Mum said I didn’t have to go back to school until I was good and ready and that her boss Dennis could go fly a kite if he had anything to say about her taking more time off to look after me. But I’ll tell you something. I knew that I probably wasn’t ever going to be good and ready. Not in another week or another month or even if I stayed at home for the next couple of years and then skipped straight into Year 9. So I just went.

Mum bought me a new backpack that had aliens stole my homework written all over it, because she said she thought it might make me smile. And then she walked me all the way to the bus stop, which she hasn’t done since I was ten, and went, Norman, if it all gets too much you just get them to call me and I’ll be there in a jiffy. And I said I will Mum and then because she looked so sad I said, and you can do the same and get them to call me if Dennis gets all too much. Which made her laugh, but I actually meant it.

When I got off the bus at school, straightaway I thought, well, this backpack probably isn’t going to last too long because here comes Archie Lowry and that’s the first thing I have to worry about. But instead of saying, oi, scabby, what’s occurring and give me a look at that dumb bag you’ve got, Archie just goes, hello, Norman, everybody’s really glad you’re back. Which made me think that maybe the Head did a special assembly for Jax and I should have been there, and also how weird is it that your best friend has to die before some people decide to be nice to you.

There’s a lot of things you have to think about when you don’t have a best friend anymore. Like where you’re going to sit for lunch and who you’re going to talk to about last night’s Live at the Apollo, and what you’re going to say when people ask you if you’re okay. And how you’re going to finish your pairs biology project when the other half of your pair is gone.

Jax reckons doing a project on the human body was going to be the easiest thing ever, because we were already experts without even trying and how cool was that. We started a big red notebook and put all the weird stuff we found out from the internet in, like how it’s impossible to tickle yourself and how humans can’t breathe and swallow at the same time. And how every single person in the world loses about a million skin cells every day so around 80 percent of the dust in your house is actually made up of all that fallen off human skin.

When Mrs. Ferris gave us some quiet time to work on our projects I didn’t open that red notebook for ages, because even though Archie and his mates were still being nice I didn’t want to push my luck by crying in front of the whole class. When I did finally open it up the first thing I saw was the page where Jax had written The Amazing Human Body Parts of Norman and Jax. And then underneath our names he’d put bees knees and dogs bollocks in brackets, and drawn a picture of a bee with knobbly knees and a dog with really big you-know-whats. As soon as I saw those pictures it straightaway made me think about Jax and how much me and him cracked up when he drew them. And I miss him. And that’s when I realized that doing a project on the human body wasn’t going to be the easiest thing ever at all. It was pretty much going to be the exact opposite of that.