I hear Robbo’s voice, and then everything goes still and quiet. More voices come to me, but they sound very far away – and muffled, like sound is passing through dense water. The pain in my chest disappears; in fact, my body feels weightless, like I’m floating. No, not floating – sinking. The awareness that my body is sinking downwards does not fill me with panic or fear, but with a calm peace like nothing I can remember before in my life.

You’re drowning, says a voice that might be my own.

You’re not drowning, says another voice, not as muffled as the others. You’re sinking – big difference.

Where am I going? I ask.

Who says you’re going anywhere? You’re coming to see me.

I think I know that voice, even though I haven’t heard it for a very long time. I think it’s the voice of someone I love. Where are you?

In the deep. You’ll be here soon enough.

More blissful floating. My body is warming up, which is strange; if I’m sinking into deep water, shouldn’t I be getting colder? Have you wrapped me in a blanket?

The voice laughs. Yeah, I’ve swaddled you in one of those super-warm sea blankets. Just because I know you hate being cold.

How do you know that?

Nah, the truth is it’s very warm down here. You’re falling to hell – you know that, right?

I am? Why? What did I do wrong?

The voice laughs again, but just for a second, and then stops. Well, that’s something we need to talk about when you get here.

It’s because I killed that creature, isn’t it?

Nothing to do with what you did – it’s what you’re planning to do.

I’m being punished for something I do in the future?

Let’s just wait until you get here, then we’ll talk about it.

I’m so warm now that my whole back is tingling like the lower part does when I’m using my power. Does this have something to do with my power?

Your power! Yeah, you could say that.

Are you going to tell me how I got it?

In a nutshell.

In a nutshell. The voice rings in my head like a hundred bells clanging at the same time. I see Rufus’s face – his mouth moving as he says those words. It was one of his favourite expressions. In fact, he started to use nutshell as a verb, that last summer. Let me nutshell that for you. Or Thom’s brain is sluggish at the end of a day breathing in Wash-fumes. We’d better nutshell that for him so he gets it. I see Saphrine’s face, pressed up against his as she laughs at that. Laughs at me.

That was Rufus’s favourite saying, I tell the voice.

Yeah, well, some things never change.

My body is so warm now I’m a little worried, like I should do something about it.

Don’t worry – nothing can happen to you. You’re safe with me. The thing is, I do feel safe with the voice – absolutely and completely.

I can’t wait to see you, Rufus, I say, and then my mind drifts away, and I see us as young boys. We’re in the school playground. We’re running home from school, kicking our feet in piles of leaves. Rufus jumps into a huge pile someone has raked up in their front yard and I jump in after him, breathing in the rusty tang of decaying leaves. We’re in his room, a heaped plate of cookies his mom has just baked in the middle of our hunched, game-playing bodies. He’s a vampire and I’m a mummy, out trick-or-treating in his neighbourhood, where the candy is off the charts in terms of quantity and quality. My dad has bound the bandages too tightly, and I’m struggling to walk. When I fall over onto someone’s lawn and can’t get back up again, Rufus laughs so hard he swallows his fake fangs.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

More memories flicker in my mind’s eye. I see us – awkward us – in junior high school, then our first day of high school, excited and terrified. A pang of dread grips my guts as I see us starting our last year of high school. Not even two months into the school year, before the Halloween dance at school, I know some radical change has occurred. Rufus’s sports bottle is full of vodka. He’s even more cheerful when he’s drunk; he manages to be even better company. He’s still smart and sharp, firing off questions in class that make all of us wonder how his brain works, and why ours don’t work the same way.

No one seems to know that he’s getting drunk every day before the first bell. No one says anything about it – not our friends and classmates, not the teachers – until I decide to talk to him before the Halloween dance.

It doesn’t go well.

“Everybody’s drinking,” he says, patting me on the shoulder like I’m a child. “It’s the Halloween dance. You should drink some more.” He waves the vodka bottle at me. It’s only a quarter full, and I haven’t had a drop.

“I don’t mean tonight, I mean every day before school, every day at school. I’m worried about you.”

His eyes widen slightly as he looks at me, as though he thought I didn’t know. Then he smiles his huge, Rufus-smile, and says, “Aw shucks Thom, are you trying to be my guardian angel or something?”

“I’m worried,” I say again, “and I’m trying to understand it. It seems to have come out of the blue.”

“Nothing to worry about, mate. I’m just taking the edge off. If it starts to be a problem, I’ll stop.”

By the time we sit our end-of-semester exams, I’m pleading with him to stop. He’s still a cheerful drunk, still smarter than anyone in our year, but his sparkle has dulled. Lethargy, or sadness, or maybe it’s depression, creep in at the sides of his personality. I try talking to him about it, but he brushes off my concerns, again. He does well on his exams, but not as well as everyone expected him to.

He drinks more. His edges wither that little bit more. When he sees me noticing, he smiles his huge smile and covers up whatever it is he’s really feeling.

The pattern continues in second semester. We don’t talk about his drinking once, not after the New Year’s Eve party where he gets so drunk he passes out for twenty-four straight hours and I stay by his side, checking that he is still breathing. When he wakes up, he laughs it off and says all he needs is some hair of the dog. No amount of pleading, crying and shouting stops him from his mission to find some of the booze he has hidden around the house, even with me following him like a shadow, begging him to give it up.

“I’m afraid you’re going to die,” I say, my voice breaking.

“An inevitable fate for all of us,” he says, winking at me, smiling.

It’s the last summer, and Rufus is working double-shifts at the diner, so we’re together much less. My guess is he’s drinking as much, but I’m not there to see it. And then Saphrine is on the scene and I can’t stand her and she frightens me and I want to choke down this truth but I have to admit that I’m relieved he’s spending so much time with her. Let his drinking be her problem to deal with for a while. I tried and I failed. Maybe she can get him off the booze.

The night Rufus disappears he invites me around for a late-night barbecue, once he’s finished his shift. I don’t ask him if Saphrine will be there, because I want to believe he takes our ritual as seriously as I want him to. Late-night barbecues in his back yard are our thing, have been since we started high school. And she’s not there, at least not at first. I accept a bottle of beer because it’s part of the ritual but I don’t drink it, just tuck it against the leg of my lawn chair and watch Rufus as he grills us food. He’s talking the whole time, telling me funny, harmless stories about what happened at work. We laugh, and we eat, and he keeps talking.

I don’t know how it happens because I haven’t had anything to drink, but I start to feel sleepy, then a bit woozy, and my lawn chair tips back and I feel the cool dampness of the lawn, covered in dew. I hear Rufus laugh, teasing me about the tables being turned. I try to tell him I haven’t had anything to drink, but my mouth won’t work. His arms wrap around me and lift me up off the grass into the hammock, telling me to sleep it off.

I hear two voices soon after that; Saphrine’s is curt, like she’s giving orders, and Rufus is cajoling her, trying to get her to agree to something. I hear her say no several times, even as Rufus keeps trying to plead his case. There’s a splashing sound, and then another, and even though my brain is swimming in a pool of fog I think Don’t go in The Wash, Rufus.

At the exact second I think it, I feel his arms around me again. You’re the best, mate. Always have been. Don’t worry about me.

I try to reach out for him, but my arms are too heavy.

I’m cold – so cold now – and try to speak to Rufus again, asking him to wrap me back up in that warm blanket. My mouth isn’t co-operating, though, and I try again.

“What did he say?” It’s Ondine’s voice I hear, coming to me through a dense cloud.

“He said ‘Take me out of the freezer’,” Robbo says.

“How curious. What freezer?” Dr. Sidris asks.

“He must be cold. I’ll get more blankets,” Dr. Pendle says.

I open my eyes and see Ondine, leaning down and scanning my face. She smiles when she sees I’m awake. “It’s Rufus,” I croak, hoping she can hear me. “Rufus is why I’m like this.”