A visitor from Alpha Centauri who was wishing she’d stayed at home. I could tell that every morning I would sit there, ignored by the other girls, hearing practically the same conversations over and over again. And I could also tell that every morning I would sit there, and they would make a show of checking me out and then looking at each other, smirking at the way I was dressed because they themselves were walking billboards advertising whatever was in fashion that week, ignorant of true style and flair. The girls in Deadwood get their fashion ideas from Seventeen and television. They don’t wear clothes as a statement of their inner selves, as I do; they wear labels.

Anyway, Ella sat near me in homeroom. The kids in Dellwood not only dress the same and talk the same; when they think, they pretty much think the same, too. But I sensed almost immediately that Ella was different in that last, crucial respect.

Carla Santini (of whom more later…) was the centre of all meaningful homeroom conversation among the girls. Sophisticated, beautiful and radiating confidence the way a towering inferno radiates heat, she swept into the room in black trousers and a short black sweater as though she’d just stepped from the pages of Vogue. Although she’d checked me out the second her foot was through the door, it was a good five minutes before she finally deigned to talk to me.

“Aren’t you the girl who just moved into the old Swenska house?” she asked. She was using the sickeningly charming voice I’ve come to know so well, but she still managed to emphasize the word “old” and make it sound as though it meant more than “no longer young”.

Taking their cue from Carla Santini, her entourage all looked at me too. They were barely breathing.

“Maybe,” I said, returning her sugar-overdose smile with one of my own. I’d checked her out, too, without even seeming to look her way. I’d known girls like Carla Santini before – there are lots of girls in New York who think the world wasn’t complete until they were born – and I’d never liked one of them. “I didn’t realize our house had a name.”