Which is both gross and breathtakingly romantic. He could always have just gone upstairs and brushed his teeth, but he stayed and lurked by the fish for me.

Sometimes I even felt like he dated me as part of his plan, like they were going to have a checklist on the application, and one of the things to tick off was going to be, "Do you have a reasonably intelligent girlfriend who shares your aspirations, and who is fully prepared to accept your limited availability?

I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.

No one hid their interest when I walked into the room. I'm not sure if it was the news about Boo or my general appearance. At home, people would have asked. People would have been crawling all over me for information. At Wexford, they seemed to extract what they wanted to know by covert staring.

One of them hung a pink bra from our lighting fixture. I left it there. It was a nice bra

This wasn't a position she wanted to be in. And yet . . . yet she knew that she was going to do it anyway.

You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.