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way, like a fairy tale prince who yearns to save the princess imprisoned in the tower. Ruby laughed aloud at the notion of Noah as a prince (although not, it must be said, at the notion of herself as a princess). He was so lanky, so awkward, so overgrown. If he tried to clamber up a tower he’d be all arms and legs, like achimpanzee. No, not a chimpanzee. That was too cruel, it made him sound ugly, which he wasn’t. They’d been friends when they were little kids, but that was a long time ago, when she was another person. She’d read somewhere that every seven years all the cells in your body change entirely: they undergo a complete turnover. She didn’t know if it was true, but it was a good notion. It must have been almost five years since she and Noah had been proper friends, so by now, nearly all her cells would have turned over – her hair, her skin, even the ones in her brain. She really wasn’t the same person. Maybe that was why when she looked at pictures of herself when she was little, at that sweet, wide-eyed girl with dimples, it felt like she was looking at a distant cousin, at someone with similar features, who she knew only vaguely.
    She couldn’t remember exactly how it had happened, how she and Noah had gone from being best friends to being nothing, but she knew they had drifted apart around the time that her parents were arguing a lot. She hadn’t wanted to spend time with anyone who knew her too well, then. It was easier to be around strangers, people who didn’t know what was going on at home, people who wouldn’t ask questions, or give her sympathetic looks. That way, she could pretend everything was normal. And by the time everything was normal again – the new normal, after Dad had left – she had a big group of mates, and Noah just didn’t fit. Notthat he’d want to. He was a superbrain, interested in completely different things. He didn’t look like one of the nerds, but he’d ended up among them. People like him made her feel stupid. If they tried to make conversation with her, she’d become self-conscious and anxious that she didn’t have anything interesting to say. She didn’t mean to be rude, or abrupt, it just came out that way. Everyone – her parents, the teachers – said she was bright, and she got decent marks (deliberately not so high as to make her stand out, of course), but she felt like a fraud. So she reasoned that if she just said a brief hello to Noah when they passed, and walked on, she wouldn’t get found out. It wasn’t as if she missed him; she had plenty of friends, she didn’t need one who lived across the street.
    ‘Hi Mum,’ she called out as brightly as she could, as she let herself back into the house. ‘I’m home!’ She tried to made it sound like she wasn’t bothered about her dad not turning up, as if she’d intended to stand outside the front door for the best part of an hour for no good reason.
    Her mother came into the hall. She gave Ruby
that
look and sighed, but didn’t say anything. Ruby was thankful. ‘I’ll just dump my bag upstairs,’ she said, her foot already on the bottom step.
    ‘OK, love, I’ll put the kettle on. And we can have those cookies I made too, the chocolate chip ones.’
    Mum was always cooking for other people. She’dprepare hearty casseroles for sick friends and bake cakes coated in buttercream to sell at charity fairs. For gifts, she enjoyed filling up boxes of the finest Belgian chocolates with hand-picked selections. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be solved with chocolate,’ she always said. Except obesity, Ruby thought. It was funny how both her parents believed that giving her things – food, clothes, jewellery, cash – would make her happy, when it was obvious to her that they would only make her spoiled and fat, if not perfectly accessorised. Her parents were pretty stupid for grown-ups.
    When she came down the stairs, there was a mug of tea and a plate piled high with crumbly cookies waiting