I sigh. It’s better not to know, but I need to try to remember. I should be trying to work out what happened to me. I’m supposed to be telling Ariel every detail of my last day, but it’s already fading. It’s slightly different every time. It must be.

I could write things down. I could try to leave myself a clue, but I have no idea how to do it, beyond sleeping with a pen and paper beside the bed and scrawling it all down the moment I wake up, and I seem to be doing that already with my maths book.

I think about that detail because it’s easier than the other stuff. It’s everywhere, though. The words are on every wall of this room. They are lit up, neon. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, they say. TODAY. RIGHT NOW. I see them everywhere I look. If I don’t die then I’ll vanish for twenty years. There seems to be some kind of life after death, but it has taken me twenty years even to notice that I’m living the same day over and over again. I think my afterlife involves me going to school every day forever, around seven thousand three hundred times so far, and if I’d lived all those days properly I’d be thirty-five, but in fact I’m still fifteen.

Maybe I’ve gone to hell. This could be my personal, specially tailored purgatory: I am sitting in a little room on my own, knowing that I’ll always be fifteen, waiting for my only friend, who should be here by now but isn’t, and for the other thing. The bad one. Meanwhile the millennium bug won’t happen, but climate change is worse than we expect, and the world’s politics have gone unthinkably weird, and I will never be a part of the world in which those things happen.

Ariel told me Gus has children. That comes back in a flash.

She had nearly found his address. She was going to go there today.

I stare at the door and feel myself spiralling out of control. I wait and wait for Ariel, but she doesn’t arrive, and after a while I realize that it’s five o’clock, and she’s not going to come.

She’s all I have. What if she’s ill? What if she has died too? Maybe she’s decided to stop coming to see me. She might have thought that she imagined me and that it was time to pull herself together for her sister’s baby.