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now on hello terms? We’re not. We have nothing to talk about so just, like, go away.’
    Michael narrowed his eyes. He really was ridiculously pretty for a boy. It was another reason why I was harshing him – he was so used to girls going swoony in his presence (I once saw someone from Year 9 walk into a tree rather than tear her eyes away from him) that I didn’t want him to think that I was, too. That was the deal with the really good-looking boys: they automatically assumed you were pining and panting for them and wouldn’t be satisfied until you’d had their babies, no matter how ugly their personalities might be.
    Apart from narrowing his eyes, Michael didn’t react in any way to what I’d said. I decided we were done and so I picked up my knitting again and began to retrace my stitches.
    ‘Look, I was just trying to be friendly,’ he suddenly said.
    ‘Is this part of some lame-o student council outreach programme?’
    ‘It’s funny but I’m starting to figure out what this whole deal with Barney and Scarlett is about,’ Michael remarked casually. Then he had the nerve to sit down next to me on the wall. I tried to ignore him. ‘If I was going out with you, I’d be looking for an exit strategy too.’
    ‘And if I had the incredible bad luck to be going out with you, my exit strategy would involve running into oncoming traffic,’ I snapped. ‘Now, why don’t you go and share your paranoid little delusions with someone who actually gives a toss?’
    Michael jumped up from the wall, knocking into me so I dropped about twenty more stitches, and muttered something under his breath that sounded like the word ‘Bitch’ said ten times, really fast. I kept a cool smile pinned on my face because I knew it would enrage him further, though I didn’t know why the need to take Michael Lee down a peg or fifty had suddenly become my life’s vocation.
    I watched him stride across the scrubby patch of grass where the stoners often sat and when he rounded the corner by the bins I got to my feet, stuffed my knitting and iPod into my bag and marched off to English.
    Scarlett was sitting at the back with her little posse of friends. They all thought they were perched on the cutting edge because they bought their clothes in American Apparel and went to gigs on school nights. They weren’t evil per se, but they sure had a lot to say for four girls who wore exactly the same clothes, listened to exactly the same music and had the sameopinion about everything. Apart from Scarlett – she wouldn’t know an opinion if it moved in next door and played death metal all night long.
    I always sat at the front because I always got to class too late. Besides, it was easier to keep an eye on the teacher and berate them loudly if they were trying to stick us with extra coursework. As I pulled out my chair, I made sure to catch Scarlett’s eye and give her my most blank-faced stare. Always worked better than a glare – it let the recipient know that they weren’t even worth the trouble it would take to scrunch up your facial muscles.
    Scarlett went as red as her stupid name and shook her head so her hair fell over her face (a move she could only have learnt from Barney), as Ms Ferguson shut the classroom door, smiled at us all brightly and announced that we were going to have a debate about the two novels we were studying for A-level:
The Great Gatsby
and
The Fountainhead
.
    There was a collective groan as I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. The chances of a rigorous literary debate were slim and if I arranged my books just so on my desk, I could probably do some tweeting without anyone noticing. Ms Ferguson was cool, but she wasn’t
that
cool.
    I let the chatter buzz around me. It wasn’t a debate, just a rehashing of the plots of both books, though I heard someone say incisively, ‘That Daisy Miller, she was really up herself.’
    It was almost worthy of a tweet, but I had an unwritten rule that I would never badmouth