Friday 15 July

Bec is absently flicking up and closing the lid of her Tic Tac container as we wander back to the bus after lunch. She just ate a huge public sandwich that she didn’t even want because of the PSST ana list crap.

‘Ady, tune in,’ Tash is saying. ‘Get that.’ She’s turning my shoulders, pointing me in the direction of a St Hilda’s-uniform-clad body tangling with a tall guy, not at all well hidden behind a bank of camellias. ‘What a slut.’

Wow, the navy really stands out against the greeny. It’s the swim-girl boarder, Clem Banks. Interesting. Since when do lap-training drudges do illicit boy rendezvous? ‘I could not be less interested.’ I catch Tash’s fleeting smile of approval as I turn away. Being unimpressed is such a cheap win. Like being bored. But it’s a default mode with my group.

On the bus back to school, Clem is sitting right in front of us.

I reach forward and pull a dry twig from her hair. A barbed briar-rose stem. She twists around and glares at me. There are leaves and twigs all over the back of her blazer, as though the garden has tried to pull a school girl into its pagan embrace and hold her there. She escaped, but when she turns and frowns at me, I see her scratch-kissed puffy mouth and her eyes still full of that place.

I’d love to dress someone as spring. Primavera. Rose red. Any old white shift, a gauzy fabric, a bit grubby and ripped, twined in creeper. Strewn with ivy leaves. And flowers. I would need . . . I look around. Kate Turner. Her dark hair, her pale skin, uncharacteristically pink-cheeked right now. Perfect. I would paint her face. Feathering fern fronds connecting her eyebrows to her hairline. Hair piled up and woven ratty with leaves and twigs and flower buds: a nest. She would be about to hatch, about to bloom. And the dress would be constructed so it looked like – like a garment in which to joyfully deflower. I declare this an active verb! Flower, deflower . . . An awakening motif. I’m twirling the twig, examining it, as I assemble the look in my mind’s eye, itching to make some sketches; but it’ll hold till later. Bare feet, tinted icy blue, walking away from winter . . .

Tash says, ‘What is that?’

I drop the twig. ‘Nits,’ I say. ‘Most likely.’ I pull another leaf from Clem’s hair and flick it at Tash.

‘Earwigs,’ says Tash.

‘Compost,’ I say.

‘Trash,’ says Tash.

And there we have it. Another satisfactory reduction of someone who doesn’t count. We’re good at this. We don’t even have to try.

Have I ever been so lost and entangled in Rupert’s arms as Clem was lost in her embrace just now? Pretty certainly not. Gotta say I’m finding the erect penis to be a distraction. It’s like an insistent puppy. If it could talk it would be saying something like: Sex, sex, sex, ready right now, I want the sex, please, do you want the sex, now’s a good sex time, sex, sex, sex, are we having sex now, let’s go . . . I’ll have sex when the time is right, so it’s not that I feel pressured, it’s just that I’m not as into Rupe as he and his peen are into me.

In fact, I definitely seem to like Rupert more in theory than in practice. He never seems more attractive than when we are apart. That cannot be right.

‘Dreaming of your dream boy?’ Tash elbows me from my reverie.

Do I reveal myself to my peers? ‘You know it.’ I smile. It’s the official smile of a girl who’s going out with a dream boy. But it’s not a smile like Clem Banks’s private, lit-up smile when she ran up to the bus late, claiming that she’d got lost.