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Toby’s mouth to talk to her friend.
    “Oh my God, Clara, you look real y pale,” says Eve, drunk but concerned. “Shal we go? We could share a taxi back. I’l phone one.”
    Behind her Clara sees Toby pep-talking Harper and vaguely wonders what he is saying.
    “No, it’s okay,” Clara manages to say, over the drum-heavy music. “I’m going to cal my mum in a minute. She’l pick me up.”
    “I can phone her if you want.”
    Toby is tugging on Eve’s shirt.
    “It’s okay,” says Clara.
    “Sure?” asks Eve, with the eyes of a drunken deer.
    Clara nods. She can’t speak now. If she speaks, she knows, she wil throw up. Instead she inhales and tries to get some fresh night air inside her, but it does nothing to help.
    And then, as Eve and Toby start kissing again, the nausea in her stomach intensifies and begins to be mixed with sharp, wrenching pain.
    This isn’t right.
    Clara closes her eyes, and from somewhere deep inside the darkness of her being, she summons the strength needed to stand up and get away from al the happy dancers and kissing couples.

    Signal

    A couple of minutes later Clara is crossing a stile and heading into an adjacent field. She wants to cal her mum but there’s no signal on her phone so she just keeps walking. Not directly toward the road—she doesn’t want to stay in ful view of the partygoers—but through this field, which offers a quieter way to disappear.
    She takes out her phone again. The little aerial symbol stil has a line through it.
    There are sleeping cows on the ground. Headless shapes in the dark, like the backs of whales breaking free of an ocean. They only properly become cows when she is near; they wake, startled, and blunder in desperation away from her. She keeps going, treading a diagonal path toward the distant road, as the voices from the party blur and fade behind her along with the music, becoming lost in the night air.
    Clara has never felt so il in her life. And in a life of eye infections, three-day migraines, and recurrent diarrhea, this is quite an achievement. She should be in bed, curled up in a fetal bal under the duvet whimpering to herself.
    Then it comes again, that racking nausea that makes her wish she could escape her own body.
    She needs to stop.
    She needs to stop and be sick.
    But then she hears something. Heavy panting.
    The fire seems miles away now, a distant glow behind a rough, bushy hedge separating the fields.
    She sees a hulking silhouette, bounding across the earth.
    “Hey,” it pants. He pants. “Clara.”
    It’s Harper. She feels so sick she isn’t real y too worried about why he might be fol owing her.
    She is delirious enough to have forgotten his lecherous stares and to imagine that he might not be fol owing her at al . Or maybe she left something behind and he’s coming to give it to her.
    “What?” she says. She straightens herself upright.
    He steps closer to her. He smiles broadly and doesn’t speak. He is incredibly drunk, she thinks.
    She’s not, though. Harper is a big oaf and a thug, but she’s always thought of him as lacking a mind of his own. And as Toby’s isn’t around for him to borrow, she should be okay.
    “You look nice,” he says, wobbling about like a huge tree chopped at the base of its trunk.
    His deep, sinusy voice weighs her down, adding to the queasiness.
    “No. I don’t. I—”
    “I wondered if you wanted a walk.”
    “What?”
    “Just, you know, a walk.”
    She’s confused. She wonders again what Toby has been saying to him. “I am walking.”
    He smiles. “It’s al right. I know you like me.”
    She can’t be dealing with this. She doesn’t seem to have her usual supply of polite and useful excuses at hand to help her deal with him. Instead, she can do nothing except walk on.
    But Harper somehow gets in front of her, plants himself in her path, and smiles as if they are sharing a joke. A joke that could get crude, or ugly. He walks backward as she walks forward, staying in