It is June and Shit is sad. Clouds like the bottom of a donkey's belly will hover all summer over her town, high among the volcanoes of northern Tenerife. She knows she will not get to leave her neighbourhood that summer, and the beach is far, far away.

But she has a best friend, Isora. Shit likes everything about Isora. From the colour of her arms and her hair and her eyes to the way she writes the letter g with a huge tail. But she envies her too. Envies her grits and gut; her periods and her pubes; the way she is growing up at full tilt without her.

As the summer goes on and the heat becomes ever more oppressive, friendship simmers into obsession, desire into intimate violence.