It's hotter than usual this September. The sun lingers over the town, flooding it with rich golds and blues. Heat haze hangs heavy in the air, sticking my vest to my ribs and spine.
The streets are empty because the children have gone back to school. But until my mother sobers up, pays the electric man so we can switch the lights on, gets out of her chair and notices I'm still around, I'm free to do what I want.
Occasionally a social worker, smelling like face powder and nerves, will visit the house and tell me I should really be getting an education – my Dad still pays for a good school, and I don't want to let him down, do I? No, ma'am. It will make me happy and good. I want to be a happy, good person don't I? Yes, ma'am. I nod seriously and promise to get the bus in on Monday.
But Monday rolls around and it turns out I'm still perfectly happy kicking my soccer ball around town, enjoying the silence and the approaching breezes. So I do.

One day I take my ball further than usual, away from my street and nearer the countryside. Our misplaced, concrete patch of suburbia gives way very quickly to grass and sparrow-nests. The trees grow a little thicker – I crane my neck upward to see the green leaves being slowly gilded.
A root twists itself around my ankle and I trip with a childish yell, blushing even in my solitude.

Well, my supposed solitude. When I return my gaze to a sensible height, I see a girl in front of me, head tilted quizzically and trying not to laugh.
She is dressed in torn jeans and a red T-shirt, and her blonde hair is a messy mane round her shoulders.
"Hi, I'm Cassie."
Her eyes are cracked mirrors. Beautifully silver-grey but broken.
I redden more fiercely, pushing myself onto my feet and cradling my ball protectively to my chest.

But her smile pales the sun, so I grin nervously back and we sit down together. She tells me she is thirteen years old, the same age as me. I let her play catch with me, and she never once drops the ball, her spider-hands gracefully wrapping around it.

I start to meet her every day by the river in the wood, and we sit by the giggling water. We name the birds and build castles for ladybirds out of twigs. I think we both missed out that bit of our childhood, so we unspeakingly act out what we were meant to do. We talk until the sun starts to set, heads pressed against the springy grass.

When she's being spoken to, she chews her pinky finger like a chicken bone, sharp little teeth denting the skin and leaving it red-raw. I ask her not to do it, so she laughs at me and bites so hard it bleeds.

But her face turns more alive than a butterfly when she chatters back to me, her eyes flashing from sombre to playful as she paints conversation excitedly.
"I live in a mansion." she will tell me, grinning wickedly. "I can have whatever I want there, but I run away each day to see you." She flicks her wild hair like they do on the adverts, and soothes her country lilt into something passing for upper class as she spins tales of ponies and private tutors; of feasts and balls.

I never mention that I sit in an oak tree and watch her walk home to a trailer park once she leaves each evening. I nod as she explains away her bruises to horse-riding, and try to convince myself that the shouting and screaming and banging I hear when I creep up in the night and press my face against the tin walls didn't really happen.

We spend all of the dying summer and golden autumn together, building dens in trees when the wind starts biting our cheeks. She never seems to feel the cold, and wears a red T-shirt every day through October.

One day, she presses her cherry lips against mine like grown-ups do, and tells me she loves me. I love her too, and I prove it to her by the river; we follow our instincts in lieu of being instructed. Afterwards she cries a little, but I brush away the tears and she smiles away the shadows again. Later I will find out we were too young – much too young – and cry a little myself at the waste of it all.

The wind starts nipping at us harder as Autumn wears on, but we still sit outside, catching the crumbling leaves in eager fingers.

One day we are sitting in a birch tree and her face is solemn, pale as a snowdrop. She tells me in a tiny voice that she thinks she will have a baby, tears rolling down her pretty cheeks. Her Dad will kill her. She doesn't bother telling me tales of riches any more – and today I can see the stark reality etched across her face.

"We'll run away," I tell her, suddenly resolute after a minute's pause. "I'll grab some food and money from home, and I'll meet you back here!" I'd walk over hot coals for the grateful smile she gives me then.

But when I got home, the social worker is there. She has brought a man like a brick wall with her, and I have to go to school &#150.
Musty desks, numbers that swim like fish in front of me and dorms shared with boys who prod my skinny ribs with rulers. I cry at night and they tease me for being homesick, not knowing that I'm sobbing because Cassie will be sobbing too, wondering why I left her.

They keep me there for three weeks before I make a break for it early one morning, my breath fast as I sprint unseen over frosty grass. I scramble over the wall, tearing my trousers and knees as I scale the brick fortress.

I walk home within a day, picking my way through small towns and crossings, eager to see Cassie and tell her about my adventures in captivity – run away and make up to her the three weeks of loneliness. But she isn't by the river when I get there.

I amble to the trailer park, edging behind trees. Her caravan is still there, and I walk casually up to it, trying not to let the wriggling maggot-worries in my stomach show on the outside.

I knock, and there is no reply.

The door turns out to be unlocked, so I ease my way into the caravan, pretending that I feel like a hero coming to rescue her, rather than a thief. The room is very untidy, like somebody's grabbed a load of stuff and left in a hurry. I frown, but remember how untidy my Mom is when she's drunk.

It smells like sour copper and iron; a scent I recognise but can't place. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a flash of gold among the shadows, and grin as I see her sleeping in a chair.

"Wake up, Cassie! I came home!"

Her face, resting sideways on the chair so I can see her pursed lips, looks paler than usual.

"Wake up!"

I shake her from behind, grasping her skinny shoulder. She is stiff, and feels cold under the fabric of her red T-shirt. Her arm is twisted wrong, like she's trying to touch that spot on your back you can't quite reach.

My belly is full of cold fire as I move so I can see her from the front. I scream at what I see, and throw up, the bile burning my throat.

There is a gaping, stinking hole in her stomach where our baby should be. Her T-shirt has been dyed a darker red, her naked legs crusted in the same colour. In that second, God disappears and the horrific rule of human nature is apparent. I feel a matching hole in myself; in the part of you nobody can see.

My beautiful Cassie's face is unmarred, and I sob into her hair for minutes, hours, weeks, years, eternities, before I stumble to the police in hysterics.    

Her Dad was arrested a fortnight after. Looks like she told him about the baby to try and make him stop sinking his fists into her. So he sunk a bread knife into her instead, and nobody came to see what the screams were.