You know what it’s like when you try not to look at something so hard that it just makes you want to look at it more? Well, the Five-Year Plan kept on trying to make me to look at it for the whole week after Jax died. But I held out because if I didn’t look that meant I wouldn’t have to think about taking it down. And if I took it down, Jax would be gone and not just for five years. Forever. Only then I did look at it because it got sneaky when my alarm went off on the morning I had to go back to school and I forgot I wasn’t looking over at that side of the room anymore. I hit the snooze button, but then my eyes just opened by themselves and straightaway there I was staring at Jax and me and Grandad and all those other guys.

I lay there looking at the poster all lopsided out of one eye for ages and ages, thinking about how now me and Jaxy were never going to get to Edinburgh and how all those jokes we had on Post-it notes would just stay in the shoebox in the second to bottom drawer in my wardrobe.

I stared at the Five-Year Plan for so long Grandad started turning into Dean Martin, words started swimming around and one of the Jaxes with a porkpie hat on started doing a dance off the cardboard and onto the wall. Then the Jax head got bigger and bigger until it was like a massive lollipop on a stick body and he started jumping up and down in a huge inflatable pool of blue plastic balls and waving a sign around with his stick arms.

I yelled out to him, stand still, Jax, and he did. Which was really weird because Jax never ever stands still and especially not if someone tells him to. But he stood still so I could read the sign and it said One Never Knows in big red writing. And then I saw that the pool wasn’t really filled with blue balls, it was actually full of about a billion asthma inhalers. Then the Jax head jumped back onto the poster and started crossing stuff out and writing new stuff and in between he kept turning around and laughing and winking at me. Maybe that’s how it happened and maybe it isn’t, and maybe I dreamed it and maybe I didn’t. But the next thing I knew the nine minutes of snooze time were over and the alarm went off again and I had to get up for school.

After that I went back to not looking at the poster on the wall, because then I would have had to read what Jax had written about going to the Fringe without him and finding my dad and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to think about that. Like I didn’t want to think about getting up and going back to school on my own without Jax. Like I didn’t want to think about what I was going to do every day for the rest of my life until the end of school and then even further. Like I didn’t want to think about how twelve was probably going to be a Helluva Year for all the wrong reasons.