Ruby’s pen flew over the pages, vitriol spewing so fast it weaved over the lines. No chance of sleep – there never was lately, so she put the time to good use. On the front of the black cover she had scrubbed out the word ‘Diary’, stuck a red rectangle of paper over it. ‘Book of Hate’ now adorned it, in spikey black lettering.

Now she was banned from seeing Harry. No way. Meeting Harry had been like seeing the stars and the moon up close and being blinded by them. She felt as if the secrets of the universe had been revealed to her. Being without him now would be leaving her in the dark once again, and the thought of going back to that made her shiver.

Never in her life had she felt so close to anyone; at the moment she had felt most alone, he had appeared. They had so much in common.

She surrounded the statement with love hearts, then realised how dorky that was and turned them into stars instead, which was slightly better.

Behind the goofy smile, Harry was clever. Maybe not academically, his grades were poor, but he was really quick and sharp. He seemed to know what was going on in her head better than she did. Which was why trying to keep the texts hidden from him was proving such a major pain in the backside.

Her parents were completely oblivious to the messages – and determined to ruin her life. They were the ones who had insisted on sending her to that expensive private school when she was eleven: Tennyson’s Exclusive School for Girls. It had almost destroyed her. She felt she was being rejected by her parents, especially as she didn’t even need to board overnight, because it was only a mile or so down the road. Father had been adamant it ‘added to the experience and made her a more rounded character’.

After three years, Ruby felt so rounded she wanted to roll under a stone and die.

Finally, she screwed up her courage, and confessed to her parents how she hated being away from her family at night, even though she was home every weekend. That she missed her little sister most of all. She had been four when Ruby went away, and starting school herself. Almost every weekend when Ruby came home, she could discern a change in Mouse: she had grown a little taller, learned something new, found a different game to play together, there was always something. Ruby was happy that she was happy at school, but worried, too. She needed to be home more, to keep an eye on things.

All of that was true. But it wasn’t the main reason why she was desperate to leave. She would never tell them the real reason.

Instead, she had begged and pleaded until her father had offered a deal. If Ruby got her grades up from Ds and Cs to Bs, she could attend a different school.

The relief.

It would be a challenge. Ruby wasn’t the most gifted person in the world academically, and knew it would be a miracle if she did it. But she had worked her socks off, sometimes doing homework until past midnight, spurred on by her dad’s promise. And she had done it. She’d got Bs in all of her subjects. All except maths. She was really, really bad at maths, but through sheer determination and a lot of tutoring, she managed to get a C and was overjoyed.

When she had given her parents her report card, she had been full of hope that her efforts would be worth it. That they would see how hard she had tried. That she had done everything that had been asked of her.

‘What about this C in maths?’ her dad asked.

He hadn’t even commented on the other grades, apparently blind to the huge improvement she had made.

In his eyes, she would always be a failure.

He had stood his ground and refused to let her leave the private school because he said she hadn’t kept her side of the bargain. She felt utterly betrayed by him.

To ‘encourage’ her to try harder, he had even persuaded the school to no longer allow her to be captain of the netball team.

‘To teach you that you can’t always get what you want,’ he had said.

She knew that for sure. Ruby never, ever got what she wanted, even when she did as she was told.

If her dad hoped that no longer doing the one thing she loved would concentrate her mind academically, he failed miserably. Ruby gave up trying. Why bother, when she couldn’t win no matter what she did?

She had got herself expelled in the end, thanks to getting drunk one night. When she first met Harry she’d told him about it, all full of bravado and making it sound dead cool. Only later had she told him the full story. A gang of the cool girls, led by Poppy Flintock, had been drinking and Ruby had been so desperate to impress them that she had joined in. She’d been delighted when they let her, thinking they were finally going to be her friend. But they’d got her to drink loads. Cheering and egging her on, telling her she had to finish a bottle of vodka as an initiation – that would prove she was good enough to hang out with them.

She’d done as they asked, not noticing that they were barely sipping their own alcohol. Once she was off her face, the giggling gaggle of bitches had then dobbed her in to a teacher. Led one right to her as she lay face down in the toilets, in a pool of her own vomit. Of course, they had only called a teacher once they had taken some video footage of her and a ton of photos to post online.

Father had been furious, but at least Ruby had got what she wanted – to leave all of her troubles behind and enjoy a fresh start at a local state school.

What a joke.

She should have realised that there is no clean slate in cyberspace. Videos do not disappear simply because you move away. There is nowhere to run and hide, no matter how far you go. Beginning at the new school in September had been the starter gun for matters getting even worse.

Beside her, her phone buzzed silently with a message, as if confirming her thoughts. She stiffened. Turned it over, to lessen the temptation to look at it. Carried on writing in her ‘Book of Hate’.

She drew some love hearts around that sentence.