Linda arrived at my school at the start of fifth form. Small features and ginger hair, pale eyes behind wire-framed spectacles. She was tall and walked with high shoulders, as if expecting to be punched from behind. She sat on her own because that’s what you do when you’ve started a new school and you’re a nerd. I knew how it was. But by now, the cigarette-breathed older girls who’d menaced us had left and we could come out of our shells. I went over to say hi.
Her voice was soft, hard to hear, but once she got going, she liked to talk. She’d moved from Palmerston North to Wellington because her parents had divorced, and Linda, the only
