Pair of feathered wings with quote

"Den Hardacre," she said. "You copied my chemistry homework every Tuesday for two years." He laughed too loudly and asked what she did now. She said she drew for a living, which was true in the way that paying the rent with commissions was true. He wanted to know if she did those feather designs, the soft grey ones, because his nephew had one done in Hull and it looked like a photograph.

She thought about Lorna Tait, who had sat by the radiator and asked for a pair of wings on the back of her school bag, drawn so the tips faded to nothing. Lorna's dad had moved them to Leeds the summer after the Latin exam, and Den had never heard from her again except for a Christmas card with no return address. Den had written the quote underneath in the margin that autumn, copied from the poster above Mr Okafor's desk, the one about what does not kill you. She had thought it was a joke at the time.

Lorna was across the hall, near the coats, with a fringe gone grey at the edges. When the caretaker dimmed the lights for the raffle, Lorna walked over without a word and held out her hand, palm up. In it was a folded page torn from a notebook, the wings traced in pencil, the words underneath in Den's own cramped hand. "I had it tattooed on my own back after my dad died," Lorna said. "Your handwriting was always a mess. It took me twenty years to read it properly."