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identical.
    What if he spoke like Flip, too? He hadn’t sounded to himself as though he was speaking any differently, but he had Flip’s vocal cords, didn’t he? Flip’s mouth, tongue, larynx, throat muscles. Alex hadn’t heard Flip speak, of course, so he had no idea whether their voices were similar in tone or pitch, but even if they were, he reckoned the other boy would have a Yorkshire accent. At Litchbury High, even the plummy kids rhymed “laugh” with “naff.” If Alex had been talking like a Londoner all day, surely someone—Flip’s mother, sister, mates, teachers—would’ve said something.
    So when he’d left that message on the answering machine at Mum’s work, and when he finally spoke to his mother …
    Alex grabbed hold of Flip’s phone again and worked out how to rerecord the outgoing message. He spoke into the mike. “Hi, this is … me. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.” Then, tweaking up the volume, he replayed his own words.
    He sounded nothing like himself.
    * * *
    The phone was still in his hand when it buzzed with yet another text from one of the girlfriends. Billie. Why had Flip stood her up? Alex remembered: she’d said to meet after school in Smoothies, wherever that was. He deleted the message without reply. He couldn’t be dealing with this.
    Funny, at Crokeham Hill he’d been desperate for a girlfriend and now he had two of them he just wished would leave him alone.
    That girl in the car park, was she one of them … or maybe a third? No. From the way she’d looked at him, he could tell there was nothing like that going on between her and Flip. Yet there was something . A connection of some sort. Alex had been mortified to realize that she had been sitting on that wall the whole time, witnessing his reaction to the voice mail message. What had it been in her expression? Not disdain, or surprise, or the smugness of someone who had caught you in a moment of private weakness that they could use against you. Nor was it sympathy or compassion. Her gaze had remained steady, holding his, the girl seemingly unembarrassed by his embarrassment. A neutral curiosity. It had been like the girl was watching the opening scene of a TV drama, unsure whether to change channels.
    He’d recognized her. Those mousey shoulder-length curls and the pale complexion and those too-thin arms. She’d been in English that morning. In a discussion about poetry, she’d said her family had been driving across Wales when they picked up a local radio station and heard a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s verse in Welsh. Even though she hadn’t understood any of it, the poems had sounded beautiful. The rhythm, the lilt of the words, the musicality . Some of the class had laughed. Alex had glanced at her, expecting her to look flushed or upset, but their mockery seemed not to affect her at all. He’d been impressed by that. And by what she’d said about the poetry.
    Cherry, Ms. Sprake had called her. Cherry Jones.
    In the car park, no words had passed between them. Just that brief eye contact. Then a car had turned in and drawn to a halt in front of the wall where she was sitting. The girl, Cherry, hopped down, loaded her cello case into the boot and let herself into the passenger seat beside a woman Alex assumed to be her mother. The woman shot a look in his direction as she drove off, but the girl kept her gaze dead ahead.
    At five-thirty, Alex phoned home.
    Number unobtainable.
    First his mobile number wasn’t recognized, now this. Alex dialed directory inquiries, gave the details to the operator. After a pause she came back on the line. That number had been changed, she said. And the new one was ex-directory. Sorry, but she couldn’t let him have it.
    Down the stairs two at a time. Thump, thump. He had to get out of the house. Flip’s house. Had to be on the move, somewhere, anywhere. If he could have run home, to his home, he would’ve done, however many hundreds of kilometers.