We stayed out on the roof while it got dark. We stayed out all night. And later, I looked across the street for the hundredth time at his house. Doors shut, lights out, still and silent. Sunk-sunset glass above the front door, like a protractor, cataract film on all the windows, part salt air, part grime and neglect. Hard to believe Novo had scaled that wall like a lizard a few hours earlier. Hard to believe any of this at all. The house was empty now, and he was here with me. Mrs. Midler’s brand-new ghosts must still be everywhere—lost lists behind the radiators, years of cooking fumes in the kitchen, cobwebs strung like bunting down the hall. I wondered how they’d like sharing their space with this new sudden spell of a boy. I wondered if they were jealous now, of me. He sat up next to me. What did we both see? The farm-dog wind, herding litter into chosen corners. The hung moon, and clouds moving blankly under the stars. Streetlights reflected in old puddles, and the huddled outline of sleeping gulls. Someone’s TV flashing like lightning behind a closed curtain, a living-room storm. And each other, leaning, breathing, waiting. I had no idea for what.

In the end, he put his arms around me, shook his head a little, and smiled, pulling me back down to sleep. The streetlight closest to him buzzed half-heartedly, flickered, catching then losing him, over and over. There, and then gone, a way of life that boy was long used to. The far edges of the sea were on the horizon where they belonged. The moon was high and bright, and I saw it so clearly then. I pictured it, or I thought I did, the join between what was real and what wasn’t, for him. The fault line that he lived on, a fluid, changeable place, like the line between the dry land and the sea.

It didn’t occur to me then that I might one day have to draw that line for myself.

SEVENTEEN

Early morning was damp and smelled of the sea. The palm trees shivered in the breeze, tropical creatures, misfits waiting for the sun to come up. Novo wanted to go diving. We had to get our timing right because of the tides. Sometimes the caves were there and sometimes they weren’t. He said they filled and emptied with the sea.

Everything seemed deserted. Like the whole world was asleep except us. I wondered if Mum and Henry even noticed I was gone.

I said, “Are we actually the only ones up?” and he said, “Maybe.”