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in good time. Let’s go into my room. I’ve just had a new delivery, perfect for welcoming Archie back to civilisation.’
    Ooh. Wow. What could this mean?
    We roll off Oscar’s parents’ bed – Oscar smooths the cover and carefully rearranges the cowpats – and decamp to Oscar’s lair, which is upstairs in the converted
loft. Moaning noises leak from Eliza’s room – she’s still playing the oboe, then – and Oscar shuts her door and then latches his.
    Lily leaps onto Oscar’s bed, I think about joining her, but it’s only a single – might look a bit harassing. So I collapse onto a silver bean bag, and Oscar straddles his one
and only chair.
    And then he pulls open a drawer and scrabbles in the back of it, and there’s a plastic bag full of . . . yes, it is. Weed, a lot of it.
    ‘Won’t Marcus notice that you’ve got all that?’ I ask, and Oscar pulls a packet of Rizlas out of the drawer as well and says, ‘Things have moved on, Archie-boy.
I’ve got my own source now – some guy from east London. Marcus introduced me.’
    OK, the drawback with being an only child is that you don’t have a cool big brother to sort you out with a dealer.
    ‘This is it, Big A,’ says Lil. ‘Your first ever joint.’
    ‘Don’t call me that,’ I say automatically. That was my nickname when I was a freakily undersized seven-year-old. Now I’m completely normally proportioned in every way
– not that Lily would know, unfortunately.
    She pulls out her phone. ‘We should record the occasion.’
    Oscar’s expertly packing the Rizla. ‘I don’t think so, Lil. In your room, maybe.’
    ‘Next time!’ says Lily. ‘Are you ready, Archie?’
    ‘It’s not actually my first time,’ I say, accepting the roach and Oscar’s lighter. I’m trying to look cool and like I’ve been doing this for years. I’m
glad that Lily and Oscar introduced me to normal smoking some time ago.
    I’m trying to look like this is no big deal, nothing special, nothing new.
    But it feels like it might be.

CHAPTER 6
Funeral
    I ’m feeling kind of bubbly inside and completely starving. There wasn’t any food at Oscar’s without getting past his mum, who was
crying at the kitchen table, so I came home.
    In Oscar’s room the main effect of the weed was feeling as though my skeleton had hardened to iron inside me, with my flesh waving in the wind like clothes on a line – which was
funny, obviously, so I laughed a lot and showed Oscar and Lily how I could make my skin wobble around. They thought it was hilarious too.
    We hung out for a while and then we heard Marcus come into the house (you couldn’t miss it, his mum was shouting so loud) and Lily went downstairs to see if he’d written any new
songs. Oscar says she’s trying to get noticed so she can join Marcus’s band as lead singer.
    Oscar and I watched
Phineas and Ferb
in his room. It’s actually very funny if you’re stoned.
    And that was four hours ago, so by now I’m almost totally back to normal, except I’m very hungry and I can still feel that flesh-wobble.
    I grab some peanut butter and pile it onto a piece of bread, before I even notice that my mum’s sitting at the kitchen table next to a box of tissues. She’s still in her gym stuff,
and her face is a bit red.
    ‘Whassup?’ I say, mouth full of crunchy goodness. Is this what mothers do in London? Sit and cry in their brand new customised kitchens?
    She sniffs. ‘Archie, darling . . . some bad news. . . Julie . . . she died. . .’
    Who the hell is Julie? ‘Oh, sad,’ I say, randomly, slapping two more slices of bread into the toaster.
    Mum grabs a tissue and says, ‘I can’t believe it. So young.’
    Some young girl called Julie has died. . . Hmmm . . . maybe that was the cleaner’s name?
    ‘Will they ship her back to Albania?’ I say, trying not to laugh. I can see it’s inappropriate and a bit sick, but somehow the idea of a corpse having to fly back home . . . in
a wheelchair, maybe . . .