I became obsessed with her hands. How they were kind of perpetually moving, twitching, the knuckles on her skinny fingers popping every time she remembered to crack them, which was often. I liked to watch them when she spoke, when she curled them round the occasional vanilla latte, when she ran them through her hair. I loved June’s hands. I loved June’s collarbone. I loved June’s hair. I loved her laugh and her nose and her purple varsity jacket. I loved June’s everything.

I was beginning to think I loved without there needing to be a common noun to follow.

I had sort of convinced myself that us going to the River Styx – her taking me to the River Styx – was indicative of our relationship having blossomed, and that maybe we’d do things like that more often. Truthfully, though, it just seemed like everything had sort of gone back to the way it was. Normal was fine, of course. Normal was more than I’d ever hoped for.

But I wanted more of her. I wanted all of her. And that was a problem.

Apart from that, for a time, I felt like I was actually getting better.

Not actually better. But a little. I’d settled into a comfortable sort of melancholy, watched the apocalypse reach its four-month anniversary, and then its fifth. I actually started to enjoy the support group sessions: Leo made them palatable at first, but the other kids weren’t bad either. The ToD drifted further and further down my recently visited pages until it disappeared completely. The messages, weirdly, seemed to have stopped. Maybe they’d realized that I talked to the police; maybe, if it was a bully, even they realized that they’d gone too far. Either way, I ended up sort of forgetting about it.

I don’t want to make it seem like everything was fixed. Because it absolutely wasn’t. When you tell a story, people tend to get bored of you repeating the same things over and over. And if I were to repeat myself, I’d tell you about all the nights where nothing helped. Where Mom and I didn’t speak. Where I thought maybe if I was dead, then I wouldn’t have to worry about dying any more. Where I went back to the ToD. Where I missed Dad more than I could even say.

My life fragmented into fortnightly support group sessions and ten-minute intervals. Like if you zoomed out on my life, there’d just be these occasional snippets of joy, split up by vast emptiness, and nothing could bring them together. Like I wasn’t really living the rest of the time. The truth was, I wasn’t; I found it impossible to keep happy without stimulus.

But maybe that was just how lives were. Wading through all the shit to get to the good stuff.