He looks at me and smiles. ‘That’s all right.’

I’m not sure what to say next, so to cover my embarrassment I pick up a chicken, but she just flies out of my hand with a burst of clucking. ‘Can you do your speech another time?’

‘Nope,’ he says. ‘I met Ms Edgecombe outside the hall and she made it very clear that it was now or never.’ He laughs. ‘I don’t think my mum’s going to be too happy.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘What a disaster. Will you still be able to go?’

‘Go where?’ he says, like he’s forgotten why we were even entering the competition.

‘To Houston on the NASA trip. Your mum and dad could pay for you, couldn’t they?’

He laughs. ‘Meg, do you know how much the trip costs?’

‘But I thought …’ I trail off. What did I think? That Ed’s family had so much money he was doing the competition for fun, or just to try to beat me?

‘When I told Mum about the trip, she said if I wanted to go, I’d better win the competition.’

‘So you just gave up your chance of going to Houston …’

‘… For you.’ He looks right at me as he says this.

‘But, Ed, I might not win!’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t care. You deserved the chance more than I did. I’ve watched you working towards this for years, plus I’ve seen your bedroom.’

‘Oh … that.’ We both fall quiet and look across Grandad’s messy garden. ‘It is pretty spacey,’ I say, and we laugh.

‘Oh, there was one other reason why I did it.’

Something about the way Ed says this makes me look down at the ground. Our hands are close together. ‘Yeah?’

‘I did it because I like you.’

And I know he means like like, because as he says this, he takes my hand in his, and there is no way this is an accidental touching of fingers. This is a total hold: palm to palm, fingers wrapped around fingers, and it feels like all the billions of atoms in our hands are bonding and joining. I look up at Ed. ‘I like you too,’ I say.

‘You do?’ He sounds slightly amazed.

‘Yes … I do.’

Then he says in a rush, ‘Good, because I want to ask you out next Saturday.’

Down at my feet, a chicken scratches at the soil and a warm breeze blows my hair. ‘The night of the dance?’

He nods. ‘I know you said you’d never go out with me, even if every other person on the planet had been fried by a meteor –’

‘Asteroid,’ I correct him, then I carry on nervously, ‘a meteor is a much smaller rocky particle that vaporises when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere –’

‘Right,’ he squeezes my hand, ‘so I know you said you would never go out with me even if every other person had been fried by an asteroid, but have your feelings changed, Meg?’