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them, have they?’
    A flicker of a frown passed over Sean’s face. Then he shrugged and kissed my nose. ‘Course not. I’m not sharing you with anyone.’
    I wanted to run back to school, to have him empty out his bag, to reassure me that our secret was safe. But he’d already made a couple of ‘Well, you’re only thirteen’ comments when I’d been shocked at things he’d done with his friends – drinking on the dunes, nicking sweets from Woolworths, banging the machines in the amusement arcades to make the coins rattle out. I didn’t dare say anything more and turned my attention to not being late for Maths with the terrifying Mr Ashcombe. I was trying to hurry without Sean noticing. He was hell-bent on dawdling back, blasé, even though he was in my dad’s French class straight after lunch. In the end, the fear of Mr Ashcombe shouting at me in front of everyone was too strong. I needed to fetch my books from my locker, so I raced on ahead.
    When I emerged back out into the playground, my dad was disappearing into his class as the second bell rang for the start of lessons. So he wouldn’t catch me cutting it fine to get to class on time, I hung back behind a pillar a few yards away. I watched him open his textbook, then pick up something inside it and study it closely. I was just about to duck past when Sean strolled round the corner.
    He winked as he opened the classroom door. ‘Back to mine after school, yeah?’
    I nodded, a little shiver of anticipation running through me.
    Then it all happened so quickly. A great roar of fury from inside. Sean flying out with Dad chasing after him, clutching something in his hand. Dad reaching Sean. Thrusting something square at him. A photo. The one Sean couldn’t find. The last one, when we’d been confident and carried away. When we’d stopped laughing when the self-timer went off. When we’d worked out how to balance the camera on a pile of LPs and tilt it at an angle so the picture got our whole bodies in. Where Sean had one hand on my breast and another spreading my legs.
    The only photo where you could see everything .
    There was a pause. Then Dad’s cufflinks glittering in the May sunshine, the tie with the school crest flapping back over his shoulder, the crack as he drove his fist into Sean’s face. Sean grunting and buckling over. Dad’s foot, clad in a highly polished shoe, making contact with Sean’s ribs. A shout. Mr Shaw, our pale Geography teacher, scattering papers as he ran. Sean on the floor, curled up, hands covering his head. Mr Shaw’s thin fingers clawing onto Dad’s arm.
    The disbelief on Dad’s face.
    On everybody’s.

    E ven now , my feeling of terror could reignite, like trick candles on a birthday cake.
    My mother’s voice took on a rasping harshness. ‘I didn’t want you to be forever etched in people’s minds as the girl who was stupid enough to let a boy photograph her private parts.’ She managed to say ‘ a boy ’ as though I’d run into the street and jiggled an array of body parts at the first male clutching a Polaroid camera.
    After all these years, I still didn’t know how to seal her words in. If ever the phrase ‘to have your say’ took on a human form, I was quite sure it would look like my mother, knotting scarves with precision and terrifying clothes into hanging without creases.
    And she was off, as ferocious and determined as the mothers in the egg-and-spoon race on sports day. ‘I can’t believe you trusted him not to show the photos to his friends. What did you think he was going to do with them?’
    Treasure them as a memento of how much I loved him, not boast about them to Nigel Graves, the captain of the rugby team and all-round alpha male.
    I could feel my throat ache with the strain of not shouting. I managed to say, quite calmly, ‘We’ve been through this. Hundreds of times. If I could live my life over again, of course, I wouldn’t have done it, but I can’t change what happened.’
    My