She taught me how to be calm. She showed me breathing exercises and made a magical place for us in space. ‘I need you to think,’ she said, ‘about Venus. The cloud tops of Venus. I looked it up and that’s the best place in the solar system for people to live, apart from Earth. It sounds lovely. Close your eyes and imagine we’re there. That’s what I do when it gets too much. I go to Venus.’

Even the cloud tops of Venus didn’t have enough magic: from the day she told us about it to her final day was less than three months. For fifteen years I had lived through March the fourteenth without even knowing that it would be the day my mum died. Nearly a year later I was stabbing my book in a French lesson because I was seeing things that couldn’t be there.

I missed my mum so much that I couldn’t think about her. I couldn’t bear to remember, so I forced myself to forget. I was angry with her for being ill and dying. I was furious in a way that made no sense because it hadn’t been her fault that she got cancer. Shit happened, and that was shit. I felt terrible for being angry. When I’d briefly seen the counsellor Sasha had arranged for us, he’d given me ways out of that thought spiral. They had helped. Except now. They weren’t working on the people I was seeing all over the school.

Izzy and I sat at our usual table. I checked the dining hall. Everyone seemed real.

‘Hey, Ariel,’ said Priya, sitting opposite us, putting down a tray that held a salad, a Diet Coke, a Twix, a Snickers and a Creme Egg. ‘When’s the baby due?’

I made a show of looking at my stomach in mock offence, which got the laugh I’d wanted. This was how I made it through school these days.

‘July,’ I said. ‘After the exams.’

‘Considerate,’ said Izzy.

‘Are you excited?’ said Priya. ‘About being an auntie?’

‘Course I am!’

‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘The most grown-up thing I’ve ever heard. A new generation.’

‘Yeah.’

I looked up, distracted by a movement off to my left. There was another of them. Two more. Two people who I knew weren’t really there. A girl and a boy walking together. I thought of the colour blue and there it was, bursting out of them. I thought of green, red, purple, yellow, but none of them worked. Only blue.