‘Shall I stay home with you?’ Poor Dad. My strategy is just to stay where I am and see what happens at four. We’ve agreed that if I don’t turn up for two days in a row Ariel will go and look for me in 2019. Imagine if she found me.

Just imagine that. Imagine if I was out there after all, living. Being thirty-five.

I look at Gus, who is acting cocky, letting me know he knows what I’m up to while he tells Dad he should definitely go to work. You’re going to have a partner called Abby, I tell my brother, in my head. And two daughters called Zara and Coco. Cool names.

If I stay in bed today and don’t even try to go to Beachview, then I will – surely, surely, surely – change the course of my life. I’ll stay alive. I’ll meet Gus’s girls and be a regular uncle.

I climb back into bed, and allow Dad to gather up my clothes and books and pile them on the chair. He picks up my maths book and looks at its cover.

‘Don’t read that!’ I yell, throwing myself out of bed and rugby-tackling him. He sits down suddenly as I pull his legs out from under him, and looks confused as he rubs his bum.

‘Ouch!’ he says. The book is still in his hand. I rip off its cover and tear it into pieces and eat them. It’s easy to swallow. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Eating the cover of a maths book actually feels exactly the same as eating a school dinner or a piece of toast or a Crunchie or a bag of chips.

Nothing tastes of anything.

‘What was that?’ Dad says. ‘Joseph! You didn’t just eat a piece of paper. Did you?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It was a magic trick. Sleight of hand.’

He looks unconvinced. Unfortunately he knows about magic tricks and sleight of hand, and he clearly knows that wasn’t anything of the sort.

‘What was it?’ he says. ‘Creative writing? I really didn’t mean to pry.’

In fact, it said:

ARIEL IS GOING TO BABYSIT GUS’S DAUGHTERS TONIGHT. 1. Give Troy back his trophy. 2. FAKE ILLNESS. Try to stay off school all day b/c if I don’t leave the house I can’t die.

I really needed Dad not to read that.

‘Yeah. Creative writing. It was personal. Sorry to throw you on the ground.’

I get back into bed and try to look sickly and weak. It feels less convincing this time.

‘That’s OK,’ says Dad, rubbing his bum again. ‘I wouldn’t have looked if I’d realized.’ He pauses and it’s full of meaning. ‘You don’t really think you’re going to die if you leave the house, do you?’

‘Creative writing!’

‘I’m starting to worry, Joe.’

‘I’m fine.’