Better get it over with. ‘Chets,’ I say. ‘This is my friend Karim, from Latham. I’ve told you about him.’

‘Aw, you’ve been talking about me?’ Karim says in a cutesy voice that’s really annoying. ‘All good things, I hope?’

‘Not all good things,’ Chets says. ‘There was something about a misdemeanour in the lab.’

‘What?’ Karim says, and for a second my belly lurches, wondering how Chets could know what we got up to in the lab yesterday.

‘I believe it involved a Bunsen burner, a chemistry text book, and a shocking lack of respect for health and safety.’

178 Karim and I start laughing. There was an incident in the chemistry lab at school a few weeks ago that resulted in Karim getting a weekend detention. ‘Oh, that,’ he says. ‘Yeah, I got in a bit of trouble for that one, but it was mostly an accident.’

‘How could it be mostly an accident?’ Chets says.

‘Be nice, Chets,’ I say. ‘You’re my friend, and Karim is too, and I know you’ll like each other once you’ve spent some time together.’

‘Oh god!’ Ade rolls her eyes. ‘You’re acting like a bunch of Year Sixes. Let’s just get going. Alien invasions are a bit more important than your pathetic jealousy.’ And she stomps up the road ahead of us.

‘You see,’ Kat says. ‘Mean.’

‘What was that about alien invasions?’ Chets says, looking like he probably looked when his mum made him sleep in a bed with her the other night.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll catch you up,’ I say. ‘But Ade is right – we should keep moving.’

Mak lives on the same road as Ade, but all the way up the other end, backing onto Straggler’s 179 Fields, which we take a short-cut through on the way to Latham. They’re vast – stretching all the way to where the train tracks meet the motorway, and have been another place we’ve spent a fair bit of time when we’re doing things we’re not really supposed to be doing. It’s a long walk and we’re slower because Chets likes to take the cheerful route through life and stop to admire holly bushes and the new extension someone’s built a few roads over. Then that moves on to people’s Christmas light displays and, frustrating as it is, it does help with our aim of looking normal to any of the hive mind that might be watching. It’s also one of the things I like most about Chets – in his eyes, kittens are fluffier, the sunshine is brighter and people are kinder. It’s nice to look at the world through them from time to time.