Page 4

Hannah’s shooting-star earrings jingle as she shakes her head. “I can’t believe you’re actually here.”

Ten minutes after Neon’s arrival, we’re sitting at a café in the shopping centre with half-drunk hot chocolates or frappuccinos in front of us (except Neon, who says he’s all coffee’d out after the train and pulls a pack of shortbread from his backpack).

I’m still too shocked to speak much – Hannah even had to order my drink for me – but my friends keep the conversation going with a million questions for Neon.

They want to know what living in New York City is like, what he did while he was in London, how he got his mum to agree to him taking a solo trip to visit me while she stays in Edinburgh.

Each of his answers matches exactly with the story I made up for him.

Each of them makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.

Neon leans back in his seat. “I can’t believe it, either. Laurie and I have talked about it for so long. It doesn’t feel real.”

He smiles at me. We’re sitting beside each other, Caitlin and Hannah on the other side of the table, and I can’t stop looking at him.

I’m searching for a giveaway, something to prove that this boy isn’t the Neon that I made up, because he can’t be.

But there’s nothing. He’s exactly like I pictured him, right down to the slightly chewed thumbnails.

Neon doesn’t seem uncomfortable with my eagle-eyed stare, or surprised that I’ve barely uttered a word since he got here. I nod and open my mouth to say something now, but all that comes out is an unintelligible mumble.

“To tell you the truth,” Caitlin says, “Hannah and I didn’t think you were real.”

Neon looks at her, his dark eyebrows rising slightly. “Oh, really? Why?”

“Well…” Caitlin waves her hand in a vague circle in front of him. “Your name, for one thing. And the fact you’re from America.”

Neon snorts. “OK, so my name is pretty uncommon. But what’s unusual about being American? There are over three hundred million of us.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” Caitlin is getting flustered. She looks at Hannah for backup, but Hannah is busy taking an extremely long sip of her hot chocolate. “It’s hard to explain. It felt too good to be true, Laurie meeting someone like that.”

Hearing her say that out loud makes me wince. Neon pokes himself in the chest, the cheek, the forehead, then looks back at Caitlin with a tight smile. “Nah. Definitely real. You should probably apologise to Laurie for calling her a liar, though.”

He says this in such a cheerful tone that at first Caitlin and Hannah don’t notice that he’s criticising them. Their smiles falter.

“We never actually called her a liar,” Caitlin says awkwardly.

“No, Neon’s right.” Hannah licks a smear of hot chocolate from her lower lip and looks at me. There actually is some regret in her large blue eyes. “I’m sorry, Laurie. We should have believed you.”

Caitlin mumbles that she’s sorry too. I don’t know what to say.

I am a liar, at least where this is concerned.

I’ve told my friends hundreds of lies about Neon over the last six months.

Though, when I was telling them, they didn’t feel like lies.

Neon had become almost as real to me as the kids in our class at school.

It’s started to rain outside, so once we’ve finished our drinks we take a walk through the shopping centre.

Neon seems weirdly fascinated by the place.

He stops to stare at the decorative animal clock that moves and plays a tune every hour, looking far more amazed than any of the toddlers watching, then wanders into a homeware shop and spends twenty minutes admiring things like oven gloves and cake tins.

If Caitlin and Hannah find it strange, they don’t say so – he’s cool enough to them to get away with being a bit quirky.

Besides, they’re never as critical with boys.

When we pass a make-up shop, I remind Hannah that she still needs to buy her mascara. She and Caitlin head inside while Neon and I linger by the entrance. As soon as my friends are out of earshot, I whirl round to face him. He’s gazing at an advert for face cream like it’s the Mona Lisa .

“What’s going on?” I whisper. “What is this?”

Neon looks up from the poster. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean!” I hiss. I take a look around me, sure that someone else will be able to see something off about Neon. “I … I made you up. You’re not real!”

When I created Neon’s profile, I knew better than to steal some random person’s pictures to pass off as his.

It’s way too easy to search for those online, and Caitlin would have found the original in five minutes.

AI images weren’t safe, either – there are websites that can detect those, and the program might give him six fingers or eight front teeth without my noticing.

Instead, I went on an app that filters photos to change people’s appearance.

I took some selfies and turned myself into a boy, making my face and lips thinner, my hair shorter and much darker, my eyes brown instead of blue.

I added freckles and a birthmark shaped like France above my eyebrow.

I smiled with my teeth, something I don’t do much in photos, and wiped away the braces that I had back then. Neon Hart is me, painted with pixels.

“Um, OK, ouch .” He laughs. “You did make me up, yes. But I’m here now. I think that makes me real enough.”

That’s not the response I expected. I don’t know how I thought Neon would explain himself, but acknowledging that he did indeed come from my imagination was not it.

“But you can’t be. You just can’t.”

Neon smiles and shrugs. Maybe I’m hallucinating, or stuck in a hyperrealistic dream. To test my theory, I try to slice my hand through his body, the way people do with ghosts in films. My fingers bump against his arm. It’s not hard but Neon put his hand on his bicep and winces dramatically.

“Again: ouch!”

“But h-how?” I say, stumbling over the words. “What do you mean, real enough?”

“I’ll explain everything later, I promise. There are too many people around right now, and I don’t want your friends to overhear.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and gives them a soft shake. “Come on, Laurie, lighten up. Aren’t you even a bit happy to see me?”

Despite the smile, he sounds hurt. I’m too busy working through stunned and confused and worried I’m having a breakdown to get anywhere close to happy right now, but it would be rude to tell Neon that.

“Of course I am. It’s just … where are you going to stay?”

Neon frowns. “What do you mean? I thought I was staying at yours?”

“My family don’t know about you!”

“But you said your moms would be away all week.” He beams. “So it’s perfect timing.”

“They haven’t left yet. Besides, my brother’s going to be at home the whole time.

” The thought of trying to explain any of this to Joel makes my cheeks burn.

He’d think I’d completely lost it. “Look, I’m really sorry, but can’t you …

go back? Your mum’s still in Edinburgh, right? You could get the train back down and…”

Neon’s face clouds over. “Are you serious? I came here for you, saved you from looking like a compulsive liar in front of your friends, and you’re telling me to get lost five minutes later? You’re supposed to be my friend too, you know.”

I feel a rush of guilt. If this boy really is Neon, then he must actually believe we’re friends.

All the long conversations we had, the thousands of messages swapping stories and songs and secrets – somehow, to him, they were real.

If I’d come this far to see a friend and they were acting the way I am now, I’d be really upset too.

“I’m sorry. I am happy you’re here. I just … wasn’t expecting for it to actually happen.” I glance into the shop and see Caitlin and Hannah walking back towards us, both holding paper carrier bags. “Of course you can come back to mine. We’ll work something out.”

Neon nods, his eyes still fixed on the poster in front of him.

For a moment, I worry that Caitlin and Hannah will pick up on the tension between Neon and me, but then he asks what they bought and laughs when Caitlin shows him some ridiculously huge false eyelashes, and the atmosphere clears so quickly it’s like our disagreement never happened.