Ben looked at the floor, sloping away towards the Shitfuckerpoobum. He imagined he could see a pile of innards: his dad’s, his mum’s, even Carl’s and Daniel’s. He felt a suction in his guts, as if his own insides were trying to get out and be with the others’, there on the floor.

He started out, unsurely at first, but they were patient with him. After his first couple of months on the trial, he said, he hadn’t liked the Vyvanse. At first, it had helped his concentration and his marks, so he had gone along with it. But after the ‘trial’ ended and he was going to have to take it as a regular prescription, he didn’t want it. It wasn’t that the pill made him feel bad—it didn’t have much effect anymore—it was the daily message that there was something wrong with him. ‘If there wasn’t something wrong with me,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have to take something that only makes me feel normal.’

He glanced at his dad for approval but Gordon’s head seemed about to fall off his neck, too heavy to withstand gravity.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Kelly asked.

‘You had enough problems without me adding another.’ He knew that after so many years of arguing over it, they believed they were doing the right thing, and the easiest course was to let them go on believing and not reopen that dispute. He already thought he was the cause of most of his parents’ fights. Once things settled, he would raise it. But their problems only seemed to get worse, so he’d put the conversation off. ‘I’d piled up five or ten bottles since I stopped using them. And then I started talking to Daniel.’

Daniel nodded, not to Ben so much as to the adults, as if he was the defendant in a trial and Ben his star witness.

It hadn’t taken Ben long to find out that a third of the boys in his year took prescribed ADHD meds. Most were casual about it, but Daniel was different. Ben had never suspected Daniel needed to take anything until he caught him at cricket practice one day, shaking a pink-and-white pill out of the familiar bottle. Daniel had begged him not to tell anyone; it was his secret; he just didn’t like people to ‘identify’ him as ADHD. Besides, Daniel said, he was only taking it on ‘high-performance days’, when he needed to sit an exam, or deliver a speech, or perform on the sports field or in the surfboat crew. Ben had been startled that Vyvanse could be a cheat drug; it had never worked that way for him.

Gordon and Kelly were looking at each other and shooting glances at Carl.

‘Go on,’ Kelly said.

‘Wait, what? Where was I at?’

‘Daniel,’ Gordon said.