He drew back and let out a quick breath. “If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling.” He wrapped both arms around the branch and glanced downward. “Oh, that’s weird.”

“You’ve got the fear.”

“A bit. It’ll pass. Hey, what are you doing?”

What I was doing was unbuttoning his Levi’s. One of his legs began to tremble slightly, dancing in the air. I wondered what it would take for Marcus not to respond to my hands—more than the prospect of a thirty-foot drop, it seemed.

Something was rustling about in the undergrowth over to the left. The moon was peeping. I liked having him where I wanted him. I liked the fact that like this, he could not touch me back, so I did it slow. Before he came, he said my name, quickly, with a furrowed brow, like I troubled him, like I pained him. I wiped my hand off on my jeans.

“I think you hit the headless horsewoman.” But part of my brain was thinking, Well, that’s that done for a while.

Later, in bed, floating on a little hash cloud, I thought of the world after the apocalypse. I saw Marlborough empty of people, its supermarkets abandoned, its shops looted. I imagined packs of dogs marauding up the high street, and the great stone fountains of its famous college dry and full of leaves. At our own school, Saint John’s, our work peeled from its sugar-paper mounting on the display boards, and in the canteen, the linoleum shrank and cracked, and the enormous saucepans rusted where they hung on the kitchen walls.

It made me feel something, something shimmery, like the times in the church, years before, when I would hang over one of the creaking pews till my hair touched the flagstones and Peter would ring one of the hand bells right next to my ear. Even after the sound had faded and my ears had stopped ringing, something in my brain would go on resounding, as though deep inside me a tiny cliff was shearing off into the sea, a tower block collapsing soundlessly.

So I kept bringing us back to it, asking Marcus and Peter and Em again and again what they would want to do if they had one more day, just one more day.

On June 20, dawn broke the color of Mrs. East’s roses. After much consideration, I’d decided not to kill my mother. Instead, I made myself pancakes for breakfast. I put all the golden syrup I wanted on them, which turned out to be all the golden syrup there was. Then I licked the plate.