The chaplain has surpassed himself. He calls to his little lair behind the sixth-form centre my friend, and tells her she is affectacious, ha! she should look that up in her dictionary.

He tells her, I can’t help you unless you tell me absolutely everything. He wants to know with whom she last slept, who she kissed when she went out on Friday night. He rages, even after she tells. You’re hiding something from me. I have a right to know. You are SO bad. You have to tighten things up. He brandishes hell as a threat.

I’m the best looking chaplain here, he boasts, after she has told him she never wants to speak to him again.

She snorts, and tells him there’s no point him being good-looking. To be honest, she says maliciously, there’s no point in you being good-looking. If you were, it would be wasted. She turns to leave, and he slaps her hard, hiking her skirt up a few inches.

I watch her mirror image paint her lips cherry red, most of which comes off as a kiss on two sheets of toilet paper, folded. She flushes the cherry kiss away, and turns back to me.

What did you do? I am mildly fascinated and half-disgusted at the same time.

I laughed, she told me, the kind of laugh you laugh when there’s nothing to say and no facial expression that would suit.

I know what she means. I pretend not to, and prod mentally at my face until it looks suitably disapproving. She buys me hot chocolate and we huddle our backs against the draft whistling in from under the door. It is foul, today. I almost cry, watching fierce rain slashing against the window pane. Once out there, I feel indistinguishable from the other bedraggled people wandering from campus to campus. One girl wears my jeans, even. I want so desperately to get away and stay away.

I want something good to happen to me, she sighs, and I don’t want to wait years and years for it. How did I get here, with the chaplain after me and everyone else staying away?

He says to her, Your Father loves you, father loves you, I love you…ooops! and laughs.