When Good Friends Go Bad by Ellie Campbell

bummed' at never seeing her parents without an entourage.
    But even she was not immune to Aiden's presence. At fifteen Meg was quite the vamp. She'd lost her virginity the previous year and ever since then had been determinedly stalking any boy who had the fortune – or misfortune – to catch her fancy. She would hover over Starkey while he worked, resting her pointy little chin on his shoulder to see what he was writing, her nubile young breasts in a skimpy top pressing against his back, her ginger curls mixing with his black ones.
    She'd laugh too enthusiastically when he spoke, her whole body shaking as if he were the cast of Blackadder and Monty Python rolled into one. And she'd even rub her toes provocatively up his denim-clad leg whenever they gathered in Clover's incense-scented boudoir, listening to Clover work up chords on the guitar. It was hard to believe that Starkey could resist such an overt seduction.
    But he did. His pen never faltered, his dark brows merely wrinkling deeper in concentration as the words flowed out, or he'd casually shift position, moving his leg away, out of invading range, and tuck it under him, never taking his eyes off Clover and her strumming fingers.
    Only once when he, Meg and Jen were lying back on the Thai silk pillows of Clover's king-size bed – Meg's parents had separate bedrooms, Clover using hers as studio, sitting room and for all kinds of entertaining – he happened to turn his head and catch Jen staring at him, and a small smile crossed his sensuous mouth as he closed his eye in the faintest of complicit winks.
    It was a moment Jen replayed time and time again in long, sleepless nights of restless yearning. For the first time in her young life she was smitten. From then on Starkey was the only one who haunted her dreams.
    He called her 'Titch' a name that she would have objected to from anyone else, but from Starkey's mouth it had the same effect as a love sonnet. 'Hey, Titch,' he'd say, 'what's up?' Or 'Hi Titch, how's it hanging?'
    To which she never had any good reply, all her brain cells having fled with the onset of first love, taking all her pithy responses with them. She was tongue-tied in his presence, every bit as shy as Rowan. She found it impossible to meet his eyes, her mind would freeze as her face grew hot and not a single coherent sentence would emerge until he'd walked away, leaving her with a sudden influx of snappy comebacks. Soon everybody else was calling her Titch too, and she loved it, because each utterance reminded her of him.
    Starkey was an enigma, a mass of contradictions and moods. He could be wildly social, livening up any room he was in, holding court with adults twice his age, or unpredictably silent and withdrawn, emanating loneliness and existential despair to rival any teenage rebel.
    Either way he was impossible to ignore. Even Rowan and Georgina fell under his magnetic spell. Rowan decided he was completely 'yummy'. And Georgina swooned, discovering that despite his oddly rough accent, somewhere between East End cockney and South (Sarf) London wide boy, his family were listed in Burke's Peerage. In fact he'd dropped out of Eton where he'd been a King's Scholar, on his way to Oxford, until he'd decided the whole scene was unbearably archaic and phoney.
    Meg once accused him of being a trust-fund baby, to which he replied equably that the coffers were looking pretty bare and he wasn't pumping petrol because he was getting off on the smell of it.
    He had a girlfriend too when they first met him, a voluptuous twenty-year-old Scandinavian called Astrid, with the whitest of white-blond hair, who the four friends were ragingly jealous of, not only because she was older, but also because she managed to be both sexy and ethereal. Next to her they all felt like lumpish, awkward children – which, really, they were.
    Astrid came to several of the Lennox parties, a pale sprite smooching with Starkey in the maroon and gold living room painted with