The Girl With The Priestly Admirer tells me over a coffee about her newly acquired admirer, forbidden admirer number two. She is collecting them. The Priest. The Geography Teacher. Catholic, corrupt. I see him around, sometimes, tall and dark with eyebrows I think he must keep in a box on his bedside table and glue on every morning. He caught me once dripping pregnant drops of rainwater, spilling leaves and bramble and mud up the tiled steps. His eyebrows, they almost escaped from his face.

He lends her jumpers and adores her photographs. Dark-skinned Africans shivering over bland English food. Colourful shawls a culture shock language barrier taboos.

The Girl With The Priestly Admirer is having a rough time of life, life in general with a capital ‘L’. She enters rooms and performs swift U-turns, leaking tears. She asks me when she sees me, when does life start? with a desperation I match silently in the small gulps of scalding coffee white one sugar extra creamy. I come away with the roof of my mouth peeling in thin, irritating strips of skin and a bitter taste at the back of my throat.

The Geography Teacher crosses lines impossible to reverse back over when he asks, how big is John’s, like this? Like this? She buries her scarlet face in her hands. His thumb and index finger almost touching, mockingly close. He crosses another when he lecturers on love.

People say things, he tells her, they don’t mean.

She nods and thinks of John and gathers her photographs.

He raises an eyebrow. She thinks it travels too far up his forehead to be real. I mean. He starts. And stops. Glances at the door. We could go for it, right here on this carpet, on this classroom floor. It wouldn’t mean a thing. Nonchalantly. Probing. The go for it embarrasses her more than the suggestion itself. It. Go for.

The Girl With The Priestly Admirer does not look at me. She shuffles plastic wallets around her ring-binder. We sit in silence for a while, and wonder what it would be like, for it to mean nothing.

I prefer shopping, she says at last.