“Yeah. I’ve liked you since Year 9. And here we are, at Leavers’ Prom. Talk about eleventh hour.”

“I like you too,” I tell him.

He nods and pulls me towards him. “Good,” he murmurs, into my neck. “Because I did think you might be with Molly for a bit.”

“And I thought you might be with Femi.”

We both laugh. “Wanna go back to the prom?” he asks.

“Together?”

He nods. “Let’s be like Kippie and Jingles. Just do our thing.”

I smile the biggest, no-holds-barred smile that I’ve smiled in a long time.

And then we kiss.

My first proper kiss. A kiss I feel like I’ve waited for, for so long.

And that he has too.

A kiss in the gorgeous, warm summer sunset.

A kiss to the perfect soundtrack…

Of Kippie and Jingles singing to one another.

Just two penguins.

In love.

I always thought it would be cool to be on the lam. I pictured myself in a convertible, soaring down American highways that stretched out forever, the open road for miles, hair trailing in the breeze, all that kind of thing. I’d imagined days of travelling and looking over our shoulders, nights spent checking into ever-changing motels with anonymous names. Bonnie-and-Clyde or Thelma-and-Louise style.

It’s a disappointment, then, that now I really have found myself On the Run, it’s in a Travelodge just outside of Leicester.

It’s not a bad Travelodge, I suppose. It just isn’t an American motel with a flickering neon sign, and we had to use our real names because we’re paying by debit card.

What it does have is a hearteningly grim breakfast room. It’s comforting in the sense that it’s exactly as it should be: standard-issue, plain walls, daily identical breakfast buffet, silent TV screen up on one of the walls. It smells of cheap coffee and if you squint out of the window you can just about see a green grassy field beyond the car park.

You aren’t really supposed to stay here much longer than a couple of nights. But then again, Dean and I have never done what you’re supposed to do.

It’s morning right now, and it’s quiet. There are only four of us in the breakfast room: me, a man in sportswear shovelling down his cornflakes, and two people in suits talking about the weather. There’s very little weather at all today so I’m impressed at how long they’ve kept it up. Sometimes a member of the hotel staff comes in and restocks the fruit or wipes a table down too.

Each morning while I eat, I go through the Things That Are Certain. There are so few of them now that I reckon I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

Certainty number one: I am in a hotel.

Certainty number two: I am at least fifty miles away from Grace Tower.