PART ONE

BEFORE

Chapter One

My brain is just a bag of soup and potato waffles at the best of times.

I’m terrible at comebacks. Until I get home and replay everything in the shower. Then I come up with something absolutely brilliant, that would crumble empires, subvert black holes, and make passersby stop and bow to me in their amazement.

But at the time, I just melt into gormlessness.

There’s a squelchy silence.

A steady stream of sweat is running from my neck all the way down into my pants, because Janis-and-Ella – resident ingrown pubic hairs – have decided to ruin my life again.

I made the textbook error of asking Michelle Baguma for a pen, because Nev didn’t have a spare. Michelle, a normal person with an abnormal number of pens, went to give me said pen, before Ella cut in with, ‘Are you sure you don’t want scissors, Mel?’ and Janis did a very crude and alarmingly inaccurate scissoring gesture and made the whole thing very uncomfortable.

The excessive sweating is not helped by the fact that it’s thirty degrees outside, which is exactly seven degrees warmer than my feeble body can handle. Unfortunately, a few days ago the fan in our classroom made a cartoon cough and spluttered out.

It’s January, by the way.

In Wiltshire.

Which is fine.

It hasn’t rained in over a year. I’m not worried about it, though. Knowing England, it’s probably just storing up all the rain for a sun-free thirty-five years or something. Right now, I’m much more bothered by the Raging Homophobe Problem.

I’ve been the only out lesbian in our school, and quite possibly the surrounding thousand miles, since Year Eight. Janis and Ella have always been determined to make it a problem, even though it’s 2031, and no one else cares. They watch me like hawks, and if I so much as look at a girl, they dig their scaly talons in and shred me to pieces.

Ella and I actually used to be best friends in primary school, if you’d believe it.

Once upon a time, she was chicken nuggets and friendship bracelets and dinosaurs in the garden. We did literally everything together, including a borderline obsessive amount of ‘kissing practice’ at sleepovers.

When we got to secondary school, she was already gorgeous and had snuggled all the way up Janis’s arse. But I met Nev that summer, and they have a certain way of eclipsing other people’s bullshit, so I didn’t think too much about it.

Sometimes, I consider yelling to the whole school that Ella’s a giant, filthy hypocrite, and a gobby kisser to boot. But I don’t think anyone would believe that Ella ‘Hates the Gays’ Garcia ever snogged a girl.

Especially not if that girl was me.

I look at the clock. Just five more sweaty, toxic minutes and we can get out of here to breathe real oxygen.

And see Sasha. My best friend. The future mother of my children.

Probably.

(Hopefully.)

Nev nudges their shoulder into me. They’re wearing a heavily jewelled, sky-blue silk saree today, just to come to triple psychology. Which could be seen as a little extra, but then Nev isn’t exactly known for flying under the radar.

‘Just another year, Mel,’ they murmur. ‘Then we can move to Bristol or something.’

Nev and I sort of fell together as the only obvious queers in our school, and have been plotting our escape from the Capital of Clean-Shirt Heteronormativity ever since.

I smile. ‘Anywhere but here.’

‘Anywhere but here. As long as you’re not the only lesbian. I can’t bear to watch you pine after straight girls anymore.’ Nev’s cheek dimples and I give them a small shove.

‘It’s just the one straight girl, actually.’

The bell goes and we’re out of our seats in less than three seconds.

We meet Sasha at the school gates. She’s wearing a crop top and a pair of high-waisted denim shorts that hug her full figure and make my heart twitch. She bounds over on her tiny little legs, pulling me into a hug and immediately recoiling when she touches my back, and I want to throw myself under a bus.

Being in love with my best friend is such an exhausting cliché.

‘Mel, how are you so sweaty?’ Sasha rubs her palms on her shorts and laughs and I feel like my stomach might fall out.

‘The fan’s broken, and Janis and Ella were, you know, themselves,’ says Nev.

‘They seem nice! You guys are always so quick to judge.’

‘Honestly, Sash, they’re like if Miss Trunchbull had a two-headed baby with Regina George and capitalism,’ I say.

Sasha rolls her eyes at Nev.

They shrug. ‘They are the worst, to be fair.’

We always head down to Sasha’s house at lunchtime, because she lives about five minutes from school, and her mum is the Queen of Snacks. Sasha links her arm through mine, and I try to keep my brain from slipping into fantasies.

I fail, of course.

I think about her inviting me and Nev over for a sleepover, but Nev can’t make it, so Sasha starts running her fingers through my hair and leaning in to kiss me and realising that it should feel so wrong but it feels so right and she loves me and we’ll talk at length about our future dog and our sweet little flat in the city and we’ll get matching tattoos and Mum will walk me down the aisle and Sasha will be wearing the most beautiful white dress and she’ll be glowing the way she always does and maybe we’re even going to have a baby and the whole time she’ll let me touch her boobs and …

‘Mel? Did you see the news?’ Sasha has that you haven’t been listening to me, have you? face.

I look at Nev for clues, who just grins and raises their perfect eyebrows at me. I give them my best you’re an asshole glare. ‘Um. No. What news?’

‘Apparently it’s snowing in Australia. In January. It’s like the planet has turned upside down.’ Sasha’s eyebrows are scrunched so closely together that she looks like an adorable angry little Stalin.

‘I wonder if anyone’s knitting jumpers for the kangaroos.’

‘Mel, this is serious!’ Sasha gives my arm a little thump.

‘Sorry, I know. It’s just too much to think about.’

‘We haven’t discussed war in a while. Any takers?’ Nev does that half-mouth smile that makes it obvious why they’re so popular with boys.

Most of Sasha’s street is Victorian terraced houses with crumbling facades. Then there’s Sasha’s ultra-modern, ­violently white, detached mega-house, that looks like it was dropped there by mistake.

Sasha scrambles up onto the immaculate granite countertops, made from freshly erupted vegan lava or something, and opens all the cupboards.

‘How have they already eaten all the crisps? Mum literally sent us a food order yesterday!’ She wriggles down off the counter with her arms full of biscuits.

She’s referring to her seven-year-old twin brothers, Sam and Paddy, who are registered terrorists. Paddy is short for Paddington and his middle name is genuinely Bear, because apparently when people get rich, they get stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam was short for Samsung.

Their mum orders in a tonne of food that doesn’t require cooking because she’s always working. I’m not sure exactly what she does, but she wears a blazer and a frown and goes for business trips in Italy, taking the twins’ young and ­chiselled father with her. She makes enough money for this house to do lots of random sexy things automatically, like turn off taps and hobs and dim the lights.

The greatest feat of technology in my house is a wooden spoon.

Because her mother is always busy, Sasha is basically Sam and Paddy’s mum. Which definitely doesn’t make me think about what a wonderful mother she would be to our perfect adopted children, Tegan, Sara and La Roux, who we will raise genderless and encourage to engage in extra-curricular activities.

‘To be fair, you need to find a better hiding spot than the top shelf of the cupboard.’ Nev pulls out a Greek salad arranged into lettuce, tomatoes, feta, cucumber, olives and dressing in different sections in a Tupperware box. They catch my pointed look. ‘Hey, it goes soggy otherwise.’

I take a bite out of my cheese-on-cheese-on-white-bread sandwich and chew with my mouth open at them.

Sasha drops her biscuit mountain onto the breakfast bar and sits down. She bites her lip as she scrolls through her phone. ‘Another species of bee has just been declared extinct! That’s four this month alone!’

I sigh pointedly, picking up the extra fork Nev put on the table and stabbing at a bit of their feta. They started putting out extra cutlery a few years ago because they do not appreciate it when I shove my ‘flaky eczema hands’ in their lunch. For an only child so anal about Tupperware box compartments, Nev is surprisingly generous when it comes to food.

I spike a bit of tomato on my fork and watch Sasha who looks like she’s about to fall into her phone.

Honestly. If I wasn’t so hopelessly devoted to those little worry lines, I would get really flubbing sick of her ‘World is Ending’ talk.

It’s just a really hot January.

Life is basically normal.

It’s fine.

Chapter Two

Spending time at Sasha’s high-ceilinged showroom-­castle always makes me happy to be back in my janky little ­terraced house, where my brother’s room should be a dining room and mine should be a toilet.

‘Mum?’ I call as I dump my bag on the floor.

‘Yes, least favourite, most disappointing child of mine?’ comes Nigel’s stupid fake-Mum voice from the living room. I’m pretty sure my mother decided to call him Nigel when he was born because she knew from the size of his head that he was destined to be an idiot.

‘Good, I’m glad what is so obviously, definitely Mum and not Nigel is here. We can talk about how much we hate him,’ I call back.

Nige is hunched over his Xbox controller with his headset on, taking on the noble duty of killing droves of zombies. At twenty-four, he is the epitome of what I want to be when I grow up.

‘Get in! Mike, we’ve nearly got ’em, just the big boss to go and—’ He’s doing that thing where he hovers slightly above the sofa when he’s gaming too intensely. I call it the Public Toilet Squat.

‘Then you will make Mum so proud, you brilliant boy!’ I shove him and jump onto the sofa, a cloud of dust erupting around me.

‘Mel!’ Nigel’s muscular avatar lies twitching on the ground. ‘That was my last life! Mike, you’re our only hope!’

I hear Mike, American, definitely pre-ball-dropping age, shout some very uncouth things into my brother’s ears. Kids these days certainly have a more violent attitude to swearing than I did.

The screen goes red and flashes with, YOU HAVE FAILED. BECAUSE OF YOU, THE ZOMBIES TAKE OVER AND ALL HUMAN LIFE IS WIPED OUT. THERE IS NO HOPE.

Nigel rips his headset off and throws it on the ground. ‘I was so close that time! Why do you always have to ruin everything?’

I sigh. ‘All right, Miss Drama. I didn’t ruin anything, you clearly just suck at that game. Maybe Mr Wrinkleberry Junior should take your place.’

Mr Wrinkleberry Junior is our enormous, one-eared ginger and white rabbit who lives in the garden and takes up his entire hutch. He lost his ear to the same fox that took out Mr Wrinkleberry Senior and all of Junior’s siblings. Probably for the best, seeing as his mum was also his sister.

‘He doesn’t have opposable thumbs.’ Nigel runs a hand through his ridiculous curly ginger mop that he got from our biological moron of a father.

Fortunately, my only remnants of him are freckles and a charmingly short temper.

‘You know, this back and forth would be a lot more fun if you were at least sixty per cent more intelligent.’ I pat his damp shoulder in mock consolation. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Mum went to the shop.’ My stepfather chooses this moment to pop his head around the door and scare the crap out of me. ‘Sorry, love, didn’t mean to startle you. I was just writing in the office and heard you come home.’

‘No worries, Gaz. Did Mum say why she was going to the shop?’ We already have food in the house, and lord knows we can’t afford any extra.

‘She said something about a great deal on a paddling pool.’

‘Excuse me?’ I shift further away from Nigel, who smells like a hot Babybel. ‘A paddling pool?’

Gary shrugs. ‘She said if she had to go one more day in this bastard heat in bastard January without putting her feet in something cold, she’d murder someone.’ He pulls a face. ‘I didn’t fancy my chances.’

‘Speak of the devil.’ I hear Mum’s excessive jangling keys in the door, accompanied by a great deal of huffing.

She appears in the doorway, red-faced and dripping in sweat, carrying a packaged paddling pool and a mischievous grin. ‘This, kids, was a fiver! Can you believe that? It’s two square metres!’ She thrusts it at Gary without pausing for breath. ‘Go and blow it up, will you?’

Gary stifles a laugh and backs out of the room before she can make good on her murdering promises. ‘I’ll find the pump.’

‘Isn’t our garden about two square metres, Mum?’ says Nige.

‘Nah, it’s three metres, easy.’ I laugh. ‘One metre for Mr Wrinkleberry Junior and two for the paddling pool.’

Mum sighs. ‘I’m going to go and make dinner before I’m tempted to smack you in the head.’

Chapter Three

Today is a Dorian Day – one where the bastard planets align to ruin my life, and Mrs Larsen puts us on shift together.

Dorian Jacob Windsor Tythennius Whissendine is, unsurprisingly, a twat. He objectifies women, irons his chinos, has seven horses named after the Royals, and he goes out in tweed and wellies and shoots things for fun.

I work in the village shop with him, selling toothpaste and individual cans of beans to idiots. Dorian doesn’t need to work in the shop, obviously. No one that pronounces ‘off’ like ‘oahwf’ needs ten quid an hour. His dad makes him work here to ‘build character’. I don’t know how character-building correcting customers on their pronunciation of quinoa while blatantly gawping at their boobs is, but he’s certainly good at that.

So far today, I’ve managed to avoid talking to him pretty effectively by offering to ‘count stock’ in the back.

‘Lissa!’

The sound of Dorian’s voice makes me want to hit things. I ignore him and keep scrolling.

‘We have a customer!’

‘So?’

‘So, help me serve them, please!’

For Christ’s sake, he doesn’t even know how to use the till.

I put my phone down carefully in the blind spot of the security cameras, and head up to the counter. An extra­ordinarily hairy and red old man in a greying vest and red swimming trunks turns at the sound of my pointed throat clearing, and I see it’s Jeremy Kingsmead, the local pigeon terroriser and full-time banana.

‘’Ere, Mels, get us a pack of Superking Lamby Bs, will you? This bloke don’t seem to unnerstaan’ me or summin’.’ Jeremy steps too close to me for comfort, opens a pint of milk, and downs the whole thing.

‘Sure.’ I side-step him and slip behind the counter. ‘Red or blue?’

‘Blue, love. And this.’ He slams a tin of Spam and two further pints of milk onto the countertop, winking. ‘For the missus.’

I reasonably effectively conceal my surprise that anyone would marry him by turning to get his cigarettes from the cabinet. ‘That’ll be seventeen sixty-nine.’

Dorian recoils as the old man thrusts a crusty twenty-pound note at him. ‘That’s her job.’

I take the money from Jeremy and give him his change, trying not to visibly wince as I accidentally touch his yellowed palm. ‘Have a good day.’ My voice is tight with the desire to kick Dorian.

‘Cheersaan!’ Jeremy downs the other pints of milk, then immediately opens the pack of cigarettes and shoves one in his gob as he leaves the shop.

I turn to Dorian and kick him in the shin.

‘What the hell, Lissa!’ Dorian cradles his shin like I stabbed him or something. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘You said that it was my job. We have the same job, Dorian.’

He gingerly puts his leg back down, putting his hand on my general shoulder/upper boob area. I promptly remove his hand, firmly digging my nails in. I don’t think consent is top of the list of educational priorities at Sons of Leaders Public School.

‘Why do you hate me, Lissa?’ He seems genuinely concerned.

‘You call me Lissa, for a start. My name is Mel.’

‘Short for Melissa.’

‘Short for Melanie, actually, Dorian.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re also a bit of a dick.’

‘Do you want to come to my party on Friday … Melanie?’

He is utterly impervious to insult. I could call him a witch’s tit and he’d think it was a compliment. I raise an eyebrow. ‘I’d actually rather spend my evening in a morgue with broken fridges. Besides, I’m having a night in with my friends.’

‘Oh my gosh, a night in? That’s adorable. Are you going to like, eat pizza and stuff?’

‘You’re actually the worst person I’ve ever met.’

Dorian makes one of his smarmiest git faces and smooths his stupid floofy boyband side-fringe. ‘Do those friends include the flirty one with the unbelievable bum that comes in here sometimes?’

‘I wouldn’t know, I don’t objectify people, Dorian.’

‘Everyone objectifies people.’

‘Her name is Sasha.’

‘Bring her.’

‘No.’

‘Please?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Think about it,’ he says, with what I assume is intended to be a less child-catcher smile. ‘You won’t have to pay for anything. It’s fully catered, and the bar will be free.’

‘You have a bar … inside your house?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

No, Dorian. They don’t.

Neither me nor Sasha have anything timetabled on a Thursday afternoon, so we normally sit on a hillside and eat cheese and cucumber sandwiches, while Sasha counts pheasants and I watch her count pheasants.

Yes, it is a weird pastime.

But Sasha is a bit weird.

One of the 22,567 things that make not being in love with her basically impossible is her seven-year-old-girl-­esque obsession with animals. She’s the sort of person that sees an ad on the telly about a donkey with arthritis called Steve and immediately signs up to adopt him.

Sometimes I’m so in love with her I want to rip my spleen out and throw it at the moon.

So, I just sit with her and pretend to count the invasive species, hoping that she’ll realise being heterosexual is entirely over-rated and that this secluded spot would be an incredible place to smoosh our naked bodies together.

‘Twenty-five to four. Mel, you’re not even trying!’

‘Sorry, look, there’s one.’ I point vaguely at a tree. ‘Now it’s twenty-five to five, I’m catching up.’

‘Where? I don’t see it.’

‘There!’ Again, I gesture randomly at one of the few trees in the expanse of fields in front of us.

‘That’s a jay, it doesn’t count.’

Jay, schmay,