I shivered as I walked past the courtyard, which had to be one of architecture’s most remarkable blunders; it was rumoured that Pleasant Hills High accidentally got the plans for a school in Los Angeles, so the windows were flimsy and thin, capable of keeping nothing out and nothing in, and the place was perpetually cold and damp. It had been built in the early twentieth century, apparently, and you could tell. Its hallways were cramped, despite Pleasant Hills not being very populated, and its layout was counter-intuitive, a labyrinth of dead ends and dimly lit corridors with chipped layers of decades-old paint and anything broken mended with duct tape. I’d felt a weird camaraderie with the building in the past – if the walls could talk, and all that – but now, it felt like it was out to get me.

Stares kept coming. But if I couldn’t see them, they maybe weren’t there, so I walked with my head down until the tiles beneath me were no longer tiles, but trampled grass and mulch and branches.

I’m hiking with Dad. At the River Styx.

It’s summer. I can’t see him, but I know he’s close, because I feel incomparably safe. A swampy gust of air rushes from ahead – it’s either just rained, or it’s about to – and I breathe the tendrils in through my nose and out through my mouth. Something above us chirps. Dad calls from behind me. ‘I used to be as quick as you, you know.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I ask. ‘What happened?’

‘I learned to slow down. Start taking it all in. It’s called mindfulness.’

‘How close is mindfulness to arthritis?’ And when I turn to smile at him, there’s a crunch beneath me. Maybe it’s a twig snapping, or a beetle’s back breaking, but once I feel the pop …

I looked up, and I found out Dad was never there at all.

It took until the moment I reached my locker to discover that I had forgotten my combination. I heard the universe laugh. One tragedy doesn’t disqualify you, it said. There’s still a lifetime of mild irritation to look forward to.

I entered every sequence of numbers that felt at all familiar to me. Two or twelve? Definitely twelve. Or twenty-one? My hands shook. Lockers were being shut, and each slam sent another jolt through my system. And then it was quiet, but I was still there, sweating on to the lock until the first-period bell rang. I gave the metal a solid kick to its jaw.

I could go home, I thought. What difference would it make? I had a tragic backstory and everything, so I practically had an excuse to drop out and become a hermit, if I wanted. What kind of monster would tell the girl with a dead dad no?