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dress, shoes, accessories. Miriam had been unsure about leaving me to shop, worried I wasn’t well enough, but even with the electricity in my spine and the roar in my ears, being with Kitty made me feel better than I had in ages. I argued. Miriam conceded. Kitty had to promise to bring me home if I felt faint, and I had promised to use Miriam’s credit card. Sort of a compromise, I guess.
    “All for a good cause,” Kitty says. “It’s always the best revenge to turn up looking gorgeous when there’s an ex around.”
    “Jamie’s not my ex,” I mutter, but I still feel buoyed enough to laugh it off. In fact, I had followed Kitty around in a daze all afternoon from salon to boutique to shoe store, compliant, content, bolstered to the point where the prospect of meeting her snooty schoolfriends no longer seems to faze me. Seeing Jamie won’t be such a big deal. He’s eighteen, I’m seventeen. Like Kitty says, we can be grown-ups. I even picture us laughing off old misunderstandings.
    The strange inner workings of my body reassure me. Zip-zap, Kitty’s very important to me. Zip-zap, she’s probably the best friend I’ve ever had. Zip-zap, it isn’t such a hardship making her happy. Besides, zip-zap, saying yes to Kitty makes me feel good.
    “Still,” she says, “won’t hurt him to feel a little regret.”
    I roll my eyes.
    She waves. “See you tonight.”
    “Okay.” The vague anxious feeling tugs at me. “Thanks again.” I hold my breath as her car pulls away. It doesn’t feel right. The not-right feeling peaks when she reaches the corner. I almost cry out. Then the car turns out of sight and the feeling evaporates.
    POOF!
    The tightness in my chest disappears. Even the zip-zap of pins and needles dies down to a barely perceptible hum. The certainty I felt that everything Kitty said was right evaporates.
    Oh crap
.
    I stand beneath the thick leafy canopy of Columbia Avenue, paralysed by dawning horror, my rational self clawing its way painfully to the surface. Whatever spell I’ve been under has lost its hold and I look back on the afternoon like a hung-over partygoer whose flashes of memory fill them with cringing regret. What the hell have I done, saying yes to this ball? Why did I let Kitty talk me into it? Now I’ve bought all this ridiculous stuff with Miriam’s money! Had I really believed I could get all dressed up and these rich kids wouldn’t see right through me? What on earth did I expect to talk about all night? How will I dodge questions about my family, my non-existent dad, my dead mom? And Jamie! Jamie, my living nightmare, will be there, smirking, indifferent and gorgeous. I’ll be the idiot trying to act like I don’t remember that he humiliated me in front of his asshole friends, breaking my fourteen-year-old heart.
    The memory of crowing boys bursting into the secluded hollow beneath the willow tree, while Jamie and I were mid-kiss, makes my ears burn whenever I’m dumb enough to let it resurface. I remember Jamie’s face paling as his friends crowded in. While most of the boys cheered and money changed hands, one had said, “I knew we should have waited. I could have made another forty bucks.”
    The aftermath was a blur. I ran. Jamie yelled at his friends and called after me. The boys’ laughter faded as I tore out of the reserve, blind with shame and fury.
    The trouble is, three years ago, before the moment when everything was ruined, it was the best summer of my life. Jamie had shot up – a staggering six-foot-two. His wiry frame had filled out and his square shoulders broadened. Basically, he got hot. For my part, I finally got boobs; changes to catch both our attentions.
    Over the months of that holiday, we circled each other with uneasy awareness and the bickering stopped. I was painfully self-conscious and he was less smug than usual. For me it was a big-time crush.
    It all came down to that day by the river. We’d wandered away, found the secluded hollow, he’d