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beside us, their roots wrapped in wet gauze. Emma has her hand resting on the spade and is staring at the camera. My fingers rest on her arm. We were told to pause like that. Not smiling, touching each other. The picture was in a newspaper – our pale faces, blank as masks and frozen in a spotlight of attention.
    People wanted to know if Chloe had confided, if we’d noticed the signs. I said nothing. Emma and I glanced at each other, and the photographer took another photograph. That’s the one I have.

Chapter 3
    Chloe wanted to go into Debenhams to look at earrings. We were supposed to be Christmas shopping but I think she had her eye out for something special to wear to her New Year’s Eve party. She’d lingered at the perfume and make-up counters, tried things on, used all the eye-shadow testers and had been shooed away. Her shoplifting habit was a secret but I knew about it because I was the one she told her secrets to. It goes without saying. Sometimes I got the blame, but that was okay – it was what close friends did for each other. She moved quickly between the aisles and displays and slid between and around people without touching them. Like a slinky. I followed her. People blocked my way after letting her pass only a second before. I always followed her.
    ‘Look at this!’
    She went to a basket filled with Christmas decorations. She was like a much younger child in that way – always gravitated to anything shiny or wrapped up. I think she liked Christmas a lot more than she would admit. She only ever described anything as ‘all right’ or ‘boring’ but that year, I think she was excited.
    When I caught up with her she was already opening boxes and taking small glass reindeer out of their tissue paper beds. She laughed at them, and held them up against her ears. The broken boxes and tissue paper lay around her feet.
    ‘What about these for my mum?’ she said, and jiggled the ornaments until the little bells on their harnesses rattled.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
    We had a lot of running jokes going on between us about people that we knew – mainly people at our school or members of our families. Her mother’s habit of always wearing large, bright earrings was something that we laughed about a lot. I thought these people didn’t know that we were laughing at them. Or I made myself forget what being laughed at felt like. We underestimated ourselves. Who cared? We were just girls – a nuisance, harmless, too loud in shops.
    ‘What about this?’ I said. I picked up one of the pieces of discarded tissue paper and held it against my top lip. ‘Hello, Chloe,’ I said, in a pretend deep voice. ‘Have you seen my new car? It’s a real pussy wagon!’
    Chloe looked, blinked her metallic eyes once, twice, and turned half away. ‘Who’s that?’ she said. She made her face go very still and serious.
    I waggled the paper. ‘I’ve got a box of chocolates for you, Chloe, come here and give us a kiss!’
    ‘That’s not really funny, actually,’ she informed me.
    The last time we saw Carl he’d been growing a moustache. He obviously wasn’t used to the feel of it on his face because while Chloe had been talking to him I’d noticed him stroking it repeatedly. I was going to point it out to her – a fault or at least a potential embarrassment it was my duty to bring to her attention – but they’d left me alone and I’d had to sit on the bandstand and hold her bag while she disappeared into his car. I’d looked inside her purse at the picture on her bus pass, the pretend student ID card she’d got hold of from someone’s older brother, who fancied her. A bracelet made with tiny beads that looked like glass but were only blue plastic. I’d smoked her cigarettes while I waited and the impression of Carl, the joke about the pussy wagon, was my attempt at revenge. Chloe was the one who was in charge of deciding what exactly was funny and what wasn’t. She was