I wander back to bed and stretch my toes, pushing my hands under my pillows as far as they’ll go, like an athlete limbering up. Then something catches my knuckle – something spiky and flat.

I pick it out. It’s a pink sequin star. For a moment, I’m so trapped in my own good mood that I pass it off as another of Dad’s games. That perhaps he’s found a way to bring a whole night sky into my bedroom. But then I remember. And it feels like sinking in a thick green pond.

Cecelia.

She was wearing a crown of these the night everything went wrong. I remember her throwing it from her head where it exploded against my wall, raining a whole sky of regret on to me.

I can feel the edges of the star now like they’re caught between my ribs, next to the jagged piece of camera lens I carry for Wes–

I don’t want to forget her like I forget him, though. I don’t want to push her down and ignore her and pretend she didn’t happen. I want to cling to the hope that she’ll come charging back through my bedroom door with a whole new colour in her braids, calling everything ancient history.

But the more I cling to this star, the more the edges push into my skin.

Mum kicks open the bedroom door and I jolt back to life.

‘You okay, sweetheart?’ she says as she tops up my med box with the day’s pills.

I push the star back under my pillow, as far as it’ll go, and smile at her. ‘Yes, I’m fine. What was so funny downstairs?’

Mum’s too busy laughing again to see the folds at the corners of my smile. She tells me a story about Dad putting ketchup on his porridge instead of jam and I laugh along with her in all the right places.

I only have three hours until I’m back with Rowan again. And in that time, I say goodbye to Mum and Dad as they head off to work, and watch the flowers on my window sill bloom over the noise of people getting up and going to school and work and Living their whole wide lives.

Meanwhile, I watch my old documentaries – trying to pretend I’m living in a blue-green world with microscopic shrimps next door to ancient turtles. And I see some of the fish that swam above me when I last saw Rowan, living out in the wild and going wherever they want to go.

Then, when waiting feels like algae bubbles glugging up my windpipe, I open my laptop.

Connecting to Rowan …

46

Rowan

And now I am back behind a long, paint-splattered desk, looking out on a classroom of people talking loudly, throwing bits of clay and ripping up paper.