The new girl, Mae, asked me to play with her today. I didn’t know what to say. She’s got long black hair that she’d tied into two plaits and put on top of her head, like Heidi or the children from The Sound of Music. She has a round doll face with bright blue eyes, and she only joined the school this term.

I was sitting in my favourite corner of the playground, with a book. It’s what I always do at break-time. Mae smiled at me in a hopeful way, but I shook my head and went back to my book.

‘Okay,’ she said, and went.

I tried to concentrate on my book, but my eyes kept sliding over to watch her. She says okay a lot; it seems to suit her. It even rhymes with her name. Okay, Mae. She told us in circle time she’d changed schools because her family had moved house. She didn’t seem to mind about it, though. She always looked cheerful.

I thought maybe she would go up to someone else but she went over to the fence on her own and started to pick up twigs from the ground. She made a little pile of them. Then she sat down and pulled something out of her pocket. The sun glinted off it – a magnifying glass.

She was trying to set fire to the twigs. I watched, fascinated. Would it work? She seemed to be having difficulty getting the angle right. She kept looking up at the sky and then down at the magnifying glass, tilting it from side to side.

That’s not right, I thought to myself. She needs to hold it in one position for a long time, so that the pinpoint of light heats up the twig underneath. I read it in a book once. Lighting a fire that way isn’t actually very practical, but it can work if you’re patient enough and if the sun is strong enough. But this is autumn. The sun isn’t very strong.

I was watching her so hard that when she looked up and saw me, I nearly dropped my book in shock. Quickly, I fixed my eyes on the page again, but I couldn’t resist sneaking another glance at her. She was still looking at me, and she smiled as if I was her friend.

My face felt hot with embarrassment. I didn’t look up from my book again.

Mae didn’t manage to set fire to her twigs. I know that because if she had, one of the teachers would have come running. Instead, when the bell went, everyone lined up just as normal. I dawdled behind, waiting until the line had almost gone in. Then I rushed over to the fence to look at Mae’s little pile of twigs.

It wasn’t a pile any more. She’d arranged them into letter shapes on the ground. They spelled out a word.

CALYPSO

I raced back to the classroom, my heart pounding. Why had she written my name in twigs?

Dad always says you should be your own best friend. When I was younger I didn’t understand what that meant, but now I do. It means that you should be happy being alone, with yourself; that you shouldn’t need other people to make you happy. He doesn’t need other people, he says.

I wonder sometimes if he needed my mother, but it’s not the sort of thing I can ask him. And I can’t ask her because she’s dead.

Teachers at school used to worry that I always sit by myself. They wrote things like ‘she is a very solitary girl’ and ‘she isolates herself’. As though those were bad things.

My latest report says something different: ‘She will find it hard to transition to secondary school next year if she can’t form close friendships.’

‘They don’t get it,’ Dad said when he read it at the end of last term. ‘They don’t understand people who don’t need people. They think being independent means you must be lonely. They’ve never been taught about inner strength.’

Dad’s a big believer in inner strength. ‘If something happened to me,’ Dad says every now and then, ‘you’d be fine, Calypso. You have great inner strength.’

I feel proud that he thinks I have great inner strength, but I don’t like to think about something happening to Dad. Something happened to Mum, five years ago, and I try not to think about that either. It all happened so quickly: she felt a bit unwell and went to the doctor, and they did some tests and told her she had cancer, and then she got very ill very fast – and then she died. If Dad died too, I’m not at all sure I’d be fine.

Whenever he says it, I feel my eyes fill with tears. He notices and shakes his head, as though I’ve let him down again. ‘It’s no good getting upset,’ he says. ‘I’m just showing you how to be strong. Find your inner strength.’

I wipe my eyes and try. It’s there, I’m sure. He says it often enough, it must be there. ‘I’d be fine,’ I say, and I don’t let my voice wobble. ‘And if … something happened to me … you’d be fine.’

‘That’s right,’ he says, with an encouraging smile, and goes off to his library. I try not to mind that he agrees. It’s because he’s got inner strength. It’s not that he doesn’t love me.

At school, the other children have stopped trying to be my best friend. I like playing with them – it’s not that I don’t like people. But to be honest, I prefer books. I like the quiet space in my head that they make; the space that can be filled with magic or islands or mystery.

Mae is new and doesn’t understand about me yet. She’ll realise in a few days, and then she’ll find someone else to be her friend.