The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

weren’t alone in striving in that way. Alice recognised the signs in other girls: grey smudges under their eyes, the way they pushed their food around their plates in formal hall, watching the men, watching the other girls, measuring up the competition. Alice spent her days measuring, too: measuring her waistline, measuring time, calculating hours left in the library or minutes on the rowing machine in the college gym.

      There was always so much to be done. There were cocktail parties and yoga classes, ballroom dancing, rowing, the library – always the library, armed with lists of books so long that she would feel a lump in her throat when they were handed to her in tutorials.

      Alice observed how Christie took care of herself: her manicures, her glossy hair. Christie, she noticed, never drank too much. She sipped her drinks, put them down for long stretches of time, and seemed to listen intently to other people without saying a huge amount herself. Despite not having the obvious charisma of other, more show-offy girls, Christie’s cool self-possession and dry wit meant friends flocked to her, but for some reason she chose Alice, of all people, to be her closest confidante. ‘I can tell we’re both alike,’ she said that morning over a cappuccino. ‘I think we know the value of things.’

      One afternoon, after Alice had fallen into bed with a handsome rugby player and was feeling rather dreadful following his retreat, Christie had popped down to see her. Surveying the dark room, Christie had pulled the curtains open, drenching it with light. She’d perched on the end of Alice’s bed and said crisply: ‘I don’t want to lecture you, but they don’t stay with the ones who sleep with them straight away.’

      ‘It doesn’t sound very modern,’ huffed Alice.

      ‘It isn’t,’ Christie agreed. ‘But it works. Especially with the rugby boys – they’re the worst. Or you can just muck around, have fun.’ She made it sound like a bad thing. ‘It’s up to you, of course, but did you have fun? Really?’

      Alice thought of the previous evening – the flush of flirtation over cocktails, the initial rush of excitement, yes, but with sweatiness, disappointment, the prickling of embarrassment hot on its heels.

      ‘My mother says these are the years,’ said Christie.

      ‘The years for what?’

      ‘Finding the right person. We’ll never have it as good as this – never again be surrounded by so many bright young men.’ She looked hard at Alice. ‘Do you know Magnus? The only decent hairdresser in town. He’s da bomb.’ Christie had the unfortunate habit of trying to pep up her rather conservative way of speaking with occasional street lingo. It didn’t really work.

      Alice put a hand to her hair. ‘No, I don’t.’

      ‘I’m going to take you to see him. He’ll sort you out. My treat.’

      As she sat in Magnus’s chair, her hair falling from her in drifts, Alice suddenly felt unspeakably sad, as if she were being shorn of her old self; as if pieces of her childhood were falling away from her. She closed her eyes.

      ‘It’s going to be so worth it,’ said Christie from behind her, reading her mind. And, strangely enough, she was right. Alice emerged from the salon as if from a chrysalis. Her brown hair became a short blonde bob, framing her eyes and making her look neat, in charge and altogether less mousy.

      ‘We need to get you some clothes to match,’ Christie said. ‘Let’s start with a dress.’

      That night, in her new Karen Millen dress, George, in his final year, noticed Alice for the first time. It was not a style Alice would have normally gone for, with a bodice in turquoise and a hot pink skirt, but it attracted the eye, as Christie put it, and emphasised her tiny waist. It cost her a serious chunk of her student loan, but it was worth it for the reaction it got. In between making eyes at George, she calculated how she was going to live for the rest of the term. She’d certainly have to work through the holidays.

      At the end of the night, George walked her back to her room, but she allowed him only to the bottom of the staircase.

      ‘So, which one’s yours?’ He smiled, looking up the stairs.

      ‘You’ll see.’ She smiled back. ‘Maybe.’

      His mouth looked sulky for a moment; he took a step closer to her.

      ‘But it would be fun to see it now.’

      Keep it light, Christie had said.

      ‘Yes, but it’ll be something for you to look forward to.’

      Alice stepped closer too, glanced up through her eyelashes at George.

      He reached for her hand, his eyes glassy, unfocused. It wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it. Standing on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek for a second, inhaling the whisky and aftershave smell of him, then turned quickly and trotted up the stairs.

      ‘Anna, come back!’ George had called after her petulantly. ‘Anna!’

      ‘No,’ she shouted back. ‘And it’s Alice.’

       Naomi

      She always had a temper. She broke my arm as a child – an accident, of course: I’d been cheating at Grandmother’s Footsteps and she pushed me too hard, misjudged her own strength.

      Then there was my first boyfriend, Jamie Havers. A boy with brown hair and freckles. He used to follow me around Pony Club Camp when I was eleven. I liked him, but I didn’t want to kiss him, so he stopped talking to me and told the other boys I was frigid. It made me cry.

      The day after he dumped me, Ruth asked the boys if she could join in with their game of touch rugby. I remember it was a hot August day and being outside all week had tanned the boys’ noses. Mrs Jenkins, who was in charge of looking after the children at camp, was wedged into a deckchair outside her caravan, keeping an eye on everyone and watching the game.

      Ruth considered the scene for a bit and then approached the biggest of the boys. ‘Can I play?’

      He squinted down at her. ‘There aren’t any other girls playing.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘Let her play,’ said a cheery dark-haired boy who was friends with Ruth.

      She hung back at first, running for the ball but not trying too hard. She was biding her time for when Jamie got hold of it, which he did before too long. He was a good player, tenacious and nippy. But Ruth was faster. As he ran for the try-line, she began to give chase and just before he reached it, she caught the edge of his T-shirt in her hand and gave it a yank so that he fell, stumbling, to the floor. Then the pair of them were wrestling for the ball, rolling over and over each other. It got so vicious that the other boys started jeering and even Mrs Jenkins sounded panicked as she heaved herself up from her deckchair to disentangle them.

      Ruth came out of the tussle wild-haired, with a scratch down her face, but she laughed off any fuss from me. ‘It’s just rugby,’ she said. ‘Just a fight for the ball.’

      Where we were from rugby was a religion. The bar didn’t have a telly – Grandma wouldn’t hear of it – but the locals would gather afterwards to discuss the game. Everyone had an opinion on it.

      We knew our father was different, though: he didn’t care as much for rugby as other men did, but he had to pretend. He was proud of the differences he’d chosen – the bow tie and flashy car – but there were ways in which he wanted to be the same, wanted to fit in with the posh crowd. Loo not toilet, lunch not dinner, long-sleeved shirts not short. There was so much to remember and apart from the voice, the slight flatness of his vowels, you’d almost never have known.

      ‘What do you think about these changes to the scrum rules?’ he asked one day in the bar after a game, cribbing from a newspaper article he’d just read.

      ‘It’ll make it harder on the pitch. Not that you’d