The boy spun round. His eyes widened. Nicky moved in, so that his voice was a low whisper. He was suddenly glad that he had a weird yellow tinge to his skin and a scar on the side of his face. ‘Dude. A word. You ever speak to my sister like that again – anyone’s sister – and I will personally come back here and tie your legs into a complex equation. You got that?’

He nodded, his mouth open.

Nicky gave him his best Fisher Psycho Stare. Long enough for the boy to do one of those massive Adam’s-apple-bobbing gulps. ‘Not nice being nervous, is it?’

The boy shook his head.

Nicky patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good. Glad we’re straight. Go do your sums.’ He turned and began to walk towards the loos.

One of the teachers stepped in front of him then, one hand raised, his face questioning. ‘Excuse me? Did I just see you …’

‘… wishing him luck? Yes. Great kid. Great kid.’ Nicky shook his head, as if in admiration, then headed for the Gents to fetch Tanzie.

When Jess and Tanzie emerged from the Ladies, Tanzie’s top was damp where Jess had scrubbed at it with soap and water, her face blotchy and pale.

‘You don’t want to pay any attention to a little squit like that, Tanze,’ Nicky said, climbing to his feet. ‘He was just trying to put you off.’

‘Which one was it?’ Jess’s expression was flinty. ‘Tell me, Nicky.’

Yeah. Because Jess going in all guns blazing was going to be exactly the start to the competition that Tanzie needed. ‘I … um … don’t think I could recognize him. Anyway, I sorted it.’

He kind of liked the words. I sorted it.

‘But I can’t see, Mum. What am I going to do if I can’t see?’

‘Mr Nicholls is getting you some glasses. Don’t worry.’

‘But what if he doesn’t? What if he doesn’t even come back?’

I wouldn’t have done, Nicky thought, if I were him. They had totalled his nice car. And he looked about ten years older than when they had set off.

‘He’ll come back,’ Jess said.

‘Mrs Thomas. We need to start. Your daughter has thirty seconds to take her seat.’

‘Look, is there any way we can delay the start by a few minutes? We really, really need to get her some glasses. She can’t see without them.’

‘No, madam. If she’s not in her place in thirty seconds I’m afraid we’ll have to start without her.’

‘Then can I go in? I could read her the questions?’

‘But I can’t write without my glasses.’

‘Then I’ll write for you.’

‘Mum …’

Jess knew she was beaten. She looked over at Nicky and gave a vague shake of her head that said, I don’t know what to do.

Nicky crouched beside her. ‘You can do this, Tanze. You can. You can do this stuff standing on your head. Just hold the paper really, really close to your eyes and take your time.’

She was staring blindly into the hall. Beyond the door the students were shuffling into place, dragging chairs under desks, arranging pencils in front of them.

‘And as soon as Mr Nicholls gets here we’ll bring the glasses in to you.’

‘Really. Just go in and do your best and we’ll be waiting here. Norman will just be on the other side of the wall. We all will. And then we’ll go and get some lunch. Nothing to stress about.’

The woman with the clipboard walked over. ‘Are you going to take part in the competition, Costanza?’

‘Her name’s Tanzie,’ Nicky said. The woman didn’t seem to hear. Tanzie nodded mutely and allowed herself to be led to a desk. She looked so damned little.

‘You can do it, Tanzie!’ His voice burst out of him suddenly, bouncing off the walls of the hall, so that the man at the back tutted. ‘Back of the net, Titch!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ someone muttered.

‘Back of the net!’ Nicky yelled again, so that Jess looked at him in shock.

And then a bell rang, the door closed in front of them with a solid thunk, and it was just Nicky and Jess on the other side, with a couple of hours to kill.

‘Right,’ said Jess, when she finally tore her gaze away from the door. She put her hands into her pockets, took them out again, straightened her hair and sighed. ‘Right.’

‘He will come,’ said Nicky, who was suddenly not entirely sure he would.

‘I know that.’

The silence that followed was long enough that they were forced to smile awkwardly at each other. The corridor emptied slowly, apart from one organizer who murmured to himself as he ran his pencil down a list of names.

‘Probably stuck in traffic.’

‘It was pretty bad.’

Nicky could picture Tanzie on the other side of the door, squinting at her papers, looking around for help that wouldn’t come. Jess stared up at the ceiling, swore softly, then tied and retied her ponytail. He guessed she was doing the same.

And then there was the sound of a distant commotion and Mr Nicholls appeared, running down the corridor like a crazy man and holding aloft a plastic bag that looked as if it might be entirely full of pairs of glasses. And as he launched himself at the desk and started arguing with the organizers – the kind of argument that comes from someone who knows there is no way in the world he is going to lose – the relief Nicky felt was so overwhelming that he had to go outside, slump against the wall and drop his head to his knees until his breathing no longer threatened to turn into a huge, gulping sob.

It was weird saying goodbye to Mr Nicholls. They stood by his car in the drizzle and Jess was acting all oh-I-don’t-care, even though she obviously did. And Nicky really wanted to thank him for the whole hacking thing, driving them all that way and just being, you know, weirdly decent, but then Mr Nicholls went and gave him his spare phone and he was so choked that all that came out was this weird strangulated ‘Thanks.’ And then that was it. And he and Jess were walking across the campus car park with Norman, and both of them were pretending they couldn’t hear Mr Nicholls’s car driving away.

They stopped by the corridor, and Jess stashed their bags in the cloakroom. Then she turned to Nicky and brushed non-existent fluff from his shoulder, and her voice was so brusque that for a moment he didn’t notice her jaw was really really tight. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s go and walk this dog, shall we?’

It was true that Nicky didn’t talk much. It wasn’t that he didn’t have stuff to say. It was just that there was nobody he really wanted to say it to. Ever since he had gone to live with Dad and Jess, when he was eight, people had been trying to get him to talk about his ‘feelings’, like they were a big rucksack he could just drag around with him and open up for everyone to examine the contents. But half the time he didn’t even know what he thought. He didn’t have opinions about politics or the economy or what happened to him. He didn’t even have an opinion about his birth mum. She was an addict. She liked drugs more than she liked him. What else was there to say?

Nicky went to the counselling for a bit, like they said. The woman seemed to want him to get mad about what had happened to him. Nicky had told her he wasn’t angry because he understood that his mum couldn’t look after him. It wasn’t as if it was personal. If he had been any kid she would have dumped them just the same. She was just … sad. He had seen so little of her when he was small that he didn’t even really feel like she was anything to do with him.

But the counsellor kept saying: ‘You must let it out, Nicholas. It’s not good for you to internalize what happened to you.’ She gave him two little stuffed figures and wanted him to act out ‘how your mother’s abandonment made you feel’.

Nicky didn’t like to tell her that it was the thought of having to sit in her office playing with dolls and being called Nicholas that made him feel destructive. He just wasn’t a particularly angry person. Not with his real mum, not even with Jason Fisher, although he didn’t expect anyone to understand. Fisher was just an idiot who didn’t have the brainpower to do anything but hit out. Fisher knew on some deep level that he had nothing. That he was never going to be anything. He knew that he was a phoney, and that nobody liked him, not really. So he turned it all outwards, transferred his bad feelings to the nearest available person (See? The therapy had done something useful).