But I was wrong. The youth of Dellwood probably wouldn’t have noticed a nuclear explosion, never mind a messenger of hope from the greater world. In my first year in the clean air and safe streets of Dellwood (two more of my mother’s reasons for moving), I’ve met only one truly kindred spirit. That’s my best friend, Ella Gerard.

There was nothing about Ella to suggest that here was my spiritual kin the first time I saw her. She looked like most of the other girls in my homeroom – expensively if dully clothed, well fed, perfectly groomed, their teeth gleaming and their hair bouncing because they use the right toothpaste and shampoo. If New York is a kettle of soup, where tons of different spices and vegetables swim around together, all part of the whole but all different at the same time, then Deadwood is more like a glass of homogenized milk. Ella was wearing a nondescript pink A-line dress and white-and-pink sneakers. The kindest thing you could say about her hair – which was twisted into a tight ball at the back of her head – was that it existed. Although Ella shops in the same stores as most of her classmates she always goes for what Mrs Gerard calls “the classic look”, which means that everyone else dresses like the dedicated followers of fashion that they are, and Ella dresses like her mother.

That first morning I sat at the front of the room in my genuine US Army combat trousers, dyed purple by my own fair hands, and the Ché Guevara T-shirt my dad brought me back from Mexico, listening to the other girls catch up on the summer gossip and sort out who was seeing whom and who was wearing what and when the first big party of the autumn was going to be, feeling like a visitor from Alpha Centauri.