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out her legs, they brushed against Holdo’s. She apologized and drew them back into herself.
    â€œS’okay,” he muttered. His own eyes were half-closed and his blondish hair fell into them, hiding the worst of his acne-splattered forehead.
    If we were more interesting, we would be having sex right now.
    Again the thought came out of nowhere. But again she knew she was right. They should be having sex! That’s what people cared about. That’s what interesting people did. They shagged each other and then got confused and upset about it and told everyone. And you would listen – interested – dying to know more. If she and Holdo ended up sleeping together tonight that would be a very interesting thing to have happened. She wondered if she should try it. Could she bring herself to? Tentatively, she stretched out her legs again, but this time laid them on Holdo’s lap.
    If he starts stroking them, what will I do?
    She watched his reaction. Holdo looked at his lap and the unexpected human parcel that had landed there. His hand clenched and unclenched and then she was certain she saw him reach towards her, to maybe touch her leg. Her breath quickened with suspense…
    But then he dropped his hand like a damp dandelion and scratched a spot on his chin.
    Not really disappointed, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the music. Jagger was yelling about not getting what you want but getting what you need.
    But what if you needed to get what you want…just once?
    She opened her eyes to tell Holdo her clever thought about the song.
    â€œHoldo?”
    His head had flopped down and a small snore whistled out his mouth.
    He’d passed out.
    â€œHoldo?” she said a little louder, but nothing. He was gone. Bree sighed, bored of this evening, bored of her life. Tired of it always feeling like sludge to wade through. She carefully extricated her apparently unenticing legs from his lap and stood up, wobbling slightly. She took a moment to roll Holdo over so he was lying on his side and put a bin next to his head. She knew Holdo, and he would always vomit when he’d had too much wine. The stain on Bree’s bedroom carpet was proof. She examined him for a while – how his face looked when he was sleeping. Maybe he would grow up to be good-looking one day. There was certainly potential. It was just hard to get over the bad skin and, well, Holdo’s somewhat difficult personality. He really needed to learn to stop interrupting people to correct them on their grammar.
    She left Holdo sleeping – dreaming about a world where he wasn’t him, where he was someone else…
    â€¦Someone confident enough to reach out and stroke a girl’s legs.

chapter six
    The house was quiet when Bree stumbled in. She’d had trouble with the security gate and almost set off the alarm. Now she was having trouble closing the door without making a noise. Every bang seemed to echo around the huge lonely house. She didn’t know whether her parents were asleep or out. Her dad was probably still at work. She removed a crystal glass from a display cabinet and pushed the button on the giant fridge to let ice fall. She then filled it with water and downed it as quickly as she could, before opening the cupboard to get out another strawberry Pop-Tart to take up to her room.
    She still couldn’t get Mr Fellows’s words out of her head. They merry-go-rounded in her brain over and over. She knew why. It was because he was right. Bree needed to become more interesting.
    Closing her bedroom door behind her, she leaned against it for a moment and stared at her special bookshelf. The shelf drilled into the wall just above her rejection spike. All her favourite books stood lined up on it in pride of place, for her to yank out and reread night after night. She walked over and trailed her fingers along the crusted spines, thinking of the authors who’d created these beautiful collections of