Doc looked at the clock and made a tisk-tisking noise. ‘Late again. He’s going to get himself fired if he doesn’t watch it.’

Sleepy had a job? This was news to me, so I asked, ‘Where’s he work?’

‘Peninsula Pizza.’ Doc was performing some sort of bizarre experiment which involved the dog and my mother’s treadmill. The dog, who was huge – a cross between a St Bernard and a bear, I think – was sitting very patiently on the floor while Doc attached electrodes to small patches of the dog’s skin he’d shaved free of fur. The strangest thing was that nobody seemed to mind this, least of all the dog.

‘Slee– I mean, Jake works in a pizza place?’

Andy, scouring a baking dish in the sink, said, ‘He delivers for them. Brings home a bundle in tips.’

‘He’s saving up,’ Dopey informed me, a thick white milkshake moustache on his upper lip, ‘for a Camaro.’

‘Huh,’ I said.

‘You guys want me to drop you anywhere?’ Andy offered, generously. ‘I’d be happy to. Whaddaya say, Brad? Want to show Suze the action down at the mall?’

‘Nah,’ Dopey said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. ‘Everybody’s still up in Tahoe for the break. Next weekend, maybe.’

I nearly collapsed with relief. The word mall always filled me with a sort of horror, a horror that had nothing to do with the undead. They don’t have malls in New York City, but Gina used to love to take the PATH train to this one in New Jersey. Usually after about an hour, I’d develop sensory overload, and have to sit down in the This Can’t Be Yogurt and sip a herbal tea until I calmed down.

And I have to admit, I wasn’t that thrilled with the idea of anybody ‘dropping’ me somewhere. My God, what was wrong with this place? I could see how, given the San Andreas fault, subways might not be such a great idea, but why hadn’t anybody established a decent bus system?

‘I know,’ Dopey said, slamming his empty glass down. ‘I’ll play you a few games of Coolboarder, Suze.’

I blinked at him. ‘You’ll what?’

‘I’ll play you in Coolboarder.’ When my expression remained blank, Dopey said, ‘You never heard of Coolboarder? Come on.’

He led me towards the wide-screen TV in the den. Coolboarder, it turned out, was a video game. Each player got assigned a snowboarder, and then you raced each other down various slopes using a joystick to control how fast your boarder went and what kind of fancy moves she might make.

I beat Dopey at it eight times before he finally said, ‘Let’s watch a movie instead.’

Sensing that I had probably erred in some way – I guess I should have let the poor boy win at least once – I tried to make amends by volunteering to supply the popcorn, and went into the kitchen.

It was only then that a wave of tiredness hit me. There is a three-hour time difference between New York and California, so even though it was only nine o’clock, I was as tired as if it was midnight. Andy and my mom had retired to the massive master bedroom, but they had left the door to it wide open, I guess so that we wouldn’t get any wrong ideas about what they were doing in there. Andy was reading a spy novel, and my mother was watching a made-for-TV movie.