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wondered how she managed to get to school without being run over.
    There were other signs, too, that suggested Barney was doing more than guiding Scarlett through the minefield that was GCSE Maths. He was meant to tutor her for one hour after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I noticed that actually he was nowhere to be found on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at all. He wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook or Google Chat and he certainly wasn’t answering his phone.
    When I asked him casually on the Wednesday morning, ‘Were you screening my calls last night?’ Barney stammered and stuttered his way through a torturous denial that involved his Physics class finishing early and having to get a permission slip signed in the school office and the planets realigning in some mysterious way that caused him to leave his phone in his locker. I wasn’t buying it.
    And I certainly wasn’t buying the way that Scarlett and Barney tried to ignore each other. He was ‘tutoring’ her so there was no reason for her to pretend that he wasn’t standing right behind her in the lunch queue. Especially when he looked as if he was sniffing her hair at one point.
    Biting my tongue and not saying anything was really hard – usually I spoke first, tweeted second and thought last. The evidence was piled high against them, but when I wasn’t atschool or scowling at Barney’s status updates and Scarlett’s inevitable lolz, I started to doubt it. Because really, Barney and Scarlett? It made no sense. They defied all laws of God and man. I’d raised Barney in my own image: he was on my side, on the side of the dorks, on the side of all that was good and pure. Scarlett was strictly darkside all the way.
    That was the conclusion I’d come to by lunchtime on Wednesday as I sat in my favourite secluded spot behind the language lab knitting furiously and listening to a podcast about the fair trade coffee industry, rather than doing the reading on the fair trade coffee industry. I was just getting to grips with a tricky bit of moss-stitching on circular needles when a shadow loomed over me.
    ‘Go away,’ I muttered without looking up, because I could see boy feet in a pair of off-white Converses and the only boy I talked to at school was Barney and he knew better than to wear off-white Converses like every other boy in Years 12 and 13, so it was no one that I wanted to talk to. ‘You’re in my light and this is my special spot so go away.’
    ‘You’re the rudest person I’ve ever met,’ said a voice that I recognised, even over the heated debate about fair trade farming in Peru. Yes, bloody Peru. With a put-upon sigh I looked up at Michael Lee. ‘Why are you so hostile?’
    ‘Why are you still in my light?’ I said, putting down my knitting so I could unhook my earbuds because he was still blocking the weak rays from the late-September sun and showing no signs of moving. Obviously we were going to have to chat this out. ‘What do you want?’
    I was pretty certain I knew what Michael wanted and part ofme wanted it too. Because thoughts of Barney and Scarlett (or Barnett as they’d be known if they were celebrities) were going round and round in my head and I had nobody I could talk to about it. I had friends. I wasn’t some sad-sack Betty-No-Mates, but I didn’t like to overshare when it came to deep stuff. I had no problem with oversharing about undeep stuff though.
    I’d used to talk to Bethan about the deep stuff but it was different over Skype, especially when she was working eighty-hour weeks and always sounded so tired. My frustration at my current lack of a confidante had to be written all over my face, making me even more scowly than usual, because Michael took a hurried step back even as he said, ‘Oh, I was just passing and I thought I’d come over and say hi.’
    ‘Why the hell would you want to do that?’ I asked very coldly. ‘Did you think that because we had one unpleasant conversation at the jumble sale we’re