She didn’t say anything straightaway, but I knew she would be thinking it was all her fault.

Because Mum’s like that. Even when something could no way be her fault, like Tony not being my dad, she sometimes blames herself. Which Jax says is called Mother’s Guilt, and he knows a lot of stuff like that because he reads a lot. Well, he did.

Anyhow, he read about Mother’s Guilt in one of his mum’s magazines when he was home sick from school for a week after a really bad asthma attack last year. He was so bored he said he was going to read every single thing in the house and then put it all together to write a comedy skit. He did it too, because he always does what he says. And even though She Prefers Hobnobs to Husbands, which came from reading all the newspapers, flyers, letters, biscuit packets and magazines in the house maybe wasn’t really suitable for an actual audience, boy was it funny to us.

So anyhow, that’s kind of the reason I started laughing. Because when the lady from the talent show left after giving me my certificate, Leonard said, hell’s bells, I wonder if she gave her husband an encouragement certificate, too. Everyone cracked up, because it was actually pretty funny, but I cracked up because for some weird reason it reminded me of Jax and She Prefers Hobnobs to Husbands.

Also, I think that maybe you have a certain amount of laughing that you’re supposed to use up every day or every month or something. And maybe the laughs just store up when you’re sad and you get to have them all at once when you stop being sad for the first time. Because once I started laughing after what Leonard said it was pretty hard to stop.

Even though I was totally thinking about Jax, I didn’t feel sad like I usually did when I thought about him. Which was always. And because I didn’t feel sad I closed my eyes and imagined that he was sitting right there squished into the booth next to me laughing, too. Louder than everyone else put together, because that’s how it would be. And I know it sounds weird, but I could actually feel him there, because when you sit next to Jax you can feel something coming off him, maybe sort of like electricity. Honest. I swear I heard him buzzing once.

This one time when we were first friends I touched his arm and we both got zapped. We just cracked up when it happened, because it was like when something is bad but it’s good at the same time. After that he always used to rub his feet on the carpet when he was coming up behind me and try to zap me when I wasn’t expecting it. He got me lots, but I never minded because it was always that bad but good feeling.

When I opened my eyes in the café everyone was still talking and laughing like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t just tried to imagine my dead best friend back to life. But I really, really had, because I’ll tell you something else, too. I’d already seen him that day.