It looked up in the sudden hush. Paused for a second, let out a squeak, dropped the nut in its hand, and ran away. It occurred to me with what felt like life-changing clarity that the squirrel’s demeanour was a lot like Thomas’s.

‘Geez, I kind of feel like we have to take that personally, Jane.’

‘Shut up, Tars, we scared the poor little guy.’

Ark said, ‘I’m okay with scaring a squirrel, man. Did I ever tell you about the squirrel situation the year I lived with Steve up on Neil? I told you right, David?’

‘Yeah, you told me.’

‘I didn’t tell you guys though, did I? Okay, so listen. I guess there was this squirrel living in Steve’s room and it died? And it decayed and it smelled so, so bad in there. Like, we could smell it all the way downstairs in the kitchen when we were cooking and shit. And we went on searching for this horrible smell all the time and we finally found it right at the end of the year. That fucking squirrel, it had probably been dead for so long, man. We had to cut a hole in his closet, because it was inside his closet and we couldn’t find the smell so we had to cut a hole, like right into his drywall, to find it. It was disgusting . . .’ He trailed off and started digging the ends of his undone shoelace into the grass.

David laughed and said, ‘This is coming from the same kid who used to catch spiders and eat them.’

Jane made a puking sound. ‘That’s really gross.’

‘No man, I used to work at this restaurant back in high school and the umbrellas and tables and stuff outside were, like, fine during the day, but I don’t know what it was, at night the spiders would come out like crazy. Like, everything would just be full of spiders. Tables, chairs, umbrellas, everything—just crawling with them. And they were some of the juiciest spiders I’ve ever seen, man. Like their juicy part was an inch thick, no joke. So that’s all I ate, just the juicy part, man.’

I heard someone mumble, ‘That’s messed up, that’s real messed up.’

‘No dude, those spiders had meat on their bones. I’m telling you. And they were everywhere. Like sometimes they’d fall in the water and you’d just watch them die.’

No one said anything for a while. I think we were all thinking about what a drowning spider would look like. I know I was.