He reacted without thinking. He pushed Jeremy off him with as much force as he could muster, turned away and fixed himself. He couldn’t bear it. It was all too sudden and too much. ‘No. We can’t do this,’ he said, keeping his back to Jeremy, and Jeremy didn’t argue, he didn’t say a word, so he must have felt the same. ‘I’m sorry,’ Rave said, when he’d gathered himself together. I’ll make it up to you. It was just such a shock. He turned back to see his friend against the wall, half leaning and half hanging.

‘Jeremy?’

Something was off and he couldn’t work out why so he moved closer. Jeremy’s eyes were wide open, his mouth agape and on closer inspection he saw blood pouring down his neck and shoulders.

‘Jeremy?’

Jeremy’s stare was fixed. He didn’t move a muscle. He was there in the room but as soon as Rave looked into his friend’s eyes he knew he was gone.

The nail was long and thick and must have been inside his skull, deep in his brain, because even the weight of his body didn’t bring him to the floor. He was like one of those animal heads stuck to the wall.

‘Jeremy!’ Rave shouted. ‘Jeremy!’ He shook him but he didn’t respond. He remained perfectly still, lost in his first real kiss, frozen there.

‘Jeremy – I didn’t mean it, Jeremy. Please, I didn’t mean it. I’m begging you. Wake up,’ he said, over and over again, hopelessly and desperately, but Jeremy wasn’t asleep: no one sleeps with their eyes wide open. I need to get him down. I need to pull him off the nail. If I do that I can do CPR. I can bring him back. People come back all the time.

‘You have to trust me. I can save you, Jeremy.’

He grabbed his friend’s head and pulled as hard as he could, so hard that Jeremy came off the nail with such force that Rave ended up on the floor with Jeremy on top of him. He scrambled to get up. He covered the streaming hole in Jeremy’s head with his hand.

‘Oh, no, no … Oh, God, Jeremy.’

He turned him over and started pounding on his chest.

‘Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy. It’s OK. It’s OK. I’ve got you. Just breathe, in and out, in and out. Come on, man, you and me, we know how hard it is to just breathe but we do it. We do it all the time.’ He couldn’t see through his tears. His nose was streaming and he kept wiping his face with his bloody hand so that he was masked in Jeremy’s blood. When he realized there was nothing he could do, he groaned, like a wounded animal.