‘To be fair, mate,’ I say. ‘And I’m only speaking for myself here, but I’ve found it hard that you haven’t been around since you got with Georgia-Rae.’

‘Lance is right,’ Kat says. ‘You just ditched us when she came along, like we didn’t matter to you at all. It was a jerk move.’ 199

‘Just because you two are suddenly friends again doesn’t mean you have to team up,’ Mak says, as Karim runs back into the Lookout.

‘Aw, I’ve missed stuff,’ he says. ‘That sucks.’

‘Why are you here?’ Chets says, getting up off the sofa and turning on Karim. ‘You’re not part of our group and you never will be.’

‘Group – what group?’ Ade laughs in a nasty sarcastic rather than happy way. ‘We haven’t been a group for months.’

‘When did this all go so wrong?’ I stand up too. ‘We had the best summer, and then we started high school and everything fell apart.’

‘Mak got a girlfriend and turned into an idiot,’ Ade says.

‘Ade started acting like some kind of gangster wannabe,’ says Kat.

‘And you started mixing with a bad crowd,’ Chets says to me. ‘You disappointed me, Lance. You could have been so much better.’

I knew he was a bit funny about Karim, but I didn’t realise he thought I’d become a waste of space.

‘First of all,’ I say. ‘Karim is not a bad crowd.’

‘Thanks, mate.’ Karim holds up his knuckles, 200 and I feel like it’s not the time, but I’m not going to air him in the current circumstances, so I try to bump fists in a quick and non-smug way because I think Chets might explode.

‘When we started high school, I thought it was going to be great,’ I say. ‘It felt like a chance to be someone new, like I could forget about Hoche and Trent and start again. But it wasn’t like that at all – it was just as hard as primary but in new, worse ways. I lost all my friends, one by one, and I didn’t have a clue why. Mum got really ill and it was my fault. Karim’s been there for me when none of you have.’

‘How is it your fault about your mum?’ Kat says.

And this is it – the guilt I feel all the time. ‘She first got ill when she was pregnant with me,’ I say. ‘So ill that she couldn’t have another baby, even though I know she wanted one. She and Dad split up over it, so technically that was my fault, too.’

‘No way, Lance,’ Ade says. ‘Your mum’s illness is not your fault, and neither is your dad leaving. That was between them – people can have worlds of problems going on that you don’t know about, even if you’re close to them.’ 201