You are a girl, twelve years of age, still small enough to fit into your mother’s gold satin nightie, still too far removed from puberty’s comprehensive rewiring of reality to suspect that someday that might not be the case, still so perfectly and utterly flat-chested that the nightgown’s plummeting neckline seems destined to be either a sad mockery of your figure or an inappropriate choice for a pre-pubescent girl, depending on your view, and yet neither of these, as it happens, turns out to be your view, which is likely bound up with how neither seems to be your mother’s view either, when you slip it on she nods once, deeply, then laughs in approval, a reaction which seems to come down at least in part to the way that the pieces of satin are stitched together, which is to say, when you step over to the mirror you realize with a shock that the slight darting at the bust has made it look as though there is something more than just air down there – but no, it’s not just that, it’s as if the satin nightie has moved you into a world where you do have breasts, allowed you to believe that you really do have them, a magical sort of belief which is very closely related to the feeling that in fact anything is possible, any transformative feat of the imagination is possible, and it’s on that basis that you decide that the garment will do for the occasion in question, namely, your transformation into Céline Dion. You’re in your first year of senior school, it’s your class’s turn to do (the only verb ever used) an assembly, and you’ve decided to do Top of the Pops – in all your enthusiasm you’ve misunderstood the remit, failed to realize that you’re not just there to put on a grand old show for everyone to enjoy, a point that in fact will not become clear to you until after the big day has been and gone, and you are cautioned by your form tutor for the fact that your assembly didn’t have any kind of educational content, albeit a head-hanging, don’t-shoot-the-messenger sort of cautioning, because of course he had watched the whole spectacle unfolding, been in attendance at all the planning meetings and rehearsals and not once suggested that you might want to include some kind of moral or takeaway or message, so for him to turn around and say that now is pretty hypocritical and he knows it – and everyone has volunteered to do the acts that they want to do, mostly they have teamed up with other people to form bands, but what you want to do is Céline Dion, who is of course a solo act, although you’ve asked two friends, one of whom is the other person who always gets top marks in French class, and they’ve agreed to be your backing dancers.