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inside . As a person. Am I all right inside?”
    What he really wanted to ask was What’s Philip Garamond like? Alex had no idea. He knew him physically—more intimately than he would’ve wished—but he didn’t know him. He couldn’t ask his teacher about that, though, without her thinking him completely mad. Even the question he had asked appeared to have flustered her.
    “What a strange thing to say, Philip,” she said with a nervous half laugh.
    “No, it’s fine. It’s nothing. I just … I want to do okay, that’s all. Better.”
    “Good. That’s good, then.” She went on watching him. After a pause, she said, “Let’s see if we can get through this last month of term, shall we?”
    He nodded.
    “And I know it may not seem like it, at your age, but there really is more to life than cricket and girls.” She was teasing him, trying not to smile.
    “I know, miss. There’s basketball as well.”
    Ms. Sprake covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. Alex was quite pleased with that: his first joke as Flip. The teacher put her glasses on, took them off again. “Right, you look done in, Philip. Go on, get yourself home.”
    At the door, Alex remembered. “Oh, miss … my mobile?”
    In the school car park, Alex switched on the phone. Most of the messages were from Donna or Billie. He scrolled down to the one that mattered and, hand shaking, keyed in the messaging service. Alex had expected his mother. It wasn’t her, though; it was the woman Mum worked with at the library. Kath? Kathy? He’d spoken to her on the phone a few times and had met her once. In the message, she talked quietly, as though she didn’t want to be overheard.
    “Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number, but if this is your idea of a prank, then … you’re sick . Sick in the head to do something like this. How could you? How could anyone try to do this to her?” There was a pause, an unidentifiable background noise. He heard her breathing. “But I’ll tell you this, young man: if you phone Fran, Mrs. Gray, again or leave any more of your evil messages, I will go straight to the police and let them deal with you. Do you understand?”
    Click.
    Alex stood perfectly still in the middle of the car park. He had been holding his breath, he realized; he exhaled, releasing the air from his lungs in a ragged sob.
    Shutting the phone off, he clenched it in his fist as though he was ready to fling it as far away as he could or as though he’d like to crush it to pieces. When at last he moved, he found he had no direction in mind and simply headed pointlessly towards the school entrance before circling back on himself.
    “Mum,” he said under his breath. Then louder: “Mummummum.”
    Crying so hard by now that it was more snot than tears. Only then did he notice her: a curly-haired girl, sitting on a wall ten meters away with a book open on her lap and what looked like a cello case propped beside her. Watching him.

At Flip’s house, truly weird music cascaded from an upstairs window. Alex kept his finger on the bell-push for an age before the sister, Teri, loomed in the front door’s smoked-glass panel. She yanked the door open. She was in the same black gear she’d worn at breakfast, but her face was made up in full goth mode and her hair looked as though it had been zapped by static. If they gave Oscars for scowling, her expression would’ve won the award in every category.
    “It’s a simple concept,” she said, gesturing at the keyhole. “You put a key in here”—she crooked her index finger—“you turn it … And. The. Door. Opens.”
    Alex didn’t have the energy for this. “I couldn’t find my key this morning.”
    Flip’s sister ducked out of sight, then reappeared, holding up a key fob in the style of a miniature cricket ball. “That would be this key, yeah? The one hanging on its usual hook, right by the door, so that even a blind, amnesiac baboon with attention