I peel an eye open and I recognize the tall green gates of the school from when I sat on the bench with Rowan. And Dad drives round and round, trying to find a space, until he looks at me and decides to just pull over on a double yellow line close to the fire engines still parked outside the school.

He turns off the engine and Mum takes off my headphones.

‘Are you okay?’ She sounds shaken, so I steady myself for her.

‘I’m fine. Let’s just get out.’

They spill round the outside of the car and, for a split second, I’m alone. And I use it to take a deep breath.

I can feel the Illness racing through spoons, but it hasn’t taken all of me yet. And – impossibly – I’m outside, sitting in a car in front of the school. I’m not strapped to the chest of someone else. I’m not pretending their life is my own.

I am Living. With a capital L. And I’m choosing Rowan.

My door opens and I’m carefully manoeuvred out. My arm gets stuck in the seat belt and I’m running my own race now to stand up – blinking off the darkness that’s patching in, and breathing in air I know is there, but that I can’t. Quite. Catch.

I feel cold whispers on my toes and sandals digging into my feet in strange places. I can hear the cries of seagulls carried on the same breeze that I am, and I wonder if – just like them – I could jump on its back and fly.

Dad looks round and winces. ‘There’s no way we can get there in the car. We’re going to have to walk.’

Mum starts laughing, but in a way that doesn’t really sound like she finds anything funny at all. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

My insides swoop with gratitude for him and I clutch his arm harder. ‘There’s a path behind the school. It leads through a tunnel and then round into a playground. There’s a climbing frame …’

I know because I’ve walked it with Rowan.

I can see Mum shaking her head out of the corner of my eye, because I might as well have said that it’s all the way in China for all the spoons I have to walk there, when I can feel them dropping just standing here and being outside and having to argue.

I’m still here, though. I don’t know for how much longer, but I am.

‘We need to hurry,’ I gasp.