It’s more than a week later, and I haven’t yet been back to see Great-gran.

To be honest, I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing. You know, Great-gran secretly signalling to me that she wanted me to come back on my own. Why would she do that? I’ve replayed it again and again in my head and all it was, really, was a look.

She’s a hundred. It could easily be nothing.

But my instinct is that it’s not. My instinct is that it’s something – that Great-gran is trying to tell me something I need to know.

On my way home (alone, obviously), I notice another missing pet poster has gone up on Missing Pet Lamp Post. It’s Geoffrey. There’s a picture of him, and the text:

MISSING

Yorkshire terrier, front leg missing. Red collar

Answers to Geoffrey

Call Mrs Q. Abercrombie

07974 377 337

REWARD

Back home, and tea with Gram is just strange.

She has gone very quiet. What with my guilt at hurting Boydy, and whatever it is that’s going on with Gram, we sip our tea in virtual silence.

Shop-bought biscuits too. That is unusual.

I say nothing.

A little later, I text Boydy. It’s probably the hardest thing I have ever had to write.

Hi. Sorry about the other day. It’s not what I really think. Friends?

Thirteen words. I’m wondering if it will be enough when a text pings almost immediately.

Too late. Forget it. ‘Lump’? I thought some things were off limits. Apparently not.

So he heard it all, including ‘lump’. It’s not quite calling him fat, but it’s in the same territory. Why did I do that?

In the time we have known each other, Boydy has never once made a reference to my spots, or for that matter to my appearance at all, apart from once saying he thought my hair looked nice – and then he blushed so much that I think he must have regretted it.

Nor have I ever mentioned his size.

But some things are out of bounds, however upset you are. Making references to Boydy’s weight, I now discover, is one of them. The hurt is written all over his text message.

He once told me he had been ‘large’ all his life and that he hated it. I have just made it worse for him.

Hurting people’s feelings would definitely merit a place on Gram’s list of ‘rather common’ things. Come to think of it, hurtful comments about someone’s appearance are probably ‘frightfully common’.

Ms Hall said she would upload my homework to the school’s website but it’s not there, or I can’t find it, and I’m clicking around the site when I see the notice for the school’s talent show, which is tomorrow, and there’s Boydy’s name as one of the contestants.

Inevitable, really. If there was anybody who would refuse to let an absence of talent hold them back from a talent show it would be overconfident Elliot Boyd. He has told me about this, in one of his coming-home-from-school monologues, but it kind of got lost in the general Boyd-noise.

He has been learning the guitar for precisely one month. And I can see from the list that he’s going up against that he’s already toast.

• A Year Ten thrash-metal group called Mother of Dragons, who played in assembly once and are really noisy and good;
• Savannah and Clem Roeber, who do ballroom dancing to modern music, like on TV. They’re good too;
• Nilesh Patel, who’s in Year Eleven and does proper stand-up comedy and not just a long list of jokes from a book.

In fact, everyone’s good. He’s going to be slaughtered. Poor Boydy cannot play the guitar for toffee and he will be booed off.

Actually, he won’t be booed off, because that wouldn’t be allowed. But he’ll be watched in total silence, applauded insincerely, and mocked for ever after.

And I realise that:

a) I don’t want that to happen to him. And …

b) if I somehow prevent it, then he will forgive me for slagging him off to Aramynta Fell and Co.

That’s when I decide I’m going to become invisible again.

To try to save Boydy. It’s the least I can do, really, given how I’ve hurt his feelings.

It’s odd, too, how quickly the decision forms in my head. It’s like I’m staring at the computer screen and then – boom! – it all becomes clear. That, I find, is reassuring: it must be a good plan if I’ve thought of it so quickly.

No?

See what you think: it is less hare-brained than it sounds.

A bit less, anyway.

I will go onstage when he’s performing. I will be invisible, having somehow got myself out of school for that day and spent the morning on the sunbed. I will whisper directions in his ear and lift the guitar from his hands thereby creating the most wonderful illusion:

The floating guitar!

I can actually play a bit. Better than Boydy anyway, so as it floats I will strum some chords, and he will wave his hands like a magician and his act will be received with rapturous, elated, wondrous applause!

Sounds good, eh?

No. Now that I have outlined it, it sounds completely ridiculous: the fantasy of a mind that has been warped by herbal concoctions and overexposure to UV light.

You decide, but at least I’ve made my mind up. Yes, it’s a risk. But any ill effects from the last time have been, well … non-existent. My skin has improved. I can even convince myself that my hair is shinier, and I try tossing it like Aramynta Fell but I can’t really do it. I probably look like a demented horse being annoyed by flies.

So, that’s one decision made. But right now I have something else to do. This is the evening that I told myself I would visit Great-gran alone and find out what on earth she meant – if anything – with that look she gave me on her birthday.

I hear Gram call from downstairs:

‘I’m off! Bye, darling. I won’t be late.’

Tonight is Gram’s ‘concert night’. Once a month or so, Gram and some of her friends go to a concert. Classical or jazz: old people’s music, basically.

It’s an early one tonight. Six-ish at the Whitley Bay Playhouse. Some jazz quartet. It finishes at eight.

Which gives me a little over two hours to get to the old people’s home and find out why Great-gran was being so odd on her birthday.