I turn and there is Susan Whatsername who has been standing close by all this time without me realising.

‘What?’ I say.

‘I heard what you said to that boy. I do not think you are lying.’

She has detached herself from her group to stand next to me. The girls she was with – school-orchestra types – eye her carefully and she lowers her voice till it’s really hard to hear her over the din of the school dining hall.

‘They’re called “waking dreams” or “lucid dreams”. It is more common than you might think.’ There it is again: this girl’s precise, adult way of talking. ‘My grandmother can do it. Hello again, by the way.’

I half expect her to put her hand out and say, ‘How do you do?’ but she doesn’t. She reaches across me for a slice of quiche and I get a whiff of her personal smell: laundry detergent and apples. Her straight black hair falls in a kind of curtain over the side of her face and she hooks it back over her ear. I can’t help noticing that her fingernails are exceptionally neat and clean.

I say nothing, but I follow her to a far table, wondering what people will think. Girls like her and boys like me don’t usually mix, not in our school, anyway. Either she hasn’t noticed or more likely she doesn’t know anyone else. She sits down and arranges her plate and glass and cutlery neatly in front of her and then looks at it all for a couple of seconds as if she’s going to say a little prayer, but she doesn’t. Instead, she fixes me with her piercing dark eyes and says, ‘If you can do that, Malcolm, it is a very special thing. Very special indeed.’

She talks as though every word she says is important and she expects you to listen.

‘Is it …?’ I realise I don’t really know the best way to ask this. ‘Is it a Chinese thing?’

She screws her eyes up. ‘A Chinese thing?’

‘It … it’s just, you know, you look … I thought … maybe your family, you know …’ Have I offended her? It’s difficult to tell. Susan relaxes her eyes and smiles.

‘No. Not Chinese, Malcolm. Tibetan. Although my mummy is Chinese, my daddy is from Tibet. And so is Mola, whom you met. That is a Tibetan word for grandmother.’

I nod wisely, as though I had even heard of Tibet, and at the same time I’m thinking mummy and daddy? Who says that? She’s going to have to lose that if she’s to survive in Marden Middle School.

‘Do you know Tibet?’ asks Susan, as though she’s making adult ‘small talk’. She takes a tiny bite of quiche.

‘What? Oh! Ah, Tibet? Aye, of course. It’s over, erm … near, you know, that place …’

Susan lets me fumble for words, deliberately I think. Then she says, ‘It is all right. Lots of people do not know it.’

I nod and frown like I’m taking all this in. ‘Pretty small, is it?’

‘About five times the size of the UK.’ She lets this sink in. ‘It lies between Nepal and China. You have probably heard of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. Half of it is in Tibet.’

‘Half of it?’

‘Yes. The border between Nepal and Tibet runs across the summit of Everest, although we call it Chomolungma – the Mother Goddess of the World. Tibet is part of China now, but it did not use to be. My daddy thinks … oh, never mind.’

Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking. I want to know about the dreams.

‘As for the dreaming?’ she says, effortlessly steering the conversation back on topic. ‘I cannot say that it is particularly Tibetan or not.’ She chews another mouthful and looks upwards thoughtfully. ‘I should not think so. But my Mola studies a form of Tibetan Buddhism called “Bon”. She grew up years ago in a town called Shangshung. It is a long way away from the capital.’

‘And her dreams?’

Susan swallows, smiles, and wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. ‘It happens sometimes when she is meditating, or even when she is asleep. She just comes down every now and then and says that she was awake during her dream, and it was fun, or “enlightening”. “Dream yoga” she calls it. She says these dreams are better than the old video films she watches! What happened in yours?’

So I tell her, and her dark eyes shine with fascination – which, compared with the reaction I got from Mason Todd, is a big improvement. I’m careful not to mention the Dreaminator because I don’t want to answer questions about how I got it. Nor do I mention anything about Seb sharing my dream because that just sounds too mad. (I also miss out the bit about her being in it, because it sounds a bit creepy.)

For a few minutes, in the school dining hall, it’s as if all the noise has gone and there’s just me and this strange, earnest new girl. At the end, I say, ‘So you don’t think I’m crazy?’

She winks at me like a much older person would, making me feel suddenly very small. ‘You jump into my garden, bleeding; you narrowly escape death at the hands of my Mola’s car; and you confess to spontaneous waking dreams? All in less than a day? Perfectly normal, Malcolm Bell!’ Then she glides off, smiling her strange, superior smile to herself, and the noise of the dining hall returns.

‘Hang on!’ I call after her. I want to ask her if she’s ever had ‘waking dreams’ herself, but she can’t hear me. Besides, I can see Kez Becker pushing her way towards me, and my retreat is blocked by the waste trolley.

First day of term, and school is taking a turn for the worse.