stare at my arch-nemesis blankly.

Apparently as soon as a young sea-squirt finds a rock to anchor itself to, it will eat its own brain because it doesn’t really need one any more.

I think that’s possibly what’s happened to me.

This place is so safe and so comfortable – such a source of inner strength – I’m not really on my guard any longer.

Now my head is totally empty.

“What a charming surprise,” Alexa continues with another laugh, blowing on her proper, caffeinated coffee. “I didn’t realise you hung out here. Do you mind if I sit with you?”

Seriously: again?

Why does she always insist on sitting with me? The surface of the earth is 510 billion square metres. Can’t she just – for once – pick one that isn’t directly adjacent to mine?

I watch as my bully of eleven years flicks the paper that says Natalie Grey on to the floor and sits down, propping her spiky high-heeled boots on the chair that says Toby Pilgrim and flinging her handbag on to India Perez.

So much for reservations.

“You know,” she continues with a little smirk, “I wasn’t sure about this place at first, but I think maybe it’s kind of growing on me.”

I nod vaguely. “Mmm.”

“What are you drinking?” she asks curiously, staring into my cup. “Go tea!”

I blink a few times. My beverage is quite clearly not tea: it has fluffed-up milk on top and a ridiculous amount of chocolate sprinkles.

“Actually,” I say, flushing slightly, “it’s an extremely strong cappuccino. The caffeine molecule mimics the molecule adenosine and binds to natural receptors that would otherwise make you sleepy, thus keeping you – I mean me – super-awake.”

Thanks to Jasper’s drink-making skills, there’s no way she can prove this is actually a kiddy-beverage. Thank goodness this time there are no pink mini-marshmallows floating on top.

“Please,” Alexa takes another delicate sip and wiggles her eyebrows, “do tell me mo’.”

I stare at her a little longer, totally bemused. Why does she sound like an American belle from the Deep South?

Then I decide I don’t really care.

There’s a spider in the United States called the Loxosceles reclusa. Its venom is so powerful it destroys flesh: chewing up cell membranes and cutting off the blood supply. Thousands of people every year used to be badly wounded by it.

They’re not any more.

In 1984, scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville found the anti-venom that blocked the spider’s venom and stopped it destroying anything.

There’s a brilliant reason why I left Alexa off my list: she no longer matters. She doesn’t make me cry and she doesn’t make me hide under tables. After eleven years, I finally found the only thing in the world that could stop my bully hurting me.

Myself.

“No, thank you,” I sigh tiredly, grabbing the crossword I left yesterday under the coffee table and studying that instead.

“Maybe we can shave it for later?”

“Sure,” I say in a bored voice, writing EWER in four across: boat or vessel.

“It’s so nice to see you finally manning up.”

I nod and scribble ERINACEOUS in six down: pertaining to a hedgehog. “Uh-huh.”

The door opens with a BANG.

“We’ll really have to— OOMPH.”

I glance up just in time to see a tornado of long black hair, blue coat and grey bag as Nat rips across the cafe with Toby and India close behind her.

And sits directly in Alexa’s lap.