reading

ONE

Patterns

Here are some facts about me.

My name is Ted Spark.

I am twelve years and 281 days old.

I have seven friends.

There are nine lies in the silver folder labelled My Lies that I keep in my desk drawer.

I am going to be a meteorologist when I grow up, so I can help people when the weather goes wrong. This is something that will happen more and more in the future. The world is heating up because of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is causing the seas to rise, and weather to become more extreme and unpredictable. This is very interesting and also very concerning. I don’t know why the rest of my family – Mum and Dad and my sister, Kat – are not as worried about this as I am.

It might have something to do with my funny brain that works on a different operating system to other people’s. It makes patterns like the weather very important to me, and makes me notice things that no one else could. I see the way things connect, and I connect things that other people do not seem able to. I am learning that there are even patterns in stories and myths and poetry. There are patterns everywhere you look.

Three months ago I solved the mystery of how my cousin Salim disappeared from a pod on the London Eye while Kat and I were watching him. A man came up to us while we were queueing and offered us a free ticket, which Salim took. Salim got into the pod at 11.32 a.m. on Monday 24 May, but when it came down again at 12.02 p.m., we did not see him get out again. Mum and Dad and Aunt Gloria, who is Mum’s sister and Salim’s mum, thought that his disappearance was impossible. Even the police thought it was impossible.

But I knew that even though some things seem impossible, they always make sense once you understand them. For example, in the year 1700 there was an earthquake in America that caused a tsunami in Japan 4,721 miles away. A tsunami is a huge wave. At that time, the Japanese people who were hit by it probably didn’t even know that America existed, but the tsunami flattened their houses anyway. This is absolutely true, and it proves that the whole of history is a pattern, and everything is caused by something else.

When Salim disappeared, Kat and I came up with nine possible theories, and one of them had to be true. That is what I knew, and that is what Kat and I proved. We worked out which theory was correct, and we got Salim back, and then he and Aunt Gloria went to New York together, to a new weather system and a new life, and a new job for Aunt Gloria as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum (my encyclopaedia says that a curator is someone who looks after paintings and pieces of art, and organizes exhibitions in art galleries). But we were still part of that life, and when Kat and Mum and I went to visit them during our summer holidays this year, the mystery of the London Eye turned out not to be the only mystery in our universe.

Fifteen days ago, on the first proper day of our holiday, a painting was stolen from the Guggenheim Museum.

When the painting was stolen, everyone kept saying that it was priceless. That was not correct. They should have said that it was worth $20 million in New York, which is £16.02 million if you are in London, where Kat and Mum and I live. (This is because of something called the exchange rate, which decides the number of dollars you can buy for a pound, or the other way round. The exchange rate isn’t always the same, which I find very interesting.)

It was very difficult for me to understand how a painting could be worth so much. Unlike photographs, paintings are not always accurate or realistic. I can see why a photograph would be valuable, because it shows you what the photographer saw at the very moment the picture was taken. My cousin Salim loves photography, and his photographs helped us solve the mystery of his disappearance. When I look at his pictures, I can tell exactly how the world looked when he took them. It’s like time travel. But paintings are not like that, and so at first I wasn’t very interested in the stolen painting.

But then Aunt Gloria was blamed. The police thought that she had stolen it, and they tried to put her in prison. That would be bad for her, and also bad for Salim. Salim is my cousin and one of my seven friends, and so I knew that I had to help him by getting the painting back again, and proving that Aunt Gloria had not been the one to take it.

This is how I, and Kat and Salim, did it.

TWO

Figures of Speech

Dad calls Aunt Gloria ‘Hurricane Gloria’. This is a good name for her. She leaves a trail of destruction in her wake (Dad’s words). In fact, Aunt Gloria does not physically destroy things. She is just quite noisy and chaotic. Dad’s name for her is an example of a figure of speech.

Dad has been teaching me about figures of speech, which are words or phrases that sound like they mean one thing, but really mean another. One example is It’s raining cats and dogs. This doesn’t mean that kittens and puppies are actually falling from the sky. It means it’s raining hard. I am making progress with figures of speech, but I still get confused very easily.

I knew we were going to see Aunt Gloria and Salim in New York before I was meant to. On 26 July, when I should have been asleep, I eavesdropped (which doesn’t mean I dropped anything, it means that I listened carefully outside the living-room door when I wasn’t supposed to) on a conversation between Mum and Dad. Mum and Aunt Gloria had just had a phone call, and Mum was telling Dad about it. Mum said that Aunt Gloria wanted us all to come and visit her and Salim in New York.

‘I think she’s missing me,’ said Mum. ‘The new job’s going well so far – but you know how hard it was for her to get there.’ I did know, because New York is roughly 3,459 miles and one seven-hour-and-fifty-minute flight from London. ‘And Salim seems to be fitting in – isn’t that a marvel? But it’d be nice for him to see his cousins. What do you think, love?’

Dad said he thought that it sounded like a lot of money, and Mum might take me and Kat but she couldn’t count on him coming too, because someone had to hold down a job and earn the money for the mortgage and school uniforms and Ted’s appointments. I felt the air pressure drop, and a cold front sweep into the living room. (This is a metaphor, another thing I am learning about. The temperature on our home thermostat by the stairs was 17 degrees Celsius and it did not change).

‘Don’t be like that, love,’ said Mum, after a pause. ‘Glo and Salim are family. We have to stick together, especially after what happened in the spring. Just think of it – the children will love it! It’ll be a holiday for them! And … it might be good for Kat.’

Dad sighed. ‘It might,’ he said. ‘And Ted as well. He needs to start learning how to cope with the rest of the world.’

The air in the living room metaphorically warmed, but an icy pocket formed around me as I sat on the stairs. I did not like hearing Dad say that. I was happy in London. I knew its geography and its weather. I knew the tube. I was not sure I wanted to travel to another country.

Last term at school I had learned about some journeys that made travelling sound dangerous and bad. When Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, he did it by mistake, while he was looking for India. That journey took him a whole eight weeks. This is actually not much time at all compared to how long it took Odysseus, the legendary Greek hero, to cross the Mediterranean in The Odyssey (ten years). Both these journeys reminded me how big and confusing the world can be, and how it is possible to get lost in it.

What if I got lost in New York? What if I never came home again?

THREE

The Home Front

To calm myself down I decided to look up the Guggenheim Museum, where Aunt Gloria worked, in my encyclopaedia. What I discovered made me feel a bit happier. The Guggenheim is an important New York landmark, just like the Statue of Liberty. Museum is not an entirely accurate word to describe it. My favourite museum in London, the British Museum, is big and hundreds of years old, and full of statues and jewels and pots. I like to go there and think about the patterns in history. But the Guggenheim is not like that. It was opened in 1959, so it’s much newer than the British Museum. It also doesn’t have any jewels, or pots. It is a museum that mostly just holds paintings. It is a very unusual museum, just like I am a very unusual person.

It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a famous American architect, and when it first opened, it made a lot of people very upset. This is because Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t want to design an ordinary square building with ordinary walls and floors and ceilings. Instead, he wanted his museum to be an interesting shape. So instead of square, it’s round, with a round spiralling ramp inside it.

I was interested when I read about that. I thought that I would like to see a place so full of patterns.

But then I thought about who I was going with, and I felt worried all over again. What Dad had meant about Kat, but not said properly, because grown-ups are bad at finishing sentences, was that this summer she was being Mad, Mean Kat approximately 97 per cent of the time. She had failed her maths and science exams at the end of the year, and almost failed history, which made Mum and Dad very unhappy. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to do any of them for GCSE,’ Kat had said, when she opened her envelope from school. ‘I want to do art and design. And media studies.’

‘Absolutely not!’ said Mum. ‘You know you have to do maths, it’s the law. And as for art – Kat, love, you have to be sensible! Your father and I want you to study practical subjects. There’ll be time for art later.’

‘But Auntie Glo’s not practical,’ said Kat, sticking out her chin and fiddling with her hair. ‘She studied art, didn’t she? I want to be like her.’

‘Your aunt’s doing all right now, but she’s struggled, Kat,’ said Mum, folding her arms. ‘The worry I’ve had over her career – love, there were years when she couldn’t pay her way, and we had to help. I won’t have that for you.’

‘That’s just not fair!’ yelled Kat, and that was the beginning of the argument.

Sometimes I don’t understand people’s emotions. But this time it was very easy. Everyone was angry. Our house was full of shouting and tears, which I imagined in my head as cold fronts and showers, for weeks. Kat stayed out late in the park with her friends, or came home on time but refused to leave her room for dinner. She also let her hair grow, so that Dad said she looked like a shaggy sheepdog, and cut it herself into a strange new shape that made Mum shout and Dad say, ‘Kat, absolutely not.’

‘All right, then, I’ll get my belly button pierced,’ she said. And the hair was allowed to stay.

Kat began to spend a lot of time on Dad’s computer in the evenings, the green light on her face making the bones of her cheeks stand out. Apparently Kat is beautiful, but I don’t know how anyone knows that. To me she just looks like Kat. The second time I caught her at the computer she looked up and said, ‘Buzz off, Ted. I’m emailing my friend from school.’ Actually, she didn’t say buzz, she said a much more awful word that Mum would have whacked her for, but I am translating.

I had a hunch (a figure of speech that means a deductive suspicion, not being crouched over) that this behaviour was suspicious. I knew that the person Kat was emailing wasn’t a friend from school. I knew this because Kat does not email her friends, she texts them. Her phone is always going off at the dinner table and making Dad say, ‘Put it away, Kat.’ She would only email someone she couldn’t text. And the one person she knew who it would be too expensive to text, because he lived in the USA, was Salim.

What could Kat and Salim be emailing each other about?

Then, on 1 August, Mum and Dad told Kat and me properly about us going with her to New York. ‘REALLY?’ squealed Kat, making my ears hurt. She went whirling up to Mum and Dad and hugged them both, and then she tried to hug me. This was an easy emotion to understand: Kat was happy about going to New York. Then she ran away to Dad’s computer again and tapped away at it. Kat was emailing Salim, I thought. My deductions had been confirmed.

And I was upset, because even though Salim had been my friend too when he was in London, he had not emailed me at all – not once, since I had helped to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Was this because he liked Kat better now? Were they becoming better friends through the words of their emails, and leaving no room for me?

FOUR

The Odyssey, Part One

I thought about this more and more, and on the morning of our journey, Wednesday 8 August, I tried to talk to Mum about it. But she was too busy zipping shampoo bottles into plastic bags and saying, ‘Make sure you pack knickers, Kat! We’ll be there for eight days— oh, where is my good blouse?’

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘I think Kat’s doing something.’

‘Of course she is, Ted,’ said Mum. ‘She’s packing. Thank heavens, for once I know what she’s doing. Have you got your things?’

‘Hrumm,’ I said carefully.

I had put my encyclopaedia, my new alarm clock, my radio, my toothbrush and two pairs of underwear into the suitcase Mum had laid out on my bed. On top I put my library copy of The Odyssey, which is the book about Odysseus’s adventures. Mr Shepherd at school gave it to me to read, and it seemed very suitable now that I was going on a long journey too.

But Mum got very upset when she saw my suitcase. ‘Ted, what about the rest of your clothes?’ she cried.

I had to explain that I was going to wear my school uniform every day, like I always do.

‘It’ll be sweltering, Ted! You’ll boil! And that radio won’t work in Gloria’s apartment in New York. American plugs are different – it’s the electricity— Oh, Ted, love, don’t look like that.’

My head had gone to the side. I was imagining New York air boiling me like water in a pan, New York electricity frying the twisting circuits of my radio. What if I did not work there any more than my radio did?

And what if I could not cope without Dad there with me, to help explain things to me when I did not understand them? This would be my first time going anywhere away from home without Dad, only with Mum and Kat.

When we arrived at our gate at Heathrow Airport, and I saw the aeroplane that was about to shoot us all the way across the ocean, I became even more worried. Odysseus’s boats keep on sinking in his story – sea travel is extremely dangerous – but I thought that I would still prefer a boat to the plane we were going to travel in. It didn’t look as though it should be able to even get off the ground. I stepped backwards.

‘Come on, Ted!’ shouted Kat, dancing away from us down the ramp that led to the plane. She was very excited. She wanted to get to New York, and Salim.

When the plane took off, it shook and rattled and shot upwards so fast that I felt as though my stomach had (literally, and not metaphorically) been left behind. I covered my ears with my hands. The plane was a rattling tube, and I was shaking inside it.

‘Look at the clouds!’ said Mum. ‘It’s all right, Ted.’

I opened my eyes and looked. The clouds were below me. They were cumulus congestus clouds, because it had been a warm, sunny day in London with a chance of rain. In Greek myths, which The Odyssey is part of, a god called Helios travels across the sky in a chariot with the sun, and that was how I was travelling, as fast and high as a god. But I was not sure that I felt like a god. I was still not sure that I was glad about this journey.

The plane rocked, and I groaned, but next to me, Kat bounced, just like the plane.

At last the aeroplane rattled us down through the clouds, and into New York. New York’s airport is called John F. Kennedy, after the president who was shot, and thinking that thought made me uncomfortable. When we came to the Arrivals hall, everything in it smelled like metal, and I didn’t know where to look. Even though we were back on the ground, there was a bad feeling still lodged in my oesophagus.

Then Mum said, ‘There’s Glo and Salim! Oh, Kat, Ted! Ted, look at them – remember, look them in the eye – and if Aunt Glo wants to hug you, let her.’

‘Hrumm,’ I said.

Then a woman came whirling towards us like a hurricane. That was the only way that I could be sure that she was Aunt Glo, because everything else about her was new. Her black hair was pulled up on top of her head in a new style, a little knot, and she was wearing a pale green dress the colour of mint ice cream. Her toenails in new sandals were painted shiny green too, which made me feel unwell. ‘TED!’ she shrieked, and I stepped back and looked up at the white beams of the ceiling.

Then Kat let out a squeal, and threw herself at a very tall boy with brown skin who was standing apart from Aunt Gloria. He still looked the same, and he was wearing a shirt I remembered him wearing in May – this was Salim. He grinned at me, and held out his hand. ‘Ted the theoretical joker!’ he said. This made me happy because Salim had called me this last spring. He had remembered.

‘Hello, Salim,’ I said politely.

Salim opened his mouth to say something more to me, but then Kat grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him round to her. I could tell Kat was happy to be near him, and Salim was happy to be near her. They were so happy that they were now both ignoring me. And noticing that made me feel as lost and far away from them as the white beams on the airport ceiling.

FIVE

The Odyssey, Part Two

Then everything went very fast. That was how things moved in New York, Aunt Gloria told us all, over her shoulder, as she rushed us to a yellow taxi which was big enough to fit five of us inside and smelled strongly of cigarettes. We raced down the motorway (it was called a freeway, shouted Aunt Gloria – everything in the USA seemed to have a different name, which made me worry that I had forgotten how to speak English while we were flying), and rushed across a huge iron bridge, honking and dodging all the other yellow taxis, which were also in a rush. The sun was burning in the sky (I thought of Helios and his chariot again), and the air was very still. Kat and Salim were talking very quickly and quietly, and both of them were ignoring me. My throat felt full.

My school shirt stuck to my skin, and my collar itched my neck. My hand flapped. Everyone else was oohing over the sights, but I kept staring down at my grey knees. They have not changed since May. I have grown, but only half an inch. Our garden still takes twelve and a half steps to cross. Usually these thoughts make me happy, but now they didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether I would fit in to New York.

Then the taxi stopped.

I looked up, craning my neck out of the taxi window. We were in front of a tall red-brick building with a staircase on the outside. We went inside, into a lift that clanked. My suitcase hurt my arm. Kat would not stop wriggling. The sharp corner of her rucksack hit my arm. Then Aunt Gloria opened a door, waved her hand and said, ‘Voilà!’ Voilà is French for Here it is! but Aunt Gloria isn’t French, so I don’t know why she said that.

I looked through the door, and discovered that an apartment means a flat. This flat was very small, with wooden floors, and the living room and the kitchen were squeezed into one small space. Three walls of the space were painted white, but one was still brick. I wondered if the builders hadn’t finished it. Everything else, apart from the bricks and the floor, was very white. The sofa was white, and even the paintings on the walls were in shades of white. All the books, and what Mum calls knick-knacks, were missing from the living-room side of the room, and the kitchen side of the room was just a white strip of cupboards and a long white table. I wondered if Aunt Gloria had forgotten to bring the things from her house in England. Or perhaps there was not room for them. That made me worried that there would not be enough room for us.

‘Our dear little apartment! It isn’t much, but I hope you’ll be happy here,’ said Aunt Gloria.

Salim rolled his eyes and grinned at Kat.

‘It isn’t much,’ I agreed with Aunt Gloria.

‘Ted!’ said Mum. ‘He didn’t mean that, Glo.’

Aunt Gloria laughed and said that she was quite used to me by now. That made me cross, because she had told us that it wasn’t much. She had not given any warning that she was using a figure of speech.

I looked around the rest of the apartment, and saw that my worry had been right. The whole space wasn’t even half the size of our house. I could cross it in only eight steps. There were only two rooms apart from the bathroom and the living-room-that-is-also-the-kitchen. This meant that we had to share, and it was even worse than the time when Aunt Gloria and Salim had come to stay with us. Mum would be sharing Aunt Gloria’s room, Kat would have Salim’s, and Salim and I would be on futons in the white living-room-kitchen. This seemed very unfair to me, because Kat is one person, and there are two of me and Salim. But I thought about how I felt about Kat-and-Salim, and how I missed Salim-and-Ted, and decided that perhaps the arrangement would be good after all. It would give me time with just Salim.

That was the afternoon of 8 August. The rest of that day was a blur, because of jet lag. I fell asleep sitting on the sofa while Aunt Gloria and Mum talked, and then again at dinner. So did Kat, although she pretended she hadn’t. I kept my special weather watch on British Summer Time so that I could think about the weather at home, and when I woke up in middle of the night from a dream where I was Odysseus, lost at sea, I could tell that even though it was dark in New York, 1.07 a.m., it was 6.07 a.m. and getting light in London.

There were two people whispering – Kat and Salim. Kat must have crept out of her room and into the living room. I kept very still and quiet and listened to them.

‘I’m so glad you’re here!’ whispered Salim. ‘I’ve missed you! I can’t wait to show you the city. You’ll love it. Mum’s got you all subway passes for the week, so we can go anywhere.’

‘New York!’ sighed Kat. ‘It’s so much better than London! I can already tell.’

I was indignant, which means upset, because nowhere is better than London.

‘Seriously,’ said Salim. ‘Though I can’t stop Mum hovering over me. She still thinks that – well, the spring might happen again.’

Salim, like most people, uses words in a very imprecise way. Of course the spring would happen again. It happens every year as the Earth goes round the sun. But I translated what he said into what he meant: Aunt Gloria was worried about him going missing again because of the time he had gone missing before, in London in May.

‘And I told you about Mum and Dad!’ hissed Kat. Hissed is a word that is like whispered, but more angry, and it is a good word for the way Kat sounded when she talked about them. ‘They’re being so stupid. I keep hoping I can get Auntie Glo to change Mum’s mind.’

‘Yeah! And maybe Aunt Fai can tell Mum to calm down about me,’ whispered Salim. ‘We’ll work together, right?’

‘Right!’ whispered Kat. ‘We’re a team.’

I heard Kat getting up to creep back to her room and tried to breathe very quietly. My deductions had been correct: Kat and Salim had definitely been communicating. They were friends, working together – and there was no room for me. Just like my dream, I was as alone as Odysseus, floating on the wreckage of my ship, all my crew members drowned.

SIX

Acting Up

On Thursday 9 August Aunt Gloria took us to the Guggenheim. She led us out of the apartment and down in the lift, putting her earrings on crooked and smearing lipstick over her mouth as we descended, telling us that the Guggenheim was closed to ordinary tourists that day, because it was Thursday. But she wanted to take us to see it, as a ‘special private viewing’ (her words). She was helping with a new exhibition of paintings that was opening next week – the very first one that she had curated for the Guggenheim. For the rest of the time we were in New York, Aunt Gloria would be on holiday from working at the Guggenheim, so she could take us around the rest of the city and look after us. She was very excited about that, but I was disappointed. I had wanted to spend all my time in the Guggenheim so I could explore all the patterns there that my encyclopaedia had told me about.

I watched Kat and Salim again. They bent their heads close together as they talked, taking the same size steps. My teacher Mr Shepherd told me that when you are friends with someone, you mirror their movements and stay close to them, so I could confirm that this morning they were still definitely friends.

Outside, New York felt even more confusing than it had yesterday. The buildings were taller than in London, and they all had stairs on the outside. Everything seemed back to front, and even the people spoke differently. A man in a grey jacket, with dark glasses over his eyes, passed us on the pavement and said, ‘Morning, guys!’ He spoke through his nose, and when Aunt Gloria said, ‘Good morning!’ back, I noticed that the tone of her voice had changed to be like the man’s. It made me uncomfortable, and my hand flapped. Aunt Gloria was different this summer, just like Kat.

I think Mum must have seen how I was feeling, because she put out her hand towards me, and then put it back on her bag again, and said, ‘Ted. Look up.’

I looked up, and realized that the New York weather was moving in a pattern I could understand. That morning it was in a system of high pressure, with high cirrus clouds. The rising temperature was making my school shirt stick to the back of my neck just the way it had the afternoon before. I imagined the air above us being twisted by the Earth’s rotation into a cyclone. This is called the Coriolis effect. It behaves the same everywhere in the northern hemisphere (which contains both London and New York). I thought about that similarity, and I was happier.

Aunt Gloria hurried us through the hot square streets, which were too full of people and cars and whirling noise, until a wall of green appeared in front of us. It was a forest, with paths under the trees and lots of people in tight, bright-coloured outfits, cycling and jogging. There were five different breeds of dogs and seven babies in pushchairs, and my nose was full of the smell of grass as well as petrol. I made myself think through what I had seen in my encyclopaedia, and I realized that we must be looking at Central Park. Central Park was opened in 1876, and it is 843 acres large, which is almost 3.5 million square metres. It has a zoo, twenty-nine sculptures and seven lakes. It is even more famous than the Guggenheim.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ cried Aunt Gloria. ‘And such a beautiful day! It’s like it knew you were coming!’

She was wrong. The weather is not sentient – which means conscious or aware – and so it does not care about people.

Aunt Gloria was fanning herself, and Mum was panting. The sun was very hot now, and an area of high pressure sat above us like a thumb pressing down. My school blazer made my neck and arms itch. The pavements were hot and white. We turned down Fifth Avenue, which ran parallel to the park, and I saw that wide blue banners on the street-lights read RICHARD POUSETTE-DART, OPENING 17 AUGUST. I recognized this name, and realized this must be the new exhibition that Aunt Gloria was working on.

The pedestrian crossing in front of us told us DO NOT WALK in bright orange stripes, but Aunt Gloria hurried us forward into the road anyway. There was a scream of tyres to our left, and a yellow taxi pulled to a stop, its driver leaning out of the window to shout at us. I felt Mum’s muscles go hard under her skin, and she said to Aunt Gloria, ‘Glo! You might have got us all killed!’

‘Oh, Fai, I’m sorry!’ Aunt Gloria panted. Her green toenails were squeezing themselves out of her very tight high shoes. The shoes looked painful to walk in. Perhaps that was why she had not noticed the taxi.

Salim snorted air out of his nose. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were rolling. ‘Mum!’ he said to me. ‘She never looks where she’s going. She’s the one who needs to be looked after, not me.’

‘Hm,’ I said. I didn’t know what to say to this Salim, who enjoyed New York and was friends with Kat, but not with me.

Salim wrinkled his forehead at me. ‘Hey, Ted?’ he said. ‘Are you OK? I mean – you’ve been acting strange since we got here.’

I wanted to tell him that this was not true. I had been acting exactly the same as always and it was everyone else who was acting strangely.

Salim said, ‘Listen. I know why you’re upset. When I first arrived I hated it too, Ted. I really did. But I got used to it, and now I think it’s great. You’ll get used to it too, I promise.’

‘Get used to it?’ I repeated.

‘Yeah!’ said Salim. His mouth was turning up in a smile. ‘I love it now. And – listen, all you’ve gotta do is copy someone who looks like they know what they’re doing. That’s the way to fit in anywhere – that’s how I fit in here. Just act.’

‘Act?’ I asked.

I looked at Salim. His shoulders were back and his feet were apart, and one of his thumbs was stuck through the loop in his jeans. I didn’t have a belt loop, so I held my thumb out in front of my hip. I shuffled my feet apart and raised my neck to make my shoulders go down.

Salim showed more of his teeth as he laughed. ‘Take your hand down, Ted, it looks like it’s floating. But other than that, good.’

I was pleased. Salim and I had talked, and it had been a good talk. As we walked down the street, parallel to Central Park, I copied Salim. My feet took big strides, and my arms swung. Then Kat wrapped her arm round Salim’s and dragged him away from me, talking loudly. But there had been a moment when Salim had remembered how to be Salim-and-Ted again, and I held onto that thought in my head.

Also by Robin Stevens:

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