It was a Twitter notification. Heart pounding, he tapped, and it took him straight to his mentions. The tweet now had 697 likes, and his notifications were chaos; it was hard to keep up with all the names of people tapping the heart button. The little red notification bubble at the bottom of the screen couldn’t keep up either. He noticed his hands were shaking a little. Before he did anything else, he pulled up the Notes app, copied the tweet about Ellen, and hit send in a rush of conviction. She probably wouldn’t ever see it. Ellen didn’t follow Jack on Twitter, though he followed her. Her profile picture was one of her holding two spoons over her eyeballs and gurning, and she posted lots of polls about which takeaway she should get to ‘satisfy her hangover’.

Quickly, Jack scanned the notifications, with one eye half trained on the WiFi, expecting it to vanish at any second. People did think he was funny! Lots of them had said so.

@namesbond

Hah mate this is classic

@long_tall_sally

Omg!!!! Too funny @BBCRadio1 have you seen this???

@fun_phil01

looooooooool mate bet she won’t like you putting this up

He screenshotted the responses, so that he could look at them when the connection dropped off. He kept scrolling. As he did so, a WhatsApp from his mum came through. He tapped it unthinkingly, and his phone left Twitter, but when it tried to land on WhatsApp he just got a spinning wheel at the top of the screen and he couldn’t see his mum’s latest message. He must have lost the connection again. He tried to return to Twitter, but when he’d refreshed, the app didn’t load anything properly. He breathed a sigh of frustration. He waved his phone around again a few times, but nothing happened. He felt furious with his mum for texting, and then guilty that he felt so cross. He pocketed his phone again and turned round to face the others.

They had definitely been watching him.

‘Are you sure you’re OK, Jack?’ Ellen sounded like she was talking to a small child.

He felt a little annoyed. ‘Yes,’ he said shortly. ‘I’m fine.’

‘OK.’ She raised her hands in surrender. ‘As you were.’

He had been about to go back over to sit with the others, but now felt like he couldn’t, because he’d been snappy with Ellen. Instead, he turned back round and looked out of the window. He took his phone out again. It had 33 per cent battery. He put it back in his pocket and decided to try and go for ten minutes without checking it. In the background, he heard the others talking about the locksmith and trying to predict how long it would take for them to arrive.