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her breasticular region look like a mountain range. ‘Too much?’ she said as I looked up her and down.
    ‘Too little,’ I said, nodding approvingly.
    Her face fell. ‘Should I go and get changed?’
    ‘Don’t you dare.’
    She then tried coaxing me into various fashion disasters that Mother Dearest had bought me over the last few months, holding them up one by one while I said ‘Nope,’ ‘Never’, ‘Hideous’, ‘Slutty – no, not in a good way’, ‘Are you joking,’ etc until she gave up and left me to it in my one pair of jeans, one decent t-shirt which I’d got at Madrigal Camp the previous summer and was festooned with medieval instruments (pictures of, I mean, not actual medieval instruments), and an old cardigan I’d found in the back of Mum’s wardrobe.
    ‘Let’ s go, Mother Dearest,’ I said to my mother as she, too, looked us up and down. She appeared a bit misty-eyed at the sight of me in the old cardy, but her eyes positively bulged when she saw Dolores.
    ‘Goodness! That’s a very …’ (Small? Tight? Flesh-exposing? Burlesque?) ‘… clean outfit, Dolores,’ she said quickly.
    Dolores patted her white, glowing bottom proudly. ‘My mum uses that Disappear stuff like in the adverts.’
    ‘Disapprove, more like,’ I whispered, but thankfully Mum didn’t hear me as she did her best to shield Dolores from view as she clambered into the back of our small car. I didn’t want her suddenly offering to drop Dolores home while she changed into something more suitable …
    Dean’s house, it turned out, was at the edge of the university campus. It was rambly and tumble-down, large and shambolic and more-or-less handsome, rather like Dean. It made our three-bed semi look really suburban.
    So that’s the kind of house you get when you’re an academic. A scientist. I could visualise it already: me striding off across the university lawns to deliver a lecture to eager young brains; Ferdy home-schooling the children with his brilliance and his attractive upper lip; long, summer afternoons on the rope swing in the garden, gazing into each other’s eyes having chemical reactions …
    Suddenly it was all ruined by Aggie appearing at the front door. She looked perfectly nice again. Jeans, like me, only tight-ish and faded. White top like Dolores, only loose enough to allow her to breathe. Lace-up biker boots, short jacket in a floral print that she might just have made herself. Perfectly bloody nice. I grimaced at her as we levered Dolores out of the back seat, but she obviously took my expression to mean ‘Check out what my friend is wearing’ and raised her eyebrows just a smidge, with faint sympathetic laughter in her green eyes.
    ‘Dolores, Aggie. Aggie, Dolores.’
    ‘Hiiiiiiii,’ they said to each other, fakely. Then, ‘So you’re a big fan, I hear,’ said Aggie with a grin.
         ‘Totally. Huge.’
          Dolores giggled, and suddenly they were both swapping histories of their Double Vision affections and in particular their overwhelming passion for the divine Jazzy D.
    ‘He’d better be worth all the hype,’ I said to nobody in particular, then added, ‘as he’s probably changed a bit from when we were at school,’ just to cover myself. But they weren’t listening anyway so I turned and stared at the distant uni buildings and flipped into my internal Oxbridge-versus-local-uni debate. Local uni was winning, unless Freddie preferred Cambridge, of course …
    Dean interrupted my daydream. ‘Fancy yourself in there one day, Cat? Rachel tells me you’re quite the scientist.’
    ‘Maybe.’ For some reason, I suddenly felt all shy. Of Dean, for Dawkins’ sake!
    Putting a hand on my shoulder, he swivelled me around until I was looking at a low glass structure that was much nearer to us than the older, more traditional university buildings. ‘That’s where my company has its lab. Rather less grand than the rest of the campus, but it meant we could still live on site