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was my out-of-school friend-who actually asked me once what I saw in her.

      She probably wasn’t the only one who wondered this. It’s so unfair, cos I don’t expect anyone ever asked Honey what she saw in me. Honey was a bit of a loner at school. She was a couple of years older than me, so of course we were in different classes, and people from different classes never mix. It’s just not done. Even if it were, me and Honey would never have hung out at school. I was one of those horrible loud, shrieking, show-off types. The sort that always gets invited to parties, always goes round in a gang, always manages to be the centre of attention. I suppose in a way I still am.

      I’m still a bit loud and shrieky, and I am quite popular, but the fact is that I have never had a real friend. Not like Honey. Marnie was OK, we used to giggle together about boys and read magazines in the girls’ toilets and swop clothes, and once I went to a sleepover at her place with a couple of others from our class. Everyone thought me and Marnie were bosom buddies, and I suppose on the surface I had far more in common with her than I did with Honey.

      But me and Honey had been friends for such ages! Years and years. Ever since we were tiny babies in our prams, banging our little plastic rattles and beaming our toothless beams. Well, I’d have been toothless; Honey was a toddler. But she always simply adored babies. She used to trundle me round the garden in a wheelbarrow. Really sweet! Probably if we’d been brought up in a normal, civilised part of the country like other people we wouldn’t ever have become friends. As it was, Honey was practically the only person my age within a fifty-mile radius. Steeple Norton, where we were doomed to live out our excruciatingly boring existences, is just about the back of beyond. What you might call an armpit. Dead as a duck pond without any ducks. Out of school, me and Honey couldn’t have been closer. We did everything together. We knew each other through and through. We never had to explain ourselves; we didn’t have any secrets.

      The thing is, people always had the wrong idea about Honey. If you’d asked anyone at school they’d have told you she was backward, and I know that’s how she came across. She was sixteen, I was fourteen, and sometimes it was like she was even younger than Kirsty. But she wasn’t backward. I mean, not like retarded, or anything. Just a bit immature. A bit…slow. And if you ask me that was mainly cos she was so unsure of herself. Cos she’d spent all her life being humiliated. Kirsty always said I kept up with her cos I could push her around, but that wasn’t true, either. I was always nagging at her, for instance, to tell someone about her mum, about the way she treated her, but she never would. Where her mum was concerned, she wouldn’t budge. I know that I was the one responsible for–well, for what happened. I know I was the one that talked her into it. But in the end she proved she had a mind of her own. Whatever people say, she wasn’t just some sort of helpless glove puppet.

      Anyway, that day, when Dad and I had our row about my eating habits, everything still lay in the future-though not so very far distant. Really, just a couple of weeks off. Not that I had any inkling of it, then; not for all my big talk. If someone had told me what I would set in motion, I wouldn’t have believed them. Miss Harriman, our year group tutor when I was in Year 8, used to say that I was “rebellious by nature”. She once warned me that if I wasn’t careful I would come to a sticky end. So maybe Miss Harriman would have believed them. But not me! I’m one of those people, I have this very wild imagination. I tend to go off into realms of fantasy. I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that. You just wait, you just see. And then someone like Marnie will go, “Oh, yeah?” and I’ll go, “Yeah!” and we’ll both know that it’s not really going to happen. Just a load of hot air, as my nan would say.

      But being with Honey made me bold-and she was the one, when it came to the crunch, who said go for it.

      It was her mum who opened the door to me when I went storming round, that Sunday afternoon. She said, “Oh, hallo, Jade!” with one of her big, bright, sugary smiles, showing all her lipsticky teeth and breathing booze over me.

      I said, “Hallo, Mrs de Vito,” but I didn’t smile back. Not a proper smile. I didn’t trust Honey’s mum. She was always sweet as pie to me and mean as maggots to Honey. She treated Honey like dirt, and especially when she’d been “at the bottle”, as they say.

      I once remarked to Mum that I thought Mrs de Vito drank too much, and Mum said, “Poor soul! She’s had enough to make her.” She meant because of Mr de Vito going and walking out on her, leaving her to cope as a single mum. But not all single mums get drunk and are horrid to their daughters. I hated Honey’s mum for the way she put Honey down all the time.

      I asked her if Honey was there and she gave this little laugh, like she was really amused by the question. She said, “Why wouldn’t she be? She never sets foot outside the house unless it’s with you. Go on, you can go up.” And then, as I headed for the stairs, “It’s beyond me what she does up there.”

      I could have told her what Honey did: she hid from her mum. Or at any rate, did her best to keep out of harm’s way. Out of tongue’s way. She really only came down when she had to, like at mealtimes–when there were any mealtimes, which mostly there weren’t. Mostly Honey just took something out of the fridge, or opened a tin.

      “Hunneee!” I banged on the door of her room. “It’s Jade, let me in!”

      Sometimes she kept her door locked. She’d get home from school and help herself to some food, take it upstairs with her and stay there right round till morning. When she did this, it usually meant her mum had been drinking. The door was locked that afternoon.

      “Hey!” I rattled at the handle. “Let me in, I want to talk!”

      “Sorry.” She opened the door a crack and pulled me through. “I didn’t hear you.”

      “I’ve been practically battering the place down!” Apologetically she said she had been listening to music; this group called the Beany Boys, that she really loved. She used to lie on the bed, with her headphones on, and the volume turned way up. She could stay like that for hours. I’d even rung two or three times in ne evening and got no reply, even though I knew she was there.

      “Honestly, I am seething,” I said. I had to talk, or I would burst!

      “You’ve had another row with your dad,” said Honey.

      “Yes, I have!” I hurled myself on to the bed. “He’s driving me nuts! I can’t take much more of it.”

      “What’s he done now?”

      It was all the invitation I needed. I was off! Railing on about Dad being a control freak and a bully. A sadist. A monster.

      “Always forcing me to do what he thinks is right. Never mind what I think. I’m old enough to make up my own mind! It’s a matter of principle. Like when I told him I didn’t want to go to his stupid church any more? He practically wanted to burn me at the stake!”

      “Yes, I remember,” said Honey.

      “Like something out of the Dark Ages! Like accusing people of being witches.”

      Dad hadn’t talked to me for weeks after I’d dug in my heels and said I wasn’t going to church any more. It’s one of the things he is most fanatical about; I suppose you might almost call him a religious maniac. Well, compared with normal, balanced people. He’s what’s known as an Elder in the Family of God, which is like really really strict and totally against anything which might come under the heading of fun. Mum’s a Family member, too, and so is Kirsty. I used to be, until I rebelled. It just got, like, too much. Every week, the same old thing. Trundling off in the car, miles and miles, for Sunday gathering. Gathering goes on for hours! And everyone so terribly holy.

      I told him, “you don’t have to go to church to be a good person. You don’t even have to believe in God to be a good person!”

      Dad was just so self-opinionated.

      “Now it’s meat,” I said. “Just because he eats it, everyone else has to. And if you don’t, then-God, I’m starving!” I reached out a hand and helped myself from a plate of goodies on the bedside table. “If you don’t, then it’s like some kind

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