Even after Mr. Tilley ruined the joke of the Helluvan Age, my mum kept carrying it on, just for fun. And I went along with it because I’ve noticed that she sometimes gets a bit sad over weird things that don’t even matter. Like when she burns the dinner or forgets to do the washing or she’s the only parent that forgot to go to the parent-teacher meeting.

When my twelfth birthday came along, which was two weeks and one day after Jax died, Mum woke me up with two bits of melted cheese on toast with candles stuck in them and a huge card made out of an inside-out cereal box with a drawing of a dog saying Happy Barkday, Norman. Because that’s the Foreman birthday rule. Homemade cards and jokes only. When she asked me how it felt to be twelve, even though it was two weeks and one day after Jax died and what I really wanted to say was that more than anything I wished I could make time go backward to when I was eleven and eleven months so I could change everything, that the last part of my own body had dirty-double-crossed me again for my birthday and my psoriasis had spread down to my willy, that being twelve and having to go back to school without Jax felt like the scariest, loneliest age I’ve ever been so far, I didn’t. I just blew out the candles, picked the pink and blue wax off my cheesy toast, stuffed a whole piece into my mouth in one go and said, I reckon twelve is going to be a helluvan age, Mum.

She hugged me really hard and looked so happy I felt guilty that I’d ever wanted to drop that dumb joke and that I was nearly being sick at the thought of having to swallow that big old mouthful of cheese on toast. And by the way, no matter how much you put in your mouth at one time, the actual amount you have to swallow in the end doesn’t get any smaller. That’s just physics. Also, me and Jax have tested it out.

All I could think about while Mum was hugging me and the toast got to halfway down my throat and stopped there in a globby lump was the weekend that Jax and I ate cheese on toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner for two days, even though I knew it was probably going to make my psoriasis worse. And how we didn’t even get sick of it after twelve pieces each, plus a couple of crusts that didn’t count. And how that was never going to happen again. I mean, I suppose the cheese-on-toastathon could, if I want to risk it, but not the Jax part.

So anyway, it looks like that joke’s still going to be with me for a helluva long time. Jax reckoned I was probably going to get a note from the queen or Charles and Camilla or whoever telling me to have a Helluva Fun Time on my hundredth. That’s if I make it that far. And Jax dying like that, two weeks and a day before my birthday, all on his own on the floor of his bedroom with a brand-new inhaler downstairs in his backpack and his mum and stepdad snoring away just through the wall goes to show that, really and truly, one never knows.