ I said, and blushed. I hadn’t meant to sound so desperate, so eager to please.

She laughed, a bitter snort. ‘Well, I guess that’s sealed then. You’re just about the only person around here that thinks I, Robin Adams, am cool. Which I’m pretty sure makes you my new best friend.’ She extended a hand, and we shook, a comical formality that felt strangely intimate in the crowded space. ‘Come on,’ she said, nudging my arm with her elbow.

The bus shuddered to a halt, and we edged out into the street, where the smell of the sea – something I hadn’t noticed was absent from the grounds of the school – whistled between the buildings. The sky had turned from blue to grey over the course of the afternoon, and tiny beads of rain started to fall, so imperceptibly I didn’t notice until Robin held a discarded paper over her head and gestured to me to follow, saying ‘This rain’s going to ruin my hair,’ as she bounded off.

I followed her into the grandly named International Coffee Company, with its one dilapidated location in a quiet street, in a town the world forgot. ‘Hey, bitches,’ she said, announcing herself to the room as we entered. The barista – all black hair and pillar-box red lips, tanned to the colour and texture of leather – waved and shouted ‘Coffee?’ Robin nodded, held two fingers up, and strolled to the back of the café, where the other girls sat whispering in a patched-up leather booth. ‘This is Violet,’ she said, pushing me towards them, thumbs pressed firmly into my shoulder blades.

The two girls looked up at me, with a bland curiosity, as I stumbled, caught myself, and smiled; they said nothing. After a moment, the shorter of the two – a girl with green eyes and pale, almost translucent skin – smiled and waved her cigarette coyly, gesturing me to sit by her side. The two were sharing a pot of tea clearly designed for one, which steamed lazily beside a thick, leather book on the table.

‘Queen bitch here is Alex,’ said Robin, sliding into the booth beside the other girl and throwing an arm around her, swiftly brushed away. She nodded, coolly, and sat back, weaving her hair into a thick, rope-like braid as she watched me, eyes hooded, almost black.

‘And this little cherub—’ Robin pinched her own cheek between finger and thumb and squeezed it white. ‘This is Grace.’ Grace rolled her eyes, passing her cigarette back to Alex, who took it, smoke curling in the air between them. Robin turned to the girls as I wedged myself in next to Grace, who slid closer to the wall, as though to leave a foot of space between us.

The girls smiled at me, dimly, before turning to Robin. ‘Did you …?’ Alex said, softly.

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘But good things come to those who wait, right?’

The waitress set two tall, black coffees down with a clatter, a pool forming around them, rolling down the almost imperceptibly slanted table towards me. She dabbed it with her apron, and I looked up, finding myself greeted by a girl with the same, deep features as the barista, but a good twenty years younger. ‘Hey, Dina,’ Robin said, the words sing-song, mocking. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine,’ Dina said, turning away and stalking into a back room behind the bar.

‘Religious nut,’ Robin said, sliding a coffee towards me. ‘I’m surprised she hasn’t come at us with the rosary yet.’

‘Or a stake,’ Alex laughed.

‘The power of Christ compels you, etcetera.’ Robin’s voice drew a swift warning look from the woman at the bar, and the girls went on in a whisper. I sipped the coffee, concealing a wince at the bitter taste, the dry, sickly layer it left on my tongue. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried to at least pretend I liked it – I had read enough to know all the people I admired adored it, and took it black – but then, as before, the taste gave way to a hot, fast-moving nausea, heartbeat racing like that of a rabbit in a trap. Still, I clung tight to the cup, feeling the warmth nip at my fingers, and made plans to jettison it the moment the girls were distracted, though the weary-looking plant at the edge of the booth, I soon realized, was plastic. The frayed leather seats, flickering light-bulbs and dusty, sun-bleached paintings had implied that from the outset.

‘So what else are you studying?’ Grace said, turning to me, Alex and Robin absorbed in some labyrinthine conversation whose thrust I’d long since lost. She peeled open a half-eaten stick of rock, sugary-sweet on her breath.

‘English, and Classics,’ I said.

She looked me up and down briefly, so quickly I might have imagined it. ‘Annabel seemed to like your idea in class, yesterday.’ She paused. ‘I think she—’

‘Hey,’ Robin said, leaning in between us. ‘This is important.’

Grace leaned back in the chair, a counterbalance. ‘What?’

‘Blood or cherry?’ We stared back. ‘Lipstick, dipshits. Jesus. Some help you are.’

Alex elbowed Robin, pulling her bag from under the table. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘But we haven’t decided yet,’ Robin whined, refusing to move.

‘Are you wearing the black dress?’ Alex said.

‘Yeah.’

‘So wear the red. It’ll pop,’ she replied, smacking her lips. ‘Now come on, piss off.’

Robin slid out of the booth and leaned over the table, one leg outstretched behind. Alex kicked her, and she withdrew it, Dina narrowly avoiding a fall. ‘Nice to meet you … Shit,’ Alex laughed. ‘I was going to … What’s your name again?’

‘Violet,’ Robin answered. ‘Her name is Violet.’

‘Alright,’ Alex said. ‘Well, nice to meet you, Violet.’

I nodded, a little burned. She’d forgotten my name. ‘You too.’

After she left, the conversation continued, Robin choosing by committee colours for nails, length of lashes, contacts in various colours for a party at her boyfriend’s dorm that weekend. Still heady from the caffeine and the cloud of smoke perpetually surrounding our booth (the girls passing a single cigarette between them at all times, Robin’s almost-spent lighter seemingly the only one they owned) I opted to make my escape – to quit while it appeared I was ahead.

‘See you next week,’ the girls said, as though there were no question of my return, and I flushed, grateful at the implication.

I took the long way back, past the beach, where the sea whispered a soothing, steady rhythm, a tenor crooning from the pavilion at the end of the pier. In the streets close to home, lonely people watched families on flickering TVs, curtains illuminated in the same, mocking patterns; the neighbour’s dog sniffed at my hand through the fence, before the grizzled old woman who lived there called him in.

‘Good evening, Mrs Mitchell!’ I shouted, in my best talking-to-the-elderly voice. Her grandson – a squat, apple-cheeked boy with a bowl haircut, a year or so older than I was – sat at the lit window above, white walls papered in posters of dragons and wizards. I looked up at him, and smiled; he pulled the curtain shut as Mrs Mitchell slammed the door without looking back.

Chapter 3

All weekend, I couldn’t sleep. I paced the halls, watched reruns of Murder, She Wrote with Mum at 3am, the news at six, seven, eight. I scraped the mould off the crusts with a knife and made toast for us both, while I mimed conversations I might have with the girls (assuming they invited me back). I worked the theoretical common ground at which our personalities might intersect, making lists of topics I could raise that might somehow make me seem interesting, or witty, or both. I scrawled opening lines and points of conversation in my diary, before tearing them out, ashamed to see my desperation on the page.

I found a stack of mouldering catalogues by the door, and made a list of clothes I thought might make me more like them, make-up they might wear, so wholly unlike my own. I mimed my mum’s voice on the phone while she slept, nervously peeling strips from the wallpaper by the stairs. She didn’t notice.

On the Monday, however, there was no sign of the girls at school. I wandered from one class to the next, imagining them around every corner, among the faceless crowds. I walked by the sports fields, hoping to catch sight of Alex, whose name I had seen on the team rosters for both netball and lacrosse; wandered the cavernous halls of the library, looking for Grace; and by the art studios, imagining I might find Robin there. Not, that is, that I would have admitted this, to either myself or the girls I was balefully stalking. I told myself I was exploring, finding my way around.

As I waited outside the English classroom, I saw the quote from Chaucer written in arched letters on the blackboard. I still remember it now: ‘How potent is a strong emotion! Sometimes an impression can cut so deep / That people can die of mere imagination.’

‘Hey, new girl,’ a sing-song voice rang behind me, startling in the silence.

I spun around to find myself watched, warily, by a short – petite, I suppose, is the word – blonde girl, dressed head-to-toe in the school’s sports colours. She fingered the tape wrapped around her fingers. She was pretty, in a sleepy way, eyes heavy-lidded, like a doll’s. The kind you want to close with your thumb.

‘What are you doing?’ She looked at me with a half-smile, a mixture of sweetness and suspicion.

‘Just … Getting my bearings,’ I said, twisting my fingers, palms tight and sweating.

‘I saw you last week with the weird girls. Not that it’s any of my business, but … Well, you seem nice. If you want to make friends around here, you might want to avoid getting stuck with them.’

‘Why?’ I was less surprised at her opinion of the girls – though naturally, I was curious – than the very fact of having been noticed at all. I’d imagined myself invisible, disappearing into the crowd.

‘You really want to know?’

I nodded. A soprano began singing halfway down the hall, a little off-key. The girl winced.

‘Okay, well,’ she said, shifting her backpack from one shoulder to the other. ‘You remember Emily Frost?’

I wound the name around, picked at the threads. It had a familiar ring to it, but where I’d heard it, I couldn’t say. I shrugged.

‘Where’d you go to school again?’

‘Kirkwood.’

‘So you’re from round here. You must’ve seen it on the news. The one that did a Richey.’

‘A what?’

‘Richey. Manics Richey. Disappeared. Never seen again. Jesus, do you even read?’ Her tone was oddly sweet, gently chiding; I nodded. ‘Emily was all over the news last year. She looked like you, except …’ She trailed off. The image came back, and I knew what she was going to say. ‘Pretty. Prettier.’

‘Oh yeah. I remember. But—’

‘Right, good.’ She grew more animated, stepped towards me. I heard the rustle of tissue paper, smelled the chemical scent of Clearasil and body spray, a chemical musk. ‘So she was best friends with Robin, and the four of them did everything together. And then they had some kind of fight one day, didn’t speak for like a week, and then poof! Gone. Everyone says she killed herself, but they never found the body.

‘I mean, clearly there was more to it,’ she went on. ‘If you even mention her name near them, they just get up and leave.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I mean, if something like that happened to my best friend, I don’t think I’d be quite so cool about it, you know?’

I tried to muster a half-smile, a non-committal response. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said, finally.

She shrugged. ‘Care in the community, I guess. Do you want to get some lunch? I’m Nicky, by the way.’

In the grim heat of the canteen, I found myself in a cloud of strange associations and artificial smells – coconut, lavender, lemon, all wrong – while girls with avian limbs and immaculate teeth giggled and clucked. The girl beside me had a laugh like a pony’s whinny, the dead eyes of a beetle.

They talked quickly, the conversation bouncing easily from one topic to another in long, breathless sentences, all featuring people whose names I didn’t know, though I nodded along, trying to keep up. A girl opposite painted her nails, brush dripping slow rolls of indigo blue; another doodled incomprehensible lists in a sticker-covered notebook, and for a moment, I wondered if I might fit in.

And then I saw them. Robin, Grace, and Alex, walking slowly across the grass, just as they had on that first day, the three of them smiling with quiet satisfaction, careless and somehow wild. I saw Robin’s hair burning fiery in the light, the moth-bitten chic of her coat; I saw Grace, preternaturally pale, large sunglasses covering the dark circles that seemed always to haunt her eyes; the crisp white of Alex’s pressed shirt, the sophisticated, sidelong glance across the Quad.

‘Ugh,’ Nicky said, her shoulder pressed against mine. ‘They’re so weird.’

I made a vague murmur of agreement, felt a pang of envy, a bitter ache in my teeth. As I stood to leave – making my excuses, the girls nodding and smiling blankly before resuming their chatter – I felt Nicky squeeze my wrist between bony fingers.

‘We’re going to the pier later – want to come?’

‘I … I’ve got homework.’

Nicky groaned. ‘We’ve all got homework. Come on. It’ll be fun.’

I felt the sharp edge of her thumbnail in the soft swell of my wrist; a brief flash of irritation, first at her, then at the other girls, for leaving me here.

‘Okay, yeah. Maybe. I’ll meet you there?’ I said, striving for the non-committal. I felt a thud of guilt as she smiled; it dissipated as the girls rounded the corner, and disappeared from sight.

Freed from Nicky’s vice-like grip, I did my best to slip away, squeezing between groups of girls who didn’t move as I passed (though on purpose, or simply because I’d so quickly disappeared into the invisible mass of average students, I couldn’t tell). In the cool air outside, there was no sign of them, the Quad empty but for a few pockets of girls in pairs, sharing secrets. Starlings hopped along the architraves above the open doors, swooping down to tug twitching worms from the dirt.

Two hands pawed at my face from behind, clumsy fingers poking at eyes and cheeks, and I screamed; a cackle echoed across the Quad. As I turned, Robin grinned her lop-sided smile, eyes puppet-wide and gleaming. ‘Come with me,’ she said, turning on her heels and walking away.

I stood, transfixed. ‘I still have classes,’ I called after her. She looked back, and I blushed, furiously, catching the eye of two girls, who’d turned to stare at the crack of nerves in my voice. My heart thudded with such force that I wondered if they could hear that, too; I smiled at them, willing them to look away.

‘Robin,’ I called again, as she loped away, headed towards the long school driveway. She didn’t look back; didn’t seem to care whether I followed, or not.

And so, without thought – without question, or doubt, or even the briefest flicker of pride – I followed her, down the hill and through the school gates, the Campanile bell sounding a warning behind.

‘Come on, just take one. One.’ Robin’s shoulder pressed against mine, in the town’s only real fashion store, where pop music hissed through invisible speakers, and girls tripped giggling between changing rooms, making catwalks of the aisles.

‘I can’t,’ I whispered back, looking down at the candied rows of nail polish, names underneath seeming all wrong, the inverse of themselves: Buttercup for a grassy green, Seashell for baby-blue, Moonlight for black.

‘It’s not difficult,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll show you.’ I watched her hands glide above, like a magician practising a sleight-of-hand. She paused, hovering briefly for a moment, plucked a neon yellow from the rack. In a single, swift motion, it disappeared. Even watching, I couldn’t tell whether it was in her pocket, or up her sleeve.

‘See?’ She moved to admire a case of lipsticks, their black cases shining like beetles. I stood, stunned, waiting for a looming security guard to swoop in and drag us away.

Nothing happened. No one came.

I followed Robin to the counter, where she hovered, thoughtfully chewing her lip. ‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she said, pointedly. Her eyes fixed on a red lipstick. ‘That’d go so well with my hair, don’t you think?’

‘I’ll buy it for you,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’ I had twenty pounds in my purse, my weekly allowance – though I also knew Mum’s bank details, and that the settlement sat there, largely untouched. It rarely occurred to either of us, it seemed – that we could have things, live differently, somehow. So we went on as we always had, with off-brand canned foods and frozen microwave dinners. For Mum, it was enough.

Robin rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever. If you’re too scared, then don’t.’

‘I’m not scared,’ I said, uselessly.

‘Well then,’ she said, turning to examine a baby-pink t-shirt she’d never, ever wear, eyes lowered, watchful.

I put a trembling hand over the counter, picking one, then another, examining each with what I hoped was casual disinterest. The harried sales assistant explained a refund policy to the mother of a screaming nine-year-old; as the assistant turned away, I slipped the lipstick into my palm, and down my sleeve.

A hand at my shoulder, a heavy slap. I flinched.

‘Good girl,’ Robin said. ‘Let’s go.’

The air in the street outside was a thrilling relief. I gulped, realizing I’d been holding my breath since I’d tucked the lipstick into my jacket. As we walked, she slid the nail polish out and held it between finger and thumb, close to my face. ‘Got something for you, too.’ I felt a rush of warmth, a sweet thrill at the gift.

I slid the lipstick from my sleeve, and did the same. She took it, clicking open a mirror she pulled from her pocket – an item even I hadn’t seen her take – and applied a dark slick to her lips as we walked, shoppers forced to dodge her, tutting as they passed.

‘How do I look?’ she said, turning to me, pouting.

‘Gorgeous,’ I laughed. It was true. To me, at least, she did.

She grabbed me by the shoulder and planted an exaggerated, ridiculous kiss on my cheek. ‘Now you’re gorgeous too,’ she said, grinning, the lipstick smudged with the impact, flecks of red on her teeth. I felt I ought to laugh, but couldn’t; I was too stunned. I stumbled along beside her, speechless and blind, as she chattered on about classes, homework she refused to do (‘on principle,’ she said, not explaining what, exactly, the principle was) and girls she hated, their crimes seeming to me like instructions, things I would no longer say or do.

As I look back, it seems ridiculous. And yet, though I have loved, and been loved, in the decades since we met, no infatuation could compare to the outrageous intensity of those first weeks with Robin.

I wanted to know every part of her, and she craved my secrets just the same. We each felt the raw crush of the other’s nerve-endings; we shared experiences great and small, sitting under trees dropping red leaves around us, glowing in the autumn sun. Occasionally, I would think of Emily Frost, as we passed the faded posters stuck to lampposts and trees, and the question would gather in my throat – Is she the reason you like me? But I’d brush the thought away, press it wilfully into forgetting, and take her interest in me as my own; raise some new topic of conversation, a new intimacy shared.

It seems impossible, now, to imagine an intensity so feverish, such delirium. Perhaps that’s a symptom of getting older. One’s feelings wear down, no longer sparking so keenly. Still, when I think of Robin, of those early days when our friendship was new and unfamiliar, I feel a swell deep within my chest, an echo of those heady days, when we ducked into a rain-battered chip shop and shared a single cone as we walked along the promenade, laughing at the withered old women and screaming kids, who seemed so stupid, so beneath us, so deserving of our contempt. When we smoked rolled-up cigarettes and stubbed them out in the sand, the detritus of summer – cans, fools’ emeralds made from broken bottles – shifting beneath our feet. When we drank sickly-sweet alcopops from glass bottles, breaking the caps on the metal backs of graffitied bus seats. Every breath, every moment, possessed with an illusion of glamour, of filthy decadence, purely because it was ours, we two our own radical world, a star collapsing inwards and bursting, gorgeous, in the dark.

Not, of course, that I was able to imagine this then, still chattering shyly as we walked along the pier, the setting sun turning the sea blood-red. I heard a familiar voice, and turned to see Nicky bounding towards the two of us. Robin let out a groan, and I swatted her arm. ‘Shhh,’ I hissed, feeling my cheeks redden as Nicky approached, caught in a lie. I’d mentioned her invitation to Robin earlier – this, admittedly, an attempt at making Robin jealous, though it seemed only to have the opposite effect: she had told me I was lucky, blessed to have been rescued, her hatred of Nicky vicious and clear.

And yet, I realized, as Nicky approached, it was Robin’s idea to come here, now.

‘How are you doing?’ Nicky said, as she strolled towards us, clutching an enormous stuffed bear (or cat – it was cheaply made, and hard to tell). She saw me staring at it. ‘Ben—’ she turned and pointed to a tall, tanned boy in a football shirt, lurking several paces behind ‘—he won it for me. Isn’t it cute?’

‘If you’re into that kind of thing,’ Robin muttered.

Nicky ignored her, and turned to me. ‘Are you coming to the party on Friday?’

She looked at Robin, who scowled back. ‘What party?’ I said, at the same time as Robin said ‘Yeah, she’s coming,’ the two of us laughing, awkwardly.

‘Awesome,’ Nicky said, pretending not to see, though a half-smile passed on her lips, a whisper of a smirk. ‘Also,’ she said, expression instantly serious, tone conspiratorial, ‘I wanted to ask … Is Grace okay?’

I felt my stomach drop; glanced at Robin. ‘I … I haven’t seen her. Why?’

‘Well, Stacey – you know Stacey, in the lacrosse team? She broke her finger at a match last Friday night. Which is horrendously bad timing, because we need her for the squad when we play …’ I felt myself dragged into the long and complex history of the school lacrosse team, and nodded dimly, waiting for her to return to the matter in hand. ‘Anyway,’ she said, finally, ‘she was at A&E and she said she saw Grace in the waiting room with Alex, looking like she’d been hit by a bus.’

‘She’s fine,’ Robin said. She looked out at the seagulls criss-crossing in the air, diving at unsuspecting tourists clutching fried doughnuts and newsprint-covered chips.

‘I don’t know … Bloody nose, black eye … Not that you’d know under all that make-up, mind. It’s a shame, really. She’s got such a pretty face.’

I shook my head. ‘I haven’t spoken to her. I didn’t know anything had happened.’ I turned to Robin. ‘Did you?’

‘No,’ she said, looking down between the broad slats of the pier.

‘Well, I thought you might know. Jodie – Jodie with the short hair, the lesbian-looking girl in the upper class – she asked Alex if Grace was okay this morning when she saw her, and Alex said she didn’t know what she was talking about. Which is kind of weird, right? I mean, if she was there and all. Which she must’ve been, because Stacey wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

I shrugged, though it seemed, based on Nicky’s sideways look, that my attempt at nonchalance was unsuccessful. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything,’ I said, at last. This seemed to appease her. Nicky smiled, leaned in to kiss my cheek – an affectation I suspected (though I couldn’t be sure) she’d adopted in some sly imitation of Robin, one’s lips marking the spot where the other’s lipstick had been, before – and bobbed off towards town, boyfriend in tow, leaving the two of us walking silently towards the sea.

Robin spoke, finally, when we reached the railings, looking out into the nothing. ‘Her dad’s a total psycho.’ She clung on, leaned back, and swung there for a moment, before pulling herself back. ‘Grace’s, I mean. He’s why she’s always got bruises.’

I turned to face her, a dull sickness rising. ‘He hits her?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Can’t we—’

‘She says it’s not our business. Like, she won’t talk about it. Ever.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, uselessly. Silence fell, broken only by the clack and chatter of seagulls swooping above, the waves rattling the pier below. ‘Where’s the party?’ I said, at last, desperate to break the silence. I felt bad for Grace, truly; but my thoughts kept wandering back to Nicky’s other comment. The party. Robin hadn’t said anything, and if Nicky hadn’t brought it up, I wasn’t sure she would’ve mentioned it at all.

‘Halloween party,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend’s throwing it. You should meet him.’ She chewed, thoughtfully, at her finger, biting off a hangnail and spitting it into the water below. ‘Lots of boys in his halls, too. You might find one yourself.’

‘Halloween isn’t for another week.’

‘So?’

‘I don’t have a costume.’

‘You won’t need one. Wear what you’ve got on now, and no one’ll tell the difference.’

I threw a bottle cap at her, sand rolling back on the wind. I’d never been with a boy, never so much as kissed one. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. I thought back to my old school, scrappy, howling boys who’d tug and paw at the girls who let them, who encouraged them, and who told each other elaborate stories of who loved who, and how they’d fucked. It all seemed a lot of work, even if they had shown any interest in me (which, of course, they hadn’t).

Still, the prospect of a night with Robin, in what I imagined might be the more sophisticated, mature company of university students, was too tempting to refuse. ‘Can’t wait,’ I said, as the last spark of the sunset clipped the edge of the horizon, and the first brush of night air echoed in the wind.

The university was on the far side of town, only a couple of miles from the Kirkwood – and it possessed none of the grandeur of the grounds to which I’d by now become somewhat accustomed (though even now I am not wholly immune to the bloom of evening light behind the Campanile, or the froth of raindrops glowing above the Great Hall’s sage and silver dome on a cool spring day). I’d only ever been dimly aware that it existed, and even now never thought of it as a university. It was ‘the old poly’, or ‘the college’, to residents of the town, and I had never thought of it in any other terms.

All béton brut and gabions, grey crumbling into black, it was impressive, in its own way, and almost a better fit for the town: ugly in a way that seemed to be somehow intentional. Aggressive, even. The tower, indeed, had cut a lonely but ever-present figure in my childhood, the only tower building in the whole town – wide and squat, with gangways connecting its two halves, a ladder leaning on the sky. The leaves hung wincing from the trees, or cracked underfoot, scratching at the pavement; the sky grey and fat with mist, words made visible in the cool night air.

When Robin and I had met, in the dim lights of the bus station, where the shelters rattled in the evening wind, she’d thrown her arms around me in an overblown hug. ‘You look amazing,’ I said, the words muffled by the crush of her shoulder, the wide, black brim of her witch’s hat.

‘I know,’ she said, pulling away. ‘What … What are you meant to be?’

I tugged at the back of my coat, the blooming flash of red. ‘Red Riding Hood,’ I said, blushing; knowing, already, that it was stupid, a childish idea.

She laughed. ‘Okay, so, before I say anything else: you are adorable,’ she said, the words shot through and veined with sarcasm. ‘But this is a grown-up party. You need to look the part.’ She pulled me down onto the cold metal seat beside her, and began rooting through her bag, chewing thoughtfully at her smudged, blackened lips.

An old man, stinking of sweat and stale alcohol, paused to stare as she reached for my chin; instructed me to close my eyes, and hold still. I don’t know how long he stood there, though the smell of him lingered as I sat, waiting, feeling myself watched. And yet the touch of her, the assurance with which she smoothed foundation into my skin, brushed powder gently into the hollows of my eyes; the way she laughed, a little, when she told me to pout, the feel of breath on my skin as she leaned in to paint my lips … It doesn’t matter who sees, I thought. I don’t care.

‘There,’ she said, at last. ‘What do you think?’

I opened my eyes, blinking in the light; caught my reflection in the threaded glass of the windows as the bus shuddered in behind. Eyes lined with soft, smudged kohl, made them wider, their expression somehow no longer mine; lips lined fat, a blooming red. A painted shadow in the hollow of my cheeks.

I looked wholly unlike myself, somehow, drawn into a new self by her. And as I blinked once, and again, I felt a shudder of recognition. My features made fuller, more vivid, I looked, now, like the taped-up photos of Emily Frost, pocked and faded by the wind.

‘Do you like it?’ she said, she, too, watching my reflection in the glass.

‘Wow,’ I said, unsure what else to say.

She talked, almost without pausing for breath, all the way to the campus, flitting from one topic to another. About her little sister, whose obsession with a certain TV show meant Robin had to listen to it playing through the walls in the middle of the night. About a tattoo she’d been thinking of getting, that she’d drawn ‘fifty thousand times’ but couldn’t get quite right. About a horror movie she’d seen but couldn’t remember the name of, though a scene in which a woman had been chopped to pieces had struck her as ‘fundamentally unrealistic,’ because ‘there’d obviously be way more blood.’ I wondered about mentioning the accident, the strange absence of blood (in memory, at least) – but I couldn’t find the words. I’d told her almost everything, but never that. I didn’t want her pity; wasn’t sure I could bear to be anything but the girl she thought I was.

At the foot of the tower, voices and music roared from an open window several floors above. Robin grabbed my hand, and we walked through the wooden doors to a dull reception area, a single security guard sitting at a tiny screen, surrounded on all sides by lewd graffiti and defaced postcards. ‘Ladies,’ he said, with a grunt. ‘You students here?’

‘You really don’t recognize us by now?’ Robin said. ‘It’s me! Robin. Tenth floor.’ He shrugged and turned back to his screen, disinterested.

‘I can’t believe that worked,’ I whispered as we stood in the lift, Robin picking at her make-up in a mirror coated with dust and handprints, ‘FUCK THE TORIES’ scrawled in lipstick overhead.

‘Whatever. One of the boys would’ve come and rescued us, anyway,’ she said, with an overblown wink. I laughed. I had doubts about her boyfriend Andy’s capacity for rescue, based on the stories I’d heard from Alex and Grace earlier in the week, but held my tongue.

The lift shuddered to a halt on the eighth floor. ‘It only goes this far. Party’s on floor ten.’ She kicked the door, once; then again. It opened with a groan, and we stepped out into a dull corridor, the air curdling with a lingering smell of damp clothes and spilled beer.

I walked a few feet behind, pausing to examine the lurid posters and photographs stuck to each door. As I looked at one – a poster for Glastonbury Festival, two years earlier, the list of bands in such tiny print I had to lean in to take a look – the door swung open. I stumbled backwards, and Robin swung around, turning back.

In the doorway stood a tall, scraggly student, hair mussed as though he’d been interrupted from sleep, though given the pounding music above, this seemed highly unlikely (though I would eventually learn, through my own undergraduate experience, that it is indeed possible to sleep through anything, if one has enough work to ignore). ‘What’s this?’ he yawned.

‘Howdy,’ Robin said, not missing a beat. She extended a hand with a half-ironic formality which seemed capable of diffusing even the most fraught situations. ‘Robin Adams, pleased to meet you. This is Vivi. We’re going to a party – want to come?’

He stood staring blankly at her outstretched hand for a moment, blinking away sleep. ‘You’re inviting me to a party in the building I live in?’

‘Well, it’s my boyfriend’s party, so I figure technically I’m the hostess. Kind of,’ she said. ‘That means I get to invite who I like, even if they do live a few floors below and consider themselves above a formal invitation. And even if they don’t introduce themselves properly. Like, with a name.’

He glanced at me, for a split second, before turning back to Robin. ‘I’m Tom,’ he said, with a smile that gave his face an almost wolfish quality, attractive in a way I couldn’t place. I felt a flash of envy, in spite of myself, as he finally took Robin’s hand.

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ she replied, coyly. ‘Well, we’re going to the party. Come if you want, or don’t. Your choice.’ She turned and strolled down the corridor, and I followed, looking back briefly to see Tom leaning in the doorway, still dazed by the encounter. He waved; I turned away and rushed to catch Robin, cheeks flushed with shame.

‘Bit of a rake, no?’ she said, when I reached the tenth floor to find her sitting on the railing, the ten floors below a sheer drop.

‘He looked like he needs a shower.’

‘They’re uni students. They all look like that.’ She laughed. ‘God, if you don’t like him, just wait till you meet Andy.’

On this, she was not mistaken. Andy, I would soon discover, was a skinny, mantis of a man, who – when we finally arrived, after a circuitous conversation with a student sitting red-eyed on the floor outside – was holding court on a single bed in an incongruously large dorm room, filthy dreadlocks clinging to his white, pimpled back in the fetid heat of the room. Even above the music, his voice carried shrilly, surrounded as he was by dazed students passing a succession of thick, glowing joints.

‘I’m not saying Ayn Rand isn’t problematic,’ he said, grandly. ‘It’s just that some of her ideas weren’t entirely without a kernel of truth. It just requires an open mind to see it.’ He coughed, a brittle, hacking cough, and Robin sidled up beside him to pat him gently on the back. He pulled her in for a nauseatingly long kiss, pausing for a drag on a joint, breathing the smoke into Robin’s open mouth. She turned to the group and, to my horror, pointed to me. ‘This is Vivi,’ she announced.

‘Hi, Vivi,’ they replied, as though hypnotized. Vivi, I thought, as I waved, awkwardly, and wandered to the makeshift bar in the far corner of the room. She sounds like fun. I poured a slug of off-brand cola into what looked to be an unused mug, whose faded university label proudly advertised ‘exceptional careers for exceptional students’. The warm liquid stuck in my throat, sharp and cloying.

I watched the mass of students, and wondered if this might be my own future; then, too, what exactly might be said to recommend it. I saw a girl dressed in a sleek Hepburn dress and tiara swaying precariously close to the open window, while a boy, deathly pale and shimmering with fake blood talked at her, staring wide-eyed into the middle distance. A few feet away, two girls – each with hair in luminous colours, turquoise green and Barbie pink, their make-up vivid, clown-like – sat cross-legged on the floor, engaged in a conversation that seemed to be turning sour. The girl facing me seemed to be growing more unsteady with every sip of vodka, taken directly from the by-now half-drained bottle; I counted a further three gulps before she rose, swaying, and stumbled out into the white glare of the hallway. A group of boys in ragged caveman furs stormed across the room, howling wildly, and proceeded to empty a carton of washing powder out of the window, onto some poor victim below. When it hit, they roared louder still, their hoots reminiscent of some monstrous creatures I had seen, once, on a nature programme.

Robin bounded over and poured herself a drink, topping mine up with a large slug of rum as she did so. ‘You like?’ she said, grinning.

‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ I lied, lifting the mug to my lips. The liquid was hot and searing; a rancid, chemical smell. I lowered the cup without swallowing, relieved to find her attentions elsewhere.

‘I love university parties. Not exactly the height of sophistication, but it’s nice to be around adults for a change.’ I searched her face for the irony absent from her voice, and nodded, solemnly, suppressing my own opinions on the matter. ‘Listen, I know it’s not normally your thing, but … Do you want one of these?’ She opened her palm, revealing a couple of white pills, their texture dusty, imprinted with a flower.

‘If it’s an aspirin, then definitely,’ I said, drily.

‘No pressure. It’s just … I thought I’d offer, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out.’

The boys roared again, now hurling bricks of soap and sopping balls of toilet paper out into the street below. The princess returned, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and gave her a weak kiss; the swaying girl still swayed, and the talking boy still talked.

I took the pill from Robin’s outstretched palm, and held it, nervously, in my own. I felt Robin wrap her arm around my shoulder with something like tenderness. ‘If you don’t like it, all you have to do is say you want to go. That’s it. If you feel weird, we’ll go straight home.’ The press of her, the promise, was enough: I swallowed the pill, washing it down with the searing, sour drink.

For the next fifteen minutes, I felt nothing, though I shuddered at every suggestion of warmth, every heartbeat a portent of doom. I had heard the stories of otherwise well-behaved teenagers who had died a sudden death from their first encounter with drugs, and imagined the cold words of the coroner’s report. My heartbeat quickened and slowed, the sense of panic rising and falling as I remembered, somehow, to breathe.

Still nothing, one moment of nothing after another, a nothing hollow with anticipation, until all at once a panoramic, gorgeous fullness burst around me, the air syrupy, the people diaphanous, unreal. I felt suddenly detached, watching the students around me, each with their own unique preoccupations and ideals, and felt a sense of oneness, an appreciation of other subjectivities beyond my own. Potent chemicals and sweat-ravaged debauchery: the source, no doubt, of the open-minded idealism for which students are known.

I turned to Robin, wanting to tell her everything – not only of this moment, but my whole life story, every secret emotion I had ever held in my heart, all the things I couldn’t say – only to find her seat now taken by the boy from the eighth floor, whose name I could no longer remember. Had he told us? I wasn’t sure.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked, reaching for the arms of the chair in an attempt to still the roiling room.

‘The stairs,’ he said, flatly. ‘Have you … Are you drunk?’

‘That sounds like something I am,’ I said, the words nonsense, confused. I felt a burning heat in the palms of my hands, and released the chair from my vice-like grip.

‘Little more than drunk, judging by those pupils,’ he said, leaning in towards me.

I pulled away. ‘It’s none of your business.’

He winced. ‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry,’ I muttered. I looked for Robin, scanning the room for the red glow of her hair. I saw her, back with Andy, who sat on the floor while she straddled his shoulders from the bed above, leaning over him occasionally for a kiss, her hair falling in strings down his chest, his fingers clutching at them, possessively. I felt sick, overwhelmingly sick, and looked down at the space between my knees, where the lines of the carpet curved and swelled like the roll of the sea.

‘Do you want some water or something?’ I’d forgotten I was being watched. I turned to him, slowly, feeling my neck and jaw tense, tongue thick in my throat.

‘Please.’ I felt both brimming with life, and horribly close to death. ‘It’s so hot,’ I said, as he handed me a plastic cup filled with dirty, bruised ice.

‘Sip it,’ he said, not letting go of the cup. ‘Don’t gulp it, or you’ll throw up.’

‘Okay,’ I said. The syllables sounded wrong, almost like a sing-song. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ I said, impressed by the cadence of the letters. He laughed, took a step back, as though unsure of himself; then paused for a moment, and sat back down, slowly sipping his drink. I felt a swell, another flush of love for the people around me, and, in the moment, this stranger, who had come to me with iced water and kind words. ‘Thank you,’ I said, with what I hoped was a smile.

‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Would some fresh air help?’

‘I’m not … I’m not going anywhere near that window.’ I heard the words slur a little as I spoke, returning with a perfect echo.

‘Oh god, no. You’re absolutely not going near any windows, or sharp edges, or anywhere without childproofing.’

‘I’m not—’

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, catching my meaning before I could finish my sentence. ‘I just mean you don’t need to worry. You can’t get in much more trouble than you already are.’

He extended a hand, and pulled me up towards him. Grateful to escape, I stumbled with him into the corridor, where the bright lights and lurid posters swam kaleidoscopic above the stained tan carpets and beaten, grey walls. Stumbling down the stairs, I felt the glow of the fluorescent lights, switching on and off rhythmically as though time had slowed to accommodate their usual invisible flicker.

The words on the posters followed me down the stairs – Dance Society Meet next week, Mason Hall, 5pm; Basketball Tryouts Tuesday – shorties need not apply!; Kafka’s Metamorphosis :: Auditions Monday!!! Occasionally I felt a rumble of doubt, the same hot sweat rising from the soles of my feet to my chest, but the feeling disappeared as soon as I had identified it, the memory delirious and fleeting.

As we reached the ground floor, the rhythm of the music echoing from above seemed still as loud as it had been in the dorm room. I put my hands over my ears, my head aching; Tom stopped as we rounded the corner, and put my hands back by my sides. ‘Act normal,’ he whispered, and walked me past the security guard (though the caution was unnecessary, he now absorbed in a tattered paperback with no interest in the activities of the students who occasionally disturbed his reading). I thought of Robin as we left the building. She’ll be fine, I told myself. And then, a little bitterly, she said she’d stay with me, and she didn’t, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

There is something enchanting about fresh air when intoxicated; though remaining steady in it is a skill I have yet to master, even now, when the mood of a long night strikes and I wander these old streets, unseen and unheard, after a night at home sipping a rich wine and, on occasion, taking some strange combination of powders and pills. Nowadays, of course, these are more likely to be opiates or sedatives prescribed by my friendly and dutifully sympathetic family doctor; still, that feeling always reminds me of this night, when the air was hazy and alive with a kind of magic.

Outside, the sky had cleared to black. As I looked up, he steered me around the slick of washing powder and soap thrown from the floor above, and we walked in silence towards the lake, around which student halls were arranged. With hindsight, ‘lake’ is, perhaps, a little too grand: the light of day would reveal it to be little more than a large pond, surrounded by concrete walls on all sides. As we approached, a flock of birds burst into flight, disappearing into the infinite darkness above.

He tucked his hands into his pockets; took them out, as though caught.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’ he said. I felt a sort of pity for him, a painful identification; I didn’t know what to do either.

I shrugged. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

He said nothing; turned and sat on the graffitied park bench behind. I joined him, wondering what I was doing; why I was so eager to follow this stranger into the dark night.

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen,’ I lied, feeling ashamed the moment the word left my lips. What was I trying to achieve?

He turned and looked at me, doubtfully. From the tower, a firework sparked and burst, leaving a yellow trail through the sky. I watched as it spiralled, dwindling down, the casing landing with a splash in the dark water. He drew breath beside me, and paused.

‘My girlfriend …’ he began. I felt a pang of loss at expectations I hadn’t realized, or at least admitted, I was harbouring: some midnight kiss, a childish imagining of romance. ‘She’s at Cambridge.’

I looked at him, unsure if I was imagining the note of apology in his voice. ‘How’d you meet?’ I said, the words ringing false, cheerful. We were amateurs reading lines, failing to perform.

‘The usual. Same school, same friends … You know.’ I nodded, solemnly, though I, of course, had no idea. ‘I think she’s probably met someone else, though,’ he sighed.

I gave a non-committal murmur, and he continued, though now – the chill of the night gnawing at my skin, the memory of Robin now an ache – I wanted to go back. I waited as he went on – a lack of letters, calls returned late or not at all – and, finally, gave a dramatic shudder. ‘I’m cold.’

He said nothing for a moment, as though surprised at the interruption; surprised, it seemed, to find me there at all. He blinked, and stood, and I followed. Occasionally he would pause to examine a discarded beer bottle on the ground or one of the dolls I now noticed had been hung from the sparse branches of the trees, which creaked and groaned in the wind. Every time I looked back, he smiled, and I mirrored him, unsure how else to respond. It was as though we were playing a game, the rules of which I – in my intoxicated state, at least – felt myself unable to grasp.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Robin hissed as we entered the reception area, where she sat perched on the security guard’s desk, he now a little put out, realizing he was no longer of use. She jumped off the desk and moved so close it seemed her breath was mingling with mine. Her pupils were wide and deep, and it looked as though she had been crying, her eyes wet, shards of mascara littered underneath. I saw Nicky, lurking behind, watching with interest; I waved, dimly, and she smiled, disappearing up the stairs.

‘She’s fine,’ Tom said, wearily. ‘She just needed some fresh air.’

‘Really?’ Robin said, her tone arch. She turned to me. ‘Fresh air?’

I nodded. I felt oddly ashamed, a swell of guilt rising as I tried to recall my reasons for leaving her behind.

‘Wanna go home?’ Robin said, after a pause. I felt the world lurch forwards, and another wave of nausea struck me like a punch to the gut.

‘Home sounds good.’

‘Okay,’ Robin said. She turned again to Tom, who was already walking back towards the stairs. ‘Thanks for looking after her,’ she said, though I thought I heard a note of sarcasm in her voice.

‘Any time,’ he replied, without looking. His footsteps echoed up the steps as we left the tower, and stepped out once again into the night. The brief moment of warmth in the reception hall served only to heighten the cold outside, which now felt biting and cruel. We walked in silence, down the hill towards the edge of campus, through a dark passage lined with chicken-wire fences and overhanging trees fused into a tangled canopy above.

‘I’m sorry for leaving,’ I said, a little relieved at the sound of my voice which, for the first time in hours, sounded like my own.

‘It’s fine,’ Robin said, a few paces ahead. We walked a little longer in silence, before she added, ‘I had a fight with Andy. I think we’re over.’

I felt a rush of relief at this, the implication that perhaps her tears were not on my account, but his. ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad,’ I offered, awkwardly.

‘How would you know?’ She turned to me, eyes flashing anger.

‘I don’t, obviously,’ I said. ‘What I mean is …’ I clawed for some non-committal phrase, something to appease her. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be better in the morning. You probably just need to sleep on it.’

She sighed. ‘I don’t want to be rude,’ she said, slowly. ‘But what experience do you have, exactly, that puts you in a pos-ition to be doling out relationship advice?’ Her eyes were dark in the orange glow of the street lamps, her shadow long and distorted up ahead. I felt my cheeks burn red hot, and, grateful for the cover of night, I looked down at my feet, watching the fabric of my shoes flash and listening to the tap of the pavement as we walked.

When we reached the mermaid, Robin leaned in and gave me a stiff peck on the cheek, gripping the hair at the nape of my neck with a clutch that felt just a little tense, her squeeze a little too tight. Without a word, she turned and walked away, her figure casting a long shadow as she disappeared into the night. I walked home in a stunned trance, remembering as I reached my front door that I had told my mum I’d be staying at Robin’s (her house a cover for a party expected to go on until dawn). I climbed the stairs and nervously crawled into bed, my mind uselessly grasping for answers as I tumbled into a cold, dreamless sleep.

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