A scream ripped through the air. She didn’t know if it came from her, or from him as his hands flew 
up to cover his face, or from the car itself as it left the road with a screech of tyres on tarmac. 
Then silence, the tree filling the windscreen, its leaves black in the head- lights. A crunch of 
metal and the lights went out. Her face rammed hard against something, pain flowered in bright 
colours inside her skull. She tilted her face and opened her eyes, seeing blues and reds and nasty 
purples. There was a silence in the car. Terror washed through her, and the terror was bigger than 
the pain.

‘Please help me,’ Jude said to no one at all.

They had been driving back from a party in Liam’s rusty old Fiat, with one of its wing mirrors held 
in place by tape and an ominous rattle on steep hills. Jude and Liam were in the front, Yolanda and 
Benny in the back, though Benny was passed out, his head on Yolanda’s shoulder and his mouth open, 
and Yolanda was also fast asleep. Jude looked at the clock on the dashboard: it was two in the morning,

but still warm after a sweltering day. It felt like the sky might split open at any moment and a flood of rain

would soak into the parched, cracked earth.

It had been a hot summer. Jude thought of sitting her A levels in May and June, the sun glaring 
through the large windows and her fingers slippery on the pen, beads of sweat on her forehead and 
damp patches under her arms. That seemed like another world away because since the middle of June 
she had been in love. Stupid and dizzy and glorious with love, in love as never before. Her body 
ached with it. She could feel where his fingers had touched her; her lips were sore. At the party 
he had taken her into the garden and kissed her until she would have lain down on the lawn in full 
sight, but he’d whispered, ‘Later,’ his breath hot in her ear. And now it was later: they would 
drop off Yolanda, haul Benny out of the car and onto his front steps, and drive into the woods. He 
had a blanket in the boot of his car. She didn’t mind if it rained; she imagined their wet bodies 
pressed against each other and a shiver of anticipation rippled through her.

She looked over at him and he felt her looking and put his hand on her thigh, through the thin

material of her dress. Liam Birch: not her type at all. Liam was not on track; Jude was. She had known

she was going to be a doctor since she was at primary school and she had worked for years to get there,

never letting up. She had a place at medical school and as long as her results were all right, and she was

sure they would be, in six weeks she would be heading to Bristol.

Liam didn’t know what he was going to do next. He was good with his hands. He could fix almost 
anything and he could pick up a pencil and in a few strokes create something vivid, startling. Jude 
had said he should go to art school and he would shrug his shoulders and say he would see what 
happened – as if it wasn’t really his decision to make, as if life just rolled him over and carried 
him along. Maybe he would go travelling, he said; get away from this medium-sized town in the 
middle of England where he had lived all his life with his parents and his little brother. She 
looked down at the hand that lay warm and heavy on her thigh. What would happen when she went to 
university? They hadn’t talked about the future, just as they hadn’t talked much about the past. 
She didn’t know a great deal about Liam’s family, his childhood, his previous relationships. What 
mattered was now, and here, and the lovely loosening of her body when he touched her, when she 
thought of him touching her, and the way he looked at her and said her name.

They hadn’t been at the same school. Liam had gone to the large sixth-form college on the outskirts

of the Shropshire town they both lived in, Jude to the comprehensive. But she had been aware of him,

a tall lanky figure with dark hair that needed cutting and clothes that never looked new: ripped jeans,

T-shirts with mysterious words on them, a weird green jacket that on someone else would have looked

terrible but he carried it off. She had seen him over the past two years, walking along the streets in a group 
of other teenagers, smoking, swigging from cans, looking cool and impossibly worldly.

A few days after her last exam, a friend introduced her to him at a party. She waited for him to 
say, ‘Hey, Jude,’ and laugh at his own wit, but he didn’t. She waited for him to turn away and go 
back to his gang, but he didn’t do that either. He told her about a baby fox he had run over that 
day, how he’d thought at first it was a little child who’d run into the road. The fox was still 
alive and squealing piteously and passers-by had quickly gathered to watch. He’d had to kill it, he 
said, smashing a stone from the kerbside against its head, and then take the body and dump it in 
the woods. He had carried it for almost half an hour, hot and rank in his arms. He was a bit 
stoned. His pupils were large; his eyes dark, almost black, in the dim light. Jude was surprised by 
how friendly he seemed, and how young. Almost – well, almost ordinary. Just a handsome boy.

For the first few weeks, it had been a gorgeous secret that she hugged to herself. She didn’t tell her 
friends, because she didn’t want them rolling their eyes or saying anything that would make it seem 
unimportant or too important or too surprising. She didn’t want to hear that one of them had been 
with him, or knew of someone who had, or had heard something about him, about his recklessness and 
his sudden inexplicable bursts of anger. She didn’t want anyone to say: ‘You need to watch out for 
that one.’ Even now, she was reticent about telling people. Every so often they went to parties together,

like tonight, and only yesterday they had spent the day by the river with a group of friends. She had talked

about him to Rosie, lying in the long grass by the river and speaking to the blue sky. But she hadn’t told her 
parents: she knew they would be alarmed by Liam, who smoked weed, took pills, sometimes looked a 
bit unwashed, and wouldn’t be going to university. Maybe that was the attraction: he was someone 
her parents wouldn’t approve of. In any case she was leaving for Bristol in September. He was her 
in-between time, her summer, her escape.

‘I feel a bit sick,’ said Yolanda, half-waking in the back of the car.

‘Wind down the window,’ Liam said. ‘I might be sick.’

‘Not in my car, you won’t.’

‘It won’t be long till we’re at your house,’ said Jude. ‘Tell us if we should pull over though.’

But Yolanda didn’t answer because she had fallen back  to  sleep.  A  gurgling  snore  came  from  
her, then a grunt.

Jude felt a bit tipsy herself. Liam had drunk a lot, too, and taken who knew what else? But it was 
only a short journey. A few large drops of rain landed on the windscreen. She put a hand up to 
touch his face and felt his lips smile.

Then: ‘Fuck,’ he said, or shouted.

Because there was a sharp bend in the road but the car sped onwards, off the road, towards the 
tree.

Terrible slow motion. Terrible clarity of disaster, and a world that would never be the same again.

A scream ripped through the air.