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was always a huddle of pots boiling gleefully on the stove, steam puffing out of them like smoke – that I couldn’t stand to be in there for more than a few minutes.
    ‘Now I’m jealous,’ I admitted, biting into the celery and thinking about the dining hall. I was yet to eat there, but didn’t have high expectations. I doubt I’d be having moi moi any time soon. ‘Do you just get to eat delicious things all day?’
    ‘Pretty much. Dad’s trying potato and rosemary bread today. I’ll tell him to make extra so we can have it for lunch tomorrow.’
    I smiled. ‘The French make the best bread.’
    She frowned. ‘The French?’
    ‘You said your parents met in Paris.’
    ‘Oh, yeah. No. They met in Paris, but they’re both English. My mother’s a Lister.’
    As with her house, she assumed that I knew that too, but I had no idea who the Listers were. Very important, I guessed, so I just smiled sweetly as she told me about her mother who was an only child and, like most of the girls at Crofton, was raised by a nanny. I had a similar upbringing. That surprises some people, they seem to think all Africans are desperately poor. Someone at my last school once asked me if I lived in a house in Nigeria. I guess she thought I lived in a mud hut. I don’t. I live in a house. A very nice house, in fact.
    I felt a sudden ache as I thought about home, about my big white house and the garden, with its hot, bright flowers and the curved palm leaves that cast shadows on the lawn like black eyelashes in the afternoon sun. I could never run away like Scarlett’s mother did; I’d miss my parents too much. Miss how my mother still likes to plait my hair before I go to bed and how my father eats breakfast in a suit while frowning at his copy of The Vanguard . But I suppose I can understand why her mother did it, why she felt like she had to run away. I’m an only child, too. I understand the burden of knowing that my family’s name ends with me. But that’s a good thing, too, I think. When I marry, I can shuffle it off. Make a new name for myself. I guess that’s what her mother was trying to do.
    The story is hopelessly romantic, and, to be frank, a little cliché, but it is what it is: her mother packed a bag, left a note for her parents, and fled in the middle of the night to Paris. Scarlett spoke of it with such joy: of how her parents met in a café and fell in love; of the top-floor apartment they shared in the twentieth arrondissement and their second-hand brass bed that they dragged into the living room so that they could wake to a view of the rooftops and the Eiffel Tower in the distance. And it was a charming story, one Scarlett was clearly proud of, even though I’m not sure that what her mother did was remarkable enough to warrant being spoken of with such reverence. When I thought about it, it was actually pretty selfish; she was in Paris for a year before she told her family where she was. But I couldn’t say that, could I? So I nodded and smiled in all the right places and waited for her to finish.
    ‘So what are your co-curriculars?’ she asked without stopping for breath.
    ‘Running, tennis and lacrosse. And I’m thinking, maybe, swimming as well.’
    ‘Oh God, I couldn’t.’ Her eyes widened as she reached for a grape. ‘I hate swimming pools. I can’t go near them. My sister, Olivia, swims, though.’
    ‘Does she go to Crofton?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What year is she in?’
    ‘Ours,’ she said with a shrug, offering me the last cherry tomato, then putting the lid back on the Tupperware tub. ‘We’re twins. She’s doing A-levels, though.’
    I grinned. ‘You’re a twin? I’ve never met a twin before.’
    ‘I was born first,’ she said with a grand wave of her hand that told me she was done talking about it, then pulled a magazine out of her bag and started flicking through it. ‘So what other co-curriculars are you interested in?’
    ‘I want to go for the Disraeli . I used to write for my