She takes it from me delicately, like it might melt. Her eyes are watery after I hand it over. I want to tell her she’s got blue liquid running on to her cheeks. Have they finally worked it all out? Am I going home?

15th September

Nothing’s happening. Miss Jukes is avoiding me.

Waiting’s worse than before she said anything. I hate this bed. And this desk. And this window, this grey sky. It should rain and pour and thunder. This is boring, tragic, gross nothingness.

Other agencies have been investigating your case.

So why don’t they come? And who are they? What if they’re not coming?

There’s a buzzing in the air, like a low hum all the time that’s making me even more twitchy, like my skin is full of ants.

There’s been a strange sign today: ice. A good sign. Underneath one of the classrooms on stilts, all over some leaves. (There are always leaves under there, and woodlice live in them.) Almost didn’t notice at first – the ice was so thin and delicate. Hardly there. It might shatter if you even breathed too close. I picked up a leaf and skated my finger along, and my heart raced when I saw how insanely thin it was, like the cleverest layer of the smoothest, coldest glass.

The weather’s warm, so this can only mean one thing, but I hardly dare hope.

16th September

I’m shaking writing this. Whizzy is DEFINITELY HERE. In Maths just now, the plug on Mr Horvat’s computer started smelling really hot and scorched so he switched it off and burned his finger. But the page projected on to the wall didn’t switch off straight away. Instead, numbers and equations slowly dribbled on to the floor.

Then everything metal in the room heated up – door handles, chair legs, pencil tops, the staples holding our worksheets together, those metal rods that hold the floor covering in place – and Olly and Matt started using some of the hot stuff as weapons.

Mr Horvat yelled, ‘How are you doing this?’ at Olly. ‘I know it’s you.’

Olly swore it wasn’t, but Mr Horvat hauled him off to the quiet room anyway, and while he was gone, this mad humming started up in the walls. It was much louder than the other day – a proper electrical buzz, like the noise a fridge makes magnified by twenty.

Lenny and I looked at each other.

‘It’s your Whizzy, isn’t it?’ he whispered. He looked monumentally excited.

I had to frown my eyebrows like mad to get him to calm down without anyone noticing.

‘Get me an intro to her!’ he hissed.

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I can’t control her.’

‘Ah, please? This whole thing is so cool!’

But it wasn’t as simple as that.