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answer her questions, but she had seen enough films to imagine that Dawn was probably lying in some ice-cold mortuary.
Even the words filled her with horror. ‘Mortuary . . . autopsy,’ – they sounded like a kind of dissection. Why did it all have to take so long? Why couldn’t they just let
Dawn be?
    Jacey and Laura had called around
again
this morning and she’d told them straight that she wouldn’t run until after the funeral. It wasn’t exactly true. Only yesterday
she’d found herself putting on her trainers and attempting to jog around the park – but instead of the familiar feeling of freedom as she pounded the pathway, her legs felt heavy and
her chest tightened, as if someone was squeezing her lungs in a vice. She had only been going for ten minutes before her legs began to shake. Kite doubted that she would ever feel the urge to run
again.
    Whenever Ruby or Seth persuade her to venture out of the flat she drew sympathetic nods and found herself locked into strained conversations in which people told her how sorry they were, and
she’d automatically say ‘thank you’, as if it meant anything to her that people she hardly knew, and who didn’t really know Dawn, were sorry. She’d decided that it was
better to be on her own. The problem was, alone in her room she bombarded herself with more questions than anyone else had thought to ask her.
    Kite stood up and walked over to her long mirror. Her skin, normally a rich brown colour, had taken on a sallow yellowish tinge. Her huge moss-green eyes were sunken into her face. She stretched
her arms towards the ceiling and felt the same strangled stiffness as when she’d tried to run. She would have liked to raise her head to the sky and howl, but no sound came. She dropped her
shoulders and hung her head so that her coils of thick black, copper-lit hair brushed over her feet. The rush of blood to her brain made her dizzy and the backs of her legs ached. Until now she had
always felt that her body could carry her anywhere she wanted to go, but since the Falling Day she had a growing sensation of standing outside herself, watching events, with no power to change
anything.
    Instead of sleeping she found herself wandering around her room doing and thinking the most random things. She sat at her computer and googled Brahms to find out what sort of a man he was. As if
knowing about Dawn’s favourite composer would provide her with the answers she needed.
    ‘The music of Brahms shows a passionate nature turned in on itself.’
    She read the sentence over and over again. Maybe this is how Dawn had felt too, distant from the world and everyone in it.
    Kite stared at herself in the mirror again. ‘Dawn Jenkins is Kite Solomon’s best friend,’ she said out loud. And who was Kite Solomon without Dawn? Maybe because she had known
Dawn for longer than anyone except for her parents, she had never realized how far her sense of who she was, was bound up with Dawn.
    Kite could picture Dawn on her sixteenth birthday, only three weeks ago. Her fine auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her soft hazel eyes heavily lined with black. She’d worn
skinny jeans and a tight long-sleeved T-shirt with an abstract line drawing in the centre, and the locket that Kite had bought for her when they’d left primary school. It contained a photo of
eleven-year-old Kite in one side and eleven-year-old Dawn in the other. She was willowy slim and tall, with legs that seemed to go on forever, but Dawn could never see how beautiful she was, always
going on instead about how lucky Kite was not to have grown too much, what a pain it was to have curves and boobs and have to wear a bra.
    Every time they looked in the mirror Dawn would compliment Kite on her eclectic style, admiring her latest quirky buy from Camden market and her DMs, her coils of hair, her smooth brown skin,
her slightly upward-turning nose, the beauty spot on her right cheekbone, and what Dawn called her