Samuel Johnson was having one of those moments. In fact, he’d been having them for quite some time, but had hoped that things might get better. After all, he’d had a crush on Lucy Highmore for so long that he couldn’t actually remember a time when he didn’t have a crush on her. Occasionally in life we will wish for something that may not be very good for us simply because we think it will make us feel better about ourselves, or make us seem more important in the eyes of the world. This is why people buy expensive cars that they don’t need, or wear gold watches bigger than their heads. It is also why people will often date someone simply because he or she is wealthy, or famous, or beautiful. In case you didn’t already know—and if you’re clever enough to be reading a book, and have managed to get this far without stumbling over any words longer than five letters, then you probably do know—let me explain a truth to you: it doesn’t work. You’re trying to fix a flaw in yourself by shoving the problem onto someone, or something, else. It’s like having a cut on your finger and bandaging your toe instead. It’s like feeling hungry, and hoping that you’ll feel less hungry by buying yourself a hat.

A wise man once said that you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Samuel wanted to meet that wise man and ask him why he hadn’t been there to advise Samuel when he’d started wishing that Lucy Highmore would go out with him. That was the trouble with wise men: they were never around when you needed them, and by the time you became a wise man yourself it was too late to use any of your wisdom on yourself, and nobody else wanted to listen to you.

Lucy Highmore didn’t particularly like Samuel’s friends. She didn’t like where he lived, and she didn’t like how he dressed. She didn’t like the sunlight because it damaged her skin, and she didn’t like the cold because, well, it made her feel cold. She didn’t like going out, and she didn’t like staying in. (When Samuel suggested that they could just stand at her front door with one foot inside and one foot outside, she had looked at him in a troubled way.) She didn’t like Samuel’s dog, Boswell, because he smelled funny. Boswell, who understood people better than people understood him, found this very unfair, as he wasn’t one of those dogs inclined to roll in stuff that smelled bad. He had yet to find a dead animal or a pile of deer poo that made him think, Wow, now why don’t I have a bit of a spin in that because I bet everyone will want to hug me after, and there’s no way they’ll make me take a bath that I don’t want. Furthermore, Lucy Highmore smelled funny to Boswell, too, but there wasn’t much that he could do about it. She smelled of peculiar perfumes with French names that sounded like Mwah-mwoh, or Zejung, names that were only impressive when spoken by an invisible man with a deep voice. She also smelled slightly of vegetables because that was all she seemed to eat. She could live for a week on a stick of celery and half a carrot, and there were camels that consumed more liquid.