Vonny came in and asked how I was. I said, ‘Okay.’ She asked where Gemma was and I had to tell her that she wasn’t coming back. Then Jerry came in and asked what was going on. Then Richard. I just sat there and wished they’d go away.

Sometimes I feel like I’m some kind of organ plucked out of a living beast. Every little twitch shows up; it’s like having to confess all the time. I can make my face go ever so still if I want to but then I forget and it starts twitching away and everyone knows exactly what I’m feeling every second.

I just wanted to bury myself about a hundred million miles under the ground.

They dashed in and out and talked about it, watching me and nodding to each other. They started on about Lily and Rob.

‘Scum,’ said Jerry. That shocked me. They looked scummy but they weren’t really like that.

‘I wouldn’t like to find one of them in my shoe in the morning,’ said Vonny, which made me laugh.

I looked at Richard, because he’s the one I trust the most. He looked terribly upset but he didn’t say anything. They grouped around me and hugged me and tried to cheer me up but none of them made me feel as good as Lily had when she was calling me the Titanium Man.

‘I liked them,’ I said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Richard.

Vonny was furious with Gemma. She thought she was being really irresponsible. Jerry kept going on about me getting over her and maybe it was all for the best. Funny thing, all the time at the back of my mind I could see this tiny picture of my mum raging at me and my dad was standing behind her as big as a mountain with his face getting darker and darker and darker.

‘She just wants to fly,’ I said.

‘She has to walk before she can run, let alone fly,’ said Vonny.

But I want to fly, too.

‘She wants to be friends still, it isn’t that she doesn’t want to see you,’ he said.

‘I just want to leave it for a bit,’ I told him.

‘What about me and Lils?’ he said. ‘We want to see you –’

We went out for a walk. I didn’t tell him what the others had said about him. We did a couple of skips, wandered around the art shops and the bookshops, but… I was too messed up. I was glad when it was over. I told him to say to Gemma, you know, that I’d not be seeing her for a bit.

Rob said, ‘She’ll be disappointed.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. He didn’t reply. It was the truth. She was leaving me behind.

‘Someone here to see you,’ called Vonny. I knew who it was at once, because of the way she said it, like the toilet had just overflowed or something. I looked down the stairs and there was Lily, weaving about at the bottom of the stairs, dancing with her head and grinning up the stairs like a cat or snake or… like Lily.

It was odd, seeing her there. It was always like that with Lily. Whenever you saw her out of her house she looked out of place. Like you looked out of your window and you saw a python sliding away under the privet bushes. Like she was having an incredible, dangerous adventure just walking down the road. I suppose she was.

‘Come with me,’ she said. I’d been planning on staying away a few days longer but…

I got my coat on and followed her out of the house.

It was a damp day. I’d only seen her at night or in the house, half naked. Now she was dressed in this long skirt that dragged in the puddles.

She walked along by me smiling all the time like she does, like she has a secret.

‘How’s Gemma?’ I asked.

‘Oh, she’s great, she’s fantastic, you know our Gems,’ said Lily, and then she laughed at me. I must have looked disappointed because she wasn’t sad like me. ‘Don’t get all hung up on that romantic love stuff,’ she told me. And she started clutching at her heart and her throat and moaning, ‘My life is at an end, I cannot go on without her, oh, woe, oh woe…’ and she ended up leaning backwards over a wall with her hand at her throat and her tongue hanging out.

I guess it was bit like that, wasn’t it? I was hung up on Gemma. I suppose I wanted something to cling on to after getting away from home – another prop, another crutch. Maybe that’s all it was.

Lily got off the wall and put her arm through mine.

‘She’s been missing you,’ she said. ‘We all have. And me.’ And she stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the lips. A real long kiss. Then we went off down the road, with her arm in mine and her warm body right against me and I thought, Crikey.

We got to the house and she made me wait in the hall.

‘We’re home!’ she yelled.

‘Hang on a mo…’ That was Rob.

Then the door opened. Gemma came running out at a hundred miles an hour and wrapped her arms round me and kissed me all over my face, just like she did that time I met her off the coach.

‘I missed you, I really missed you, I was so AMAZED at how much I missed you,’ she said. And then before I had time to think about it they pushed me into the room and there was Rob with a can of lager in his hand nodding and grinning and next to him…

It was the book! I couldn’t believe it. That book, that sixty quid’s worth that you had to be God to own. They had it up on this old wooden easel and there were ribbons and flowers they’d picked – loads and loads of dandelions, a great big yellow heap of dandelions. And a big card with, ‘For Tar, love from’… and their names written on it for me.

‘For who? For who?’ I said, because it didn’t make sense.

And they said, all together, ‘For you! For you!’

I couldn’t believe it! They’d opened it up at one of the pictures I thought was really amazing, and it was covered in flowers and paper leaves Lily had made. And the whole thing was draped in red silk; it was a kind of monument to me.

‘But… how did you get it?’ I mean, that book was kept right next to the pay desk all on its own, right where all the assistants always were.

‘You’re the only person who could afford it,’ said Rob.

‘Yeah, and now you’ve got three people to love instead of just one,’ said Lily, and she gave me a big kiss – a proper one, about two minutes’ long, it felt like. I could hear Gemma clapping her hands and whooping and Rob yelling, ‘Yeah… yeah!’ They started counting, to see how long we could go on.

I started crying then, right in the middle of kissing her. Sort of leaking tears, not sobbing, but they were on my cheeks. They thought I was pleased and I was but it wasn’t just that. I was still so sad then about losing Gemma, and Lily saying that and kissing me reminded me. Then Lily stood up on tiptoe – I’m quite a lot taller than her – and she licked all the tears off my face.

‘I’m gonna live forever now,’ she said.

Anyway, so after about six days they still hadn’t worked out how to do it, when Rob heard an assistant talking about how someone should have come in and they hadn’t and he was late for his tea break. So the under manager or something like that comes in and lets this guy go for his break. Then the phone rings and the under manager has to go to the phone.

Rob had been planning on going in as a student with one of those art portfolio cases to hide the book in. He didn’t have it with him because he was still staking the place out. But then suddenly there he was standing next to the book and there’s not an assistant to be seen and he’s totally unprepared…

He just put it under his arm and walked out, right past everyone, past the assistants in the fiction department between him and the door, past the girl at the sales desk and the other shoppers walking to and fro, past the staff stacking books and pricing them. He just walked past them all with this amazing showpiece book tucked under his arm, right under all their noses. He got to the pavement and Gemma saw him and they both just walked fast round the corner and then they legged it.

For me. They did it for me.

Gemma came over and started going through the book with me. We were showing each other our favourite pictures and smiling at each other. All the time at the back of my mind I was thinking, What now? What now?

Lily and Rob were sitting at the table. Rob was shaking something on to a strip of foil.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Gemma.

Rob handed the foil to Lily. She lit a match and held it under the foil. There was this thick, sweet smell and a curl of white smoke. Lily held the foil to her mouth and ‘Glop!’ she said. She sucked down that curl of white smoke and clamped her lips down. And held her breath for ages. Then she breathed slowly out. She smiled like a snake.

‘Now I feel good,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

Lily waved her fingers in the air like it was spooky and magic and she said, ‘Heroin, yeah!’

‘Is it? Is it really heroin? Is it?’ I said. I was horrified. Rob was doing another lot. I was thinking, She’s a junkie, she’s a junkie, she’s a junkie…

You know those stories. You take one little sniff and that’s it, you’re hooked for life; you end up on the streets robbing old ladies and putting your hands down old men’s trousers for a few quid for the next fix. Rob held out the foil for Gemma and she grinned at me and struck a match and ‘Glop,’ she said. I watched her letting the smoke ooze out of her nostrils. But she must have been doing it wrong because Rob and Lily jumped up and shouted at her,

‘Don’t let it go, don’t let it go…!’ And Gemma chased the smoke she’d let out with her mouth.

‘That’s pretty important smoke,’ said Rob.

I was thinking, Oh my God, oh my God…

Then he did one for me but I shook my head. Rob laughed and sucked it down himself.

‘Hey!’ Lily was angry. ‘Hey, that’s Tar’s, what’re you doing?’ He just smiled and opened his mouth to let the smoke out. He looked like a ghost. Lily was getting seriously annoyed, but then he got out the little packet and shook it at her.

‘Plenty more where that came from,’ he said, and Lily grinned.

‘Go on, try it, it won’t hurt,’ Gemma told me. ‘It doesn’t do you any harm, it just feels good.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I said.

Lily was amused. ‘Aren’t you gonna be a junkie with us?’ she teased. ‘Are you a junkie, Tar?’

‘No.’

‘A little heroin isn’t going to change you into one. You have to think like a junkie if you want to be a junkie.’

‘Yeah, you don’t need smack to help you…’

Gemma sighed and leaned back in her chair. I looked into her face to see if I could see anything different. She looked… happy.

‘It’s all right, Tar, try it. You don’t have to do it ever again if you don’t want to. But try it once. Try everything once. All that stuff you hear about one little hit and you’re a junkie for life is just stories, you know.’

‘Stories to scare the kids, stories to keep you in your place,’ said Lily.

Rob had done another one. He held it out for me. ‘Junk’s the best. That’s why the doctors keep it for themselves.’ He gave me a slow wink.

‘I know what’s better for me than any doctor,’ said Lily. I looked at the foil and I thought, God, I don’t know what to do…

‘Look, he’s actually going to miss the chance to feel better than anyone else in the whole world,’ said Lily.

‘More for us,’ said Rob. Then I thought – what did I have to lose? Rob held the lighter to me, I lit it up and held it under the foil and I watched the white powder turn to a little blob of brown running up and down the crease in the foil. Then I went ‘Glop’ and…

Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space. This time it was Lily and Rob and Gemma spending all that time to make me feel one of them, but it was the drug too. All that crap – about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home. All that negative stuff. All the pain…

It just floated away from me, I just floated away from it… up and away…

I leaned back and I looked at the book and I looked at them and Gemma smiled at me, a big soft smile, and her eyes were like marbles.

‘Better?’ she said.

I just nodded. I didn’t feel incredibly wonderful or anything, but it was gone. All the hurt. She came over and sat next to me and sort of wriggled under my arm.

‘Tar,’ she said. ‘Will you go out with me?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I will.’

‘I nearly blew that, didn’t I?’ she said.

‘You’re gonna live here now, with us,’ said Lily. ‘Yeah, both of you. Aren’t you?’

What could I say? I felt I was just beginning to learn how to live.

‘Yeah!’