Her hands wrapped round my biceps and squeezed as we did, and I felt all of her; her hair on my face and her nose smushed against mine and the softness of her lips and everything, everything, and I wanted to melt into her, and I wanted to live tucked in her eyelids. One kiss, then her mouth contorted and there was another, and another, and she smelled like sweat and the hospital and it was wonderful, and I’d never kissed someone like this, it went on forever, and for a millisecond and a Big Bang and an entropy and it was so much more than I ever could have wanted even though it was nothing like I had imagined.

She stirred against me in a way that felt encouraging so I continued, exploring everything previously untouchable. At one point I accidentally brushed against her cast and she unlocked from me for a moment, said, laughing, ‘Oh God, that’s probably the least sexy thing ever,’ but it wasn’t really, not even close, and I pulled her to me again.

We were here now. A billion years had led to this and there’d be a billion years to come but right now we were here, and with my lips on hers I was trying to tell her thank you, thank you, thank you, in the smallest way, in this small moment, and I think maybe she was doing the same thing. For both of us, this was our first act of freedom.

When we finally pulled apart, her eyes crinkled at the corners and she threw herself back on to the bed; I followed, engulfed by a pain that was no longer pain but pure intensity of feeling. ‘I feel so light,’ she breathed into my ear.

‘Me too.’

I got the inexplicable sense of being underwater, or in space – of a weightlessness which required you to hold your breath.

And there we were, the two of us, clutching my duvet while the world spun underneath us, and we were there for no reason, no reason at all; the same random events that had killed Dad had jolted us awake, and brought us here. I thought back to the first week after he died, thinking then that there was no feeling quite so strong as misery, but here, there was something greater, greater than ecstasy and misery and not on the scale. It wasn’t neutral, not nothing, not a compromise between the two: it was separate and hollering and lovely.

Peace, peace, peace.

‘Whitaker,’ she said, ‘how did we get here?’

I did not have an answer for her besides my hands in her hair and the moonlight on her face.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

A month later, I barrelled through the front doors of Pleasant Hills High with a scar on my cheek, a skip in my step and a USB stick clutched firmly in my left fist.

Leo and I had a plan.