When I see her name appear on my WhatsApp, I don’t even open the message. I archive it, to look at another time. In some ways, you could say she archived me fifteen years ago, that I was no longer urgent news to her .

School friends since we were five, we did it all together in a series of thrilling firsts: first boyfriends, first cars, first dates. We were brand new even if we didn’t know it. There were other, toxic firsts: first cigarettes, first bottles of wine, first lines of coke, first pills. This was the noughties after all and ladette culture had coalesced into the “have-it-all, shag-it-all, drink-it-all” culture. Somehow, feminism seemed to have become co-opted into excess . Viva Forever we sang, drunkenly. We believed it.

Except there was one thing that we couldn’t do tog

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