And the bullets hit him and hit him and the screen splashes red and the health bar drains to nothing and Roy is shouting in a way I’ve never heard him shout before and –

You have disconnected from this stream.

5

Alice

I throw the laptop down and grip the sides of my bed and, of course, Mum sees.

She hurries forward. I try to smile as if nothing’s wrong, but my breathing’s giving me away. She pinches each of my wrists between her forefinger and thumb.

‘Nice steady breaths,’ she says.

I close my eyes. Take myself away to another place for a moment, where I’m suspended in a whole ocean of multicoloured life.

I am safe. I am happy. I am alive.

I think it until I start feeling that it’s true. The bad thoughts tie themselves into nice little bows and I fold them neatly in a drawer at the very back of my mind.

I open my eyes and smile at Mum as she searches my face for any wisps the thoughts left behind.

‘Perhaps you should give Stream Cast a rest. Just for a while.’

I grab her hands. ‘No! I’m fine, honestly. I was just being silly.’

Mum sighs. ‘You can talk to me, you know. About Wesley. About anything.’

‘I know.’ I smile and try to shake Wesley’s name away before it sticks. ‘And I was going to talk to you, actually. About maybe getting me a new streamer. Someone who doesn’t play shooting games, or fights, or walks round a busy city. Someone who just does normal, everyday things that I might do.’

Mum slides her hands away and picks up the blanket that slipped off the bed when I was trying to get away from the bullets. ‘I’ll think about it. But, Alice – think about what I said, too. I’m here if you want to talk.’

She puts the blanket back on my bed and irons out all the crinkles with her arm, and it feels as if she’s doing the same to my brain – smoothing out all the thoughts of cars crashing into bikes, and soldiers being gunned down.

I nod and hope she can’t tell how fast my heart is beating. Because – as much as I know that she’d do anything for me – I can’t keep asking her to hold everything. Like how my chest is hurting today, or that the pain in my knees is back. I can see all that worry weighing her down and drawing lines on her face that shouldn’t be there yet.

So I distract myself by focusing on all the wonderful things there are in the world, like how I’m back to twelve spoons today. And that means that when she leaves, and my phone starts to buzz like a bee trapped inside a window, I can lift myself slowly out and round my bed to answer it.