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“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“You’re alive,” she said. “And he’s a liar.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Everyone is going to see how sick it was,” Edie said. “
No
one
is going to talk to him now.”

I concentrated on breathing. I thought if I didn’t, I might just stop.

“How do I know why he’d do that, Cass?” Edie was saying. “Why would Floyd make up a lie like that about you? About Frank?”

I didn’t know the answer to her question. I didn’t know what to say.

Frank came up the stairs then, knocked on the door. I tried to see behind his handsome, warm face, his immaculate clothes, his smooth voice, his affectionate smile. Was there something darker in there?

“We’re going,” he said. “I thought I’d treat Mum. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

I couldn’t speak. My lips were stuck together. My tongue was numb.

“We’ll be fine,” Edie said. “It’s nice of you, Frank. She needs it.”

Frank smiled at me and closed the door again. I only blinked when he was gone. Could he be hiding something? I didn’t think so.

If he was, he was better at it than me.

And if he was, did he see it written all over my face?

In an hour Floyd would be waiting for me at the clock tower. And I didn’t care what Edie and Helen wanted me to do. I was going to go and find out.

I
never had a friend before Floyd. I kidded myself he was my first. It’s sad, I know, it’s pitiful. Because I kept telling myself from the beginning that it wasn’t really me he was friends with. I knew it must be Cassiel. I just stole his friendship, along with everything else. I just lapped it up, underhanded and pathetically grateful, from the moment I met him.

I’d never known anyone my own age. Not really. Grandad and I tried making friends in the park a few times, but the mums were brittle and aloof, the kids were shrill and hung out in packs and laughed at my clothes. It didn’t work out.

Grandad didn’t send me to school because it wasn’t worth the paperwork. That’s what he said. He said it was a waste of his time and mine. I could read and write and count already. Apparently the rest was always going to be up to me. According to Grandad, school was nothing more than falling into line, sitting around waiting to be spoon-fed little pre-polished, government-approved morsels of information. Real life taught you to scavenge for your own facts, to track knowledge for days and hunt it down.

“I should know,” he’d said. “I used to be a teacher.”

So I got used to being apart, to spending most of my time alone. From the outside, a school playground sounds just like seagulls around a fishing boat, just like chickens over grain. From the outside, other children hide from you, shrink behind their eyes, until one of them is brave enough to get a stick and hit you with it, until another one chases you away.

Floyd didn’t chase me away. That’s why I liked him. But, then, why would he? I seemed to be the only person talking to him.

Floyd walked around in a circle of silence. Wherever he went, people stopped talking and just looked at him. They didn’t bother to hide their contempt. If you wanted to clear a building in that town, put Floyd in it. If you wanted to silence a crowd, give them him to look at. I saw it that first day, when I went to meet him. I saw it straight away. He stood by the clock tower in his weird black clothes, in front of the little town hall, a one-man exclusion zone. I swear not even birds or vermin or insects dared break the rule. He was utterly alone.

I remember thinking we had that in common.

Grandad would have liked Floyd. He would have liked the way he looked and read and spoke and thought differently from everyone else. He would have liked the fact that he didn’t belong. He would have liked all the things that set him apart, just like I did.

I borrowed Edie’s bike without asking. I figured it was the least of my crimes. I asked an old farmer directions on the way down. He looked at the horizon the whole time we were talking. The clock tower, he said, was at the bottom of town.

“It’s tall,” he said, “with a clock. You can’t miss it.”

“How long will it take me?” I said.

He laughed at some fixed point in the distance. “Depends how fast you’re going,” he said.

It took me less than twenty minutes. Floyd saw me wheeling down the narrow passage toward him and he broke into a smile. I entered his airspace without blinking. I jumped off my bike.

“Hello,” I said.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“Well, we need to talk,” I said.

The smile disappeared from his face when I said that. He looked scared and ashamed and confused.

“So you know, then.”

“Edie told me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That you said I was dead. That you said Frank killed me.”

Floyd put his head in his hands and groaned. “So now you can hate me, like everybody else,” he said. “That’s fine, I get it. Are we done? Can I go?”

“Is that why everyone hates you?” I said. “Because of what you said?”

“I’ve always had a head start on least-popular,” he said. “You know that.”

“True,” I said.

He said, “Try being half Indian in an isolated rural community. Try being an adopted half-Indian vegetarian who reads poetry and is called Floyd.”

“And dresses like a circus,” I said. “You forgot.”

“Thanks for that,” he said. “You were always the first to point that out.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “And for the record, I don’t hate you.”

Floyd looked up, taken aback. “You don’t?”

I shrugged. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Are we?”

I said, “In fact, I was thinking of going vegetarian myself.”

He looked baffled. He looked at me like I was playing a trick on him, like he was waiting for it to happen.

We walked to the river, to a place he called the warren. Floyd said he wasn’t the best person for me to be seen with, given the circumstances. He said we were a pretty unlikely pair.

He said, “I’m surprised you met me anywhere public. People will see you with me, you know?”

“I don’t care who I’m seen with,” I said.

And he said, “Since when?”

We were walking through the town, headed for the river. People stared openmouthed at the sight of us. I don’t suppose it was something they’d expected to see, the dead boy and the slanderer, out together. I was starting to realize they hadn’t been seen much together before. Floyd kept his head down. He dropped his shoulders and his chin, and he moved through the open hostility like he was more than used to it. I pushed Edie’s bike, tried to look friendly and avoid eye contact at the same time.

By the castle, a group of kids our age filled up the narrow pavement in front of us. They were shouting and whistling. Floyd shrank even further inside his clothes. I put my bike on the road and walked around them, back onto the pavement. I didn’t really see them. I didn’t really look.

“What did you just do?” Floyd said.

“When?”

“Why did you just do that?”

I looked at him. I didn’t understand. “What?”

He looked behind him. They were suddenly silent and staring at us. One of them said, “Roadnight, what’s with you?”

“Those are your friends,” he said. “Those are all your friends right there. You just blanked them. You just walked right past. With me.”

I had no idea. Of course I didn’t. What was I supposed to do now?

“Oh. Hi,” I said. I waved. They waved back, offended, speechless. A couple of them cursed me and walked away.

I didn’t have time for it. I looked at Floyd. “Come on,” I said.

“What?”

I carried on walking. I didn’t want to get in front of Floyd because I didn’t know where we were going. He’d stopped and was looking at me really strangely. He looked like he was adding up numbers in his head.

“What?” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”

He looked at me like I was insane, or he was worried for my health.

He caught up to me, got a little ahead, the way I wanted. “Whatever you say.”

When we got to the church we went down along a footpath that ran beside the river. It was crawling with dogs. You had to watch where you were walking, for all the dog crap. The smell of it was sharp in the air. The footpath opened out on to a common, sheep grazing and kids skimming stones at a bend in the river. The rapids bared their teeth, a flecked white line across the width of the water. I wished I didn’t have the bike. The air was wet. The ground was soft and damp and marshy. The bike was moving down into the earth instead of forward along it. Floyd walked fast, ahead of me. He turned and spread his arms, a black scarecrow in the middle of all that land. I followed, dragging the bike over grass clumps and sheep dung, cutting the corner carved out by the river.

There were four people on the common, three men and a woman, building something, the beginning of something. A sort of framework out of wood. It was taller than them already.

I pointed. “What’s that?”

“Can’t you see from there? The Wicker Man’s beginning. It’s that time of year, if you think about it.”

We stood and watched them for a minute. They were using lengths of willow, winding it around itself, bending it into shape.

“Oh yes,” I said. “So it is.”

In two days it would be fireworks night, the Fifth of November. Two years since Cassiel’s disappearance. Two years since my own.

Not a time of year I wanted to think about.

We cut off the path into a clump of trees. Floyd went ahead again because my back wheel got caught on a hawthorn. I had to wrench it free.

It was instantly different inside the little wood. It was colder and darker and dead quiet. I heard the sound of tread and wood-snap ahead of me. I followed it just fast enough to see Floyd’s back disappearing into a sort of hollow. I left Edie’s bike leaning up against the roots of an upended tree.

“Wait for me,” I said, coming down into the dip behind him. “What are you, the White Rabbit?”

“Lewis Carroll or Hunter S. Thompson?” he said.

Like I said, Grandad would have liked Floyd.

We sat in this sort of dirt bowl of smooth, packed mud.

Floyd wanted Cassiel to start. I could tell he did. He just sat there looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

I said, “Why did you make up all that stuff?”

Floyd had picked up a stick and was starting to split it.

“What, that you were dead? All that stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t make it up.”

He smiled. He looked at me. How do you tell the person sitting in front of you that you didn’t make up the fact that that person was dead? He corrected himself.

“I didn’t
think
I was making it up,” he said. “I believed it.”

“Okay. Why did you believe it?”

He glared at me. “Because you made me,” he said. “Because of what you said.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“We were both there,” he said.

“I know.”

“You’re the one with all the answers,” he said.

I dodged it. I’d sailed frighteningly close to the truth, and I just had to cross my fingers he wouldn’t see it.

“Pretend I’m not Cassiel,” I said. “Pretend I’m somebody else who knows nothing about all of this, and just tell me what happened.”

He looked at me funny. “Why would I bother doing that?”

“Because I want to see things from your point of view.”

“You’re the first one who does,” he said.

I made myself comfortable, shifting down so the small of my back was resting on the hollow’s mud slope. “Well, if I’m the one who got you into this mess,” I said.

“I guess you are.”

“Go on,” I said, “I’m listening. I won’t say a word.”

It happened at Hay on Fire. It happened right in the middle of the show. Floyd said, “Two years ago, two days from now.”

He said the fire maze was alight, he called it the labyrinth, and the man with the fire whip was doing his thing when I came running up to him—Cassiel came running up to him.

He said, “You remember that, right? Him cracking his whip, making those massive great bursts of fire?”

“I remember,” I said.

“It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Utterly mad, but brilliant.”

“Yes.”

“How do you find out you’re good at that?” he said.

“What?”

“Dipping a bullwhip in paraffin and making cracking great clouds of fire?”

I smiled at him. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly. Anyway. You ran over to me in the middle of it. You went right through the labyrinth like it wasn’t even there, like you couldn’t even see it.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Everyone was yelling at you, and I thought you were going to set your cloak on fire, your shoes.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You must have been very high,” he said. “Were you high?”

“I must have been,” I said.

“Or very afraid. That’s what I thought,” he said. “That you were terrified.”

He looked for a response when he said it. I didn’t give him one.

He said that the band was playing, and the drumming was loud and low so it entered your body through your feet and hands and chest as well as your ears.

I liked the way he described it. I said, “I remember that.”

“You were wearing a cloak,” he said, “and you had a mask on, a black-and-red mask. You know the one.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“I didn’t know it was you, to start with,” he said. “I didn’t know who it was coming right for me in the dark.”

“What did I say?”

Floyd looked up at nothing while he remembered it word for word.

“You said, ‘I’m finished. He knows it’s me. It’s all over. I’m dead.’”

I didn’t say anything.

“You said that Frank knew it was you. That’s what you said.”

“Did I say ‘Frank’?” I asked him. “Or did I say ‘He’?”

Doubt flickered across his face. I saw it there. “You said Frank. Did you? I think you did. That was who you were talking about. I knew that.”

“Okay.”

Floyd looked at the stick instead of at me. He picked at the bark, pulled it off in thin strips. “You threw your bag at me,” he said, “from under your cloak. You told me to hide it or bury it. You said that if you didn’t come back I should use it to get him.”

“Get him?”

He nodded. “Get Frank,” he said.

“What was in it?”

He dropped the stick. He scratched his head and shifted a bit and blew his hair out of his eyes. “Why are we doing this?” he said. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Just tell me.”

He frowned at me. “You told me what was in it. It was all notes and numbers and stuff. Everything was there, you said, whatever that meant.”

“What else did I say?”

A dog suddenly came into the clearing above us, stood on the bowl’s lip, looking down. A Jack Russell, panting, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. I heard somebody calling. The dog licked its lips and ducked out. Floyd and I looked at it and then back at each other.

“You said you were sorry to land it on me, but I was the last person he’d think of.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. You said that’s why you were giving it to me, because I was the last place he’d think to look.”

“Okay.”

“You said Frank knew you had it and that he’d be the reason if something bad happened to you.”

“What else?”

“You said, ‘He is going to have me killed. Frank is trying to kill me.’ Is that enough?”

I swallowed. My mouth was dry. “I said that?”

“Definitely. Why are you making me do this? You know what you said.”