CLAIRE

Whenever my sister mentioned his name it was always preceded by an ‘Ooh’. ‘Ooh Dylan,’ she would say at even my first reference to him, but we had survived a year together, and one apart, and I was hoping that this would now put an end to the ‘Oohs’.

We were reunited for the summer at Josie’s party. It had been a hard few months. All the false smiles at interviews and the mindless pleasantries had somehow been pulling at my essential being. A fragment of the poem I remembered from my A-level English class had been floating around in my