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as though I've completely lost it.
    ‘How can I help?’ Jenny asks Edie. She's obviously given up on me as a lost cause.
    This is tricky. Jenny's going to be out of the country for the next few weeks.
    ‘Maybe you could email her descriptions of what people are wearing in New York and Tokyo?’ I suggest. ‘To give her ideas for making stuff.’
    Edie maintains her pitying look.
    ‘She can hardly read and she hasn't got a computer. Apart from that, brilliant.’
    I'm crushed.
    ‘Maybe you could bring her back stuff, then,’ I mumble.
    ‘It'll do as a start,’ Jenny says. Then she suddenly realises that she's overrun her break time and is hopelessly late.
    ‘I'm in such big trouble!’ she wails dramatically, thengiggles. ‘What can they do to me, though? Edit me out of the film?’
    We accompany her back to the hotel's reception, where FOUR PR people are standing in their black suits, on various phones and BlackBerries, looking out nervously for her. It's like being met by four angry parents after a late evening out. Much as we love her, we leave her to it. She doesn't seem to mind too much. She's used to it by now.
    It's only later, back in the sunshine, that I realise I forgot to ask her about Joe Yule. Something strange was happening on that red carpet yesterday. Was he deliberately avoiding her? Too late now. I know she won't trust anything sensitive to texts or emails while she's away – she's been warned about them being intercepted. Honestly, knowing a couple of Hollywood stars is like joining the CIA. So it may be a while until I finally wheedle the truth out of her.

I  t's near the end of summer term, so exams are over, classes are winding down and homework is minimal. This gives Edie plenty of time to think about the Three Bitches.
    ‘I've told the special needs people,’ she informs me one day in maths. ‘But I'm not convinced they can do very much. The one thing they did say was that Crow needs more friends. I'd have thought that was obvious. They suggested I should try and befriend her more. I've tried, but we don't really have much in common.’
    She gives me a look and the light comes on in that superbrain of hers. For once, I'm right there with her.
    ‘Invite her over,’ I say. ‘She can come any time.’
    And so she comes.
    She looks at my wall of Vogue photo shoots and my other wall of costume exhibition posters from the V&A, and I can tell she's in heaven.

    She snuggles herself into my favourite armchair, the purple velvet one, and tells us about her sketches and V&A visits and making clothes after school. It turns out she's on her own a lot, so she goes off to look at clothes, or she just invents them at home with whatever fabrics she can find. And she's always drawing her ideas. Pages and pages and pages of them.
    I ask about her family, but she looks past me and I wonder if she's heard me. Then she says something about growing up in Uganda, where her parents and several of her aunts and uncles and cousins are, and leaving them to come to England when she was eight.
    ‘Why?’ I ask, appalled. I mean, I love England, but leaving your family to come here seems a bit extreme.
    Crow looks at the floor and shrugs. For ages, she says nothing, but we wait. Eventually she looks up.
    ‘It was difficult in my country. My dad wanted me to get an English education. When my little sister is older, maybe she'll come too.’
    ‘How often do you see your parents?’ I wonder. My dad lives in Paris. Mum met him when she was modelling there. I see him twice a year, which really isn't enough at all. Harry's dad is in Brazil (Mum travelled a lot), which is worse.
    ‘Not so much.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘Never,’ she almost whispers. ‘They send photos. My sister Victoria sends me her drawings. She's four now.Nearly five.’ She reaches into her satchel and pulls out some folded sheets of paper. They are covered in pictures of smiling children with stick fingers and triangular, colourful clothes