By the looks of it, Roy is still playing the same game with the guns and the apocalyptic landscape. I could try to get his number from my Auntie Holly – see if he’d mind playing something else for an hour a day …

But Rowan is online. His thumbnail shows a wide expanse of blue and – somewhere – a ball, waiting for me to hit.

I trace my mouse over the letters in his name.

‘Sorry,’ I whisper to Hana and Roy.

Connecting to Rowan …

19

Rowan

And now I am strapped to Rowan’s chest as he sits on a beach, gazing out at a wide sky tumbling with bruised clouds. The sea looks angry, rolling grey and spitting froth. I can hear it roaring over the pebbles like a patient with a sore throat.

The weather is completely,

royally

shit.

‘Beautiful.’

She’s online.

‘How are you getting “beautiful”

from that?’

‘Well, look over there, at the horizon. There’s a gap that looks like the sea’s burning and all these clouds could perhaps just be smoke. And you can see it raining, even though it must be miles and miles away. It’s like travelling in time or something, isn’t it?’

I look.

And I want to see that.

All of that.

‘All I see is rain coming this way,

to be honest.’

As he says it, thick drops fall from the sky, colliding with the beach like the whole world is caught in a dishwasher.

‘Aren’t you going to get inside?’

Sue’s shut the golf,

so the only ‘inside’ is school.

And I’ve already bunked off for the day.

‘You know –

you were better with the golf club yesterday.

Why don’t you take a swing again?’

I can see the knees of his jeans getting darker and darker as the water hits him. And I want to tell him to stop being silly and get out of the rain before he catches his death.

But …

‘Go on,

tell me what we should do. It’s raining

and fucking freezing, to be honest.

Where we going?’

And –

It’s as if I’m there with him on the beach as the rain gets harder and harder. It’s like fingers thrumming to a rock band on my head. And I can feel the cold leaking into my bones and –

‘Run!’ I shout. ‘To the pier!’

The water’s in my eyes.

I slide down the pebbles as I try to get up.

I’m about as graceful as a newborn giraffe –

but I’m running.

And he – I – we – run. Ducking, like the rain might not reach us. Water slaps down our hair and slides under our feet. It dances on our tongues like loose change.

We’re panting by the time we reach the umbrella of the pier and we shake ourselves like dogs.

I’m so unfit.

‘Can you still see?’