“I... Well, they’re just so relieved I’m mostly back at school,” I started. The moment I’d said it, I was frantically trying to think of a different story instead. I turned over in bed and looked down at my Jessica glowworm on the air mattress. Her eyes were patient, kind.

“Back at school?”

“Yeah. I, umm, I stopped going to school, for a while last year.”

“How come?”

“I... Well, I bet everyone at school’s already told you.”

“I don’t want to hear about this from them. I want to hear about it from you.”

That was the moment I fully trusted her. When she quietly confirmed my worst fears that, yes, people at school still whispered about me. She didn’t deny something painful to placate me, but she also didn’t revel in telling, to get off on the drama of being the one who got to tell. It was so...not secondary school, and I loved her for it.

“So, I’ve always been a bit...dark, I guess? Like, in my head a lot,” I started, sitting up against my headboard and huddling my knees up to my chest. “I just have all these awful whirring thoughts and then they get too much, and, I suddenly go from feeling everything, to feeling nothing at all. If that makes sense? I sort of...numb out. Sometimes for just a minute or two, sometimes hours, sometimes...well...weeks.”

She pushed herself up in the sleeping bag, but I couldn’t look at her face. “Last year, I disconnected for a really long time. Like I’d stumbled through this door into another realm, where everything was dialed down to a whisper, and I couldn’t find the exit anywhere. I couldn’t feel anything for ages, apart from this kind of dull, melancholic ache, this certainty that everything was pointless. That I was worthless. Unlovable... I’d keep making myself sleep, hoping, when I woke up, I’d be back in the real world again, but every time I woke up, I was still stuck. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to care about. Nothing to live for...”

“That sounds really scary.”

I nodded and coughed, as the agony of the memory raged up my throat. “It was really scary. And nobody seemed to understand it. My mum kept telling me to stop being selfish, like I was doing it deliberately to stress her out, and then she’d argue with Dad when he defended me, so I stopped trying to explain it, and I was really pissing Amy off, as I was so shit to hang out with, and I wasn’t doing my homework, and getting really bad marks, and I didn’t even care really, I was just passing the time until I was allowed to go to sleep again. And then...then...”