This morning, I feel almost weightless.

Mum pushes my window open and the sounds of kids getting dropped off at school swim over my head. Usually the laughing and the footsteps hammering on the pavement outside is a ray with a sting. But today a group of girls chattering are brightly coloured angelfish. A woman shouting at someone to slow down is a turtle with long, sweeping feet. And the sound of my own mum, humming to herself, is like a strawberry anemone unfurling from the sides of my tank.

He doesn’t look anything like I thought he would.

Whenever I think of boys, I picture them with short hair and dirt smeared over their cheeks. I suppose that’s what they looked like when I was last at school. They all had grass-stained knees and fingers up their noses and were generally unpleasant to be around.

But Rowan has long hair – chestnut brown – that was fanning out all around him on the floor, like he really was at the bottom of the sea. He looked clean, too, with a square jaw and eyes like dark stones. And I think about what he might look like next to me and my stomach flips like a fish out of water.

And it’s strange. Because, however much I wanted to take over his body and become him in that moment, seeing his face has made me want something else even more. I want to be with him. Beside him. Holding his hand and looking at the same world together – as similar but impossibly different people.

I’m blushing as Mum bends down to pop headphones over my ears, and I hope she can’t reach down and see into the bottom of my thoughts. I don’t have the energy to smack her with a pillow again.

Faraway music starts playing through my headphones and I feel like I might be pinned to a violin. I watch her turn on the vacuum cleaner and push it round the carpet, only hearing a light buzz.

I stretch my eyes to the window, where I can see the school in the shadow of the bell tower. But somewhere down there, among the parents and the children, is Rowan – dropping his little brother off at school and thinking about heading to his own class.

And even though I don’t have the spoons to join him today, he feels close enough now that I might reach out and touch him.

45

Alice

I’m back to a full twelve spoons and, although that means I can just about stumble to the bathroom, I feel like dancing.

Mum and Dad seem different, too. Their foreheads are less creased and I can hear them downstairs, laughing. And even though I have no idea what could be so funny, I smile at myself in the mirror and look almost back to pre-Illness Alice – just for one snapshot.