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realizing that the first one hadn’t finished.
    “I can see I’ve been entirely too lenient with you, Isabel,”
    Dad continued. “But these tantrums have gone on long enough and . . .”
    I turned to him and gave him the calmest smile I could muster, which threw him. “Oh, piss off,” I said, and flounced away.
    It was really liberating, the acting out or whatever you want to call it. Like, I’d drawn a line between us, one that had been there, anyway, but we didn’t have to tread around it anymore.
    My foot was poised to step off the curb so I could cross over Western Road and head down to the beach, when his hand came crashing down on my shoulder. God, I bet he wished that they’d never made spanking illegal.
    “How dare you talk to me like that?” he spluttered. “Apologize at once.”
    “Get your hand off my shoulder,” I told him pretty reasonably, considering it felt as if he was trying to mold my collarbone into a new and exciting shape.
    He let go of me and we stood there, staring at each other. I wondered if he could even really see me as anything other than the shopping list of adjectives that summed up what a major disappointment I was.
    “I’m still waiting for that apology, Isabel.”
    A guy pushed past us — and something in the way he held himself, the way his hair looked like it had had an accident with a vat of perming lotion, seemed familiar, even though I couldn’t see his face. It was that boy, Smith, or whatever his name was, from the party.
    “I don’t have time for this,” I told Dad, and walked away. I knew he wouldn’t come after me again — that would actually have required some effort on his part.
    Smith walked fast with a loping gait, almost bouncing on the soles of his sneakers, and I liked that he was so free, so unaware, not knowing that I was looking at him. Like, when you’re on the bus and you stare into someone’s front room and you see them watching television or slumped on the sofa, and it’s like you’re taking a tiny piece of them home with you.
    He ambled into a couple of charity shops and rifled through piles of battered vinyl records and tattered paperbacks. I loitered by the racks of musty-smelling polyester dresses—I was going for this whole melting into the walls vibe, but I just looked really shifty, if the suspicious attention I was getting from the blue-rinse brigade manning the tills was anything to go by.
    I hadn’t been able to get a good look at him before. It had been dark, and there had been huge quantities of alcohol involved, but daylight softened out the slant of his cheekbones and the hard lines of his jaw, so he looked less thuggish. Didn’t do anything to lessen the effect of his nose. If you were being kind you’d call it aquiline; if you weren’t, you’d call it beaky. And I could see those lips that I’d kissed — how they looked as pillowy as they’d felt. His hair was still ridiculous, he’d obviously never got intimate with a pair of straightening irons. But what I liked about him (and I did appear to like him, even though he had a stupid name and needed to stop kissing girls at parties because he thought they were other girls he’d kissed at other parties) was his serenity. There was something utterly calm about him, no matter how fast his elegant hands leafed through records or pored over books. It was as if everything was out of focus except him.
    He brushed past me on his way toward the door, and I pressed myself against a rail of coats. I waited for the door to shut behind him, then cautiously slunk out in time to see him disappearing into the newsagent’s next door.
    Luckily, I could pretend to read the ads for exotic Swedish massages while I peered through the window and watched Smith buy a packet of cigarettes and some chewing gum. As he was walking down the length of the shop, I realized my cover was about to be blown, so I dived into the nearest doorway, which happened to be a hardware shop and looked with