There was nothing Harriet Novak hated more than having to tell strangers that she attended Little Dorrit School. Grownups would smile and coo as if it were disgustingly sweet – which made Harriet wonder how many of them had ever actually read Little Dorrit - and kids looked at her as if she’d just teleported from another planet.

Not that the school itself was all that bad, she allowed, digging the toe of her trainer in the play yard dirt as she waited for the first bell. It was just that it sounded so God-awfully sickening – like telling people you were called Tiny Tim.

It helped to be prepared, Harriet had learned, knowledge a necessary defense against living in a Dickens-infested neighborhood. She’d read the biography in the school library and could tell people more about Dickens than most wanted to know. Charles Dickens’s father had been briefly imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison, just up the road, and twelve-year-old Charles had lived in lodgings nearby. This experience had stayed with him all his life, working its way into many of his books, and then his creations had come back to haunt the Borough. Not only did the area boast a Little Dorrit Court and a Little Dorrit Street, there was a Marshalsea Road, a Pickwick Street, and a Copperfield Street.

At least there was nothing named after Oliver Twist. Harriet thought Oliver a right little tosser, too sweet to be borne. Davey Copperfield she liked better. He was a bit soft on his dead mum, but at least he had bitten his horrid stepfather. Davey knew how to stand up for himself.

Harriet scowled, only half aware of the smoky tang in the air and the students straggling in the school gate. Her thoughts settled into a well-worn groove. Would it be better to have a wicked stepfather, like Davey, rather than a father who had walked out? He said he loved her, her dad, but if that was true, how could he have left them?

He told her lots of parents got divorced, that it was just something they would all have to learn to live with, but that didn’t stop her missing him. Nor had his moving out stopped her parents’ rows. She heard them when he came to pick her up, and other times she heard her mum on the phone with him.