Remedios yawns, and leans her head against the hand dryer. This is only the end of her third week here and although she’s still, as it were, finding her wings, she couldn’t be more bored if she were walking across mudflats on crutches. Not that the teenagers of Jeremiah don’t have problems – they do have problems (to hear them talk, they have more problems than Noah) – but they are no more than petty worries and everyday anguish and despair. They should try living through the sacking of Rome or the Blitzkrieg if they want a real problem.

The last bell of the day rings and Remedios lets loose another sigh. Where, she wonders, are the innocent and lost souls who really need my help?

The door opens and Beth Beeby hurls herself into the girls’ room, miraculously managing to look both flushed and eerily green at the same time. Beth, of course, is no stranger to anxiety – it’s the most constant companion she has – but her nervousness about the weekend surpasses anything she’s experienced before. She desperately wants to win in the way that only a girl who is depressed by getting an A- rather than an A can; but at the same time winning means that she will have to do even better in the future – publish a novel before she’s twenty-five, be profiled in The New York Times, win the Pulitzer Prize. Great expectations, of course, open the door to great disappointments.

Remedios watches Beth clasp a hand to her mouth and run to the end stall. Because Remedios often comes in here to avoid the tedium of hearing the same lectures and conversations over and over, she has seen Beth before. Sometimes Beth simply hides in the end stall reading a book, but sometimes she comes here to vomit or weep. This afternoon, it seems, she’s come to do both.

The door opens again and Gabriela Menz glides in like an image on a screen, her book bag and handbag held over one shoulder and a suit bag in her other hand.