That’s how I knew Heather was really gone. The crickets had started up again.

‘Jesus,’ Sleepy said again, still panting pretty heavily, ‘are you sure you’re all right, Suze?’

I turned to look at him. All he had on was a pair of jeans and an Army jacket, thrown hastily over a bare chest. Sleepy, I noticed, had almost as defined a six-pack as Jesse.

How is it that I’d nearly been smothered to death, and yet I could sit there and notice things like my stepbrother’s abdominal muscles a few minutes later?

‘Yeah,’ I said, pushing some hair out of my eyes. ‘I’m fine. A little banged up, maybe. But nothing broken.’

‘She should probably go to the hospital and get checked out.’ David’s voice was still pretty wobbly. ‘Don’t you think she should go to the hospital and get checked out, Jake?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No hospitals.’

‘You could have a concussion,’ David said. ‘Or a fractured skull. You might slip into a coma in your sleep and never wake up. You should at least get an X-ray. Or an MRI, maybe. A CAT scan wouldn’t hurt, either—’

‘No.’ I brushed my hands off on my leggings and stood up. My body felt pretty creaky, but whole. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here before somebody comes. They were bound to have heard all that.’ I nodded towards the part of the building where the priests and nuns lived. Lights had come on in some of the windows. ‘I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.’

‘Yeah,’ Sleepy said, getting up. ‘Well, you might have thought of that before you snuck out, huh?’

We left the way we’d come in. Like me, David had wriggled in beneath the front gate, then unlocked it from the inside and let Sleepy in. We slipped out as quietly as we could, and hurried to the Rambler, which Sleepy had parked in some shadows, out of sight of the police car. The black and white was still sitting there, its occupant perfectly oblivious to what had gone on just a few dozen yards away. Still, I didn’t want to risk anything by trying to sneak past him, and retrieve my bike. We just left it there, and hoped no one would notice it.

The whole way home, my new big brother Jake lectured me. Apparently, he thought I’d been at the school in the middle of the night as part of some sort of gang initiation. I kid you not. He was really very indignant about the whole thing. He wanted to know what kind of friends I thought these people were, leaving me to die under a pile of roofing tiles. He suggested that if I were bored or in need of a thrill, I should take up surfing because, and I quote, ‘If you’re gonna have your head split open, it might as well be while you’re riding a wave, dude.’

I took his lecture as gracefully as I could. After all, I couldn’t very well tell him the real reason I’d been down at the school after hours. I only interrupted Jake once during his little anti-gang speech, and that was to ask him just how he and David had known to come after me.