Page 6

It’s getting dark by the time we arrive back at my town. We get off the bus on the high street and walk past the bookshop where Gio is finishing up for the night. There are a dozen or so customers milling around the tables, which is a relief – on Wednesday no one came in all day.

Neon points to the Halloween display in the window. “This is your moms’ bookstore, right? Can we go in?”

I almost ask him how he knows that, then remember I’ve told him all about my life in our messages. Neon probably knows me better than anyone else in the world.

“Not right now. I need to be home before five, and I’ll have to work out what to tell Gio about you first.”

My family lives a few minutes away from the shop, in a semi-detached house with a blue door and a very overgrown back garden.

I pause on the corner of our street, working out how to sneak Neon past my mums. We don’t have a garage or a shed that he can hide in, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask him to crouch in the downstairs cupboard until they leave.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I whisper. “We’ll … we’ll run upstairs to my room really fast and hope they don’t follow.”

He bursts out laughing. “That’s your brilliant idea? Stellar work, Laurie. I’ve seen multiple James Bonds in action in the Realm, and none of them have anything on you.”

“Well, I don’t know what else to do,” I say, throwing my arms up. “Do you want to wait here until they leave?”

“Uh, I’d rather not. It’s pretty cold out here.” He wraps his arms round himself and shivers. “Next time, imagine me as the owner of a very thick winter coat, OK?”

I creep forward to make sure that our next-door neighbour, Carrie, isn’t peeking through her front windows, then open the gate and beckon for Neon to follow me down the path to our house.

I push the front door open, quietly slip off my shoes, then pull him upstairs and into my bedroom as quickly as I can. Neon spins round to take it in.

“I can’t believe I’m actually here,” he says, his eyes twinkling. “It’s smaller than I imagined, but it’s cosy.”

My room is nothing special – four sky-blue walls, a bed and a desk, a beige carpet that’s constantly covered with books and clothes – but the way he looks around, you’d think this was the big reveal on one of the interior-design shows that my mum likes so much.

I hold my finger to my lips, then creep back to the door. No footsteps follow us. We’re safe.

I pull the curtains closed and gesture to the bed. “Stay here and don’t make any noise.”

Neon sits down and salutes. “Aye aye, cap’n.”

Heart pounding, I leave him looking around and slip out on to the landing. My heart almost leaps out of my chest when I see Mum just in front of me, dressed in her big coat and scarf and struggling down the stairs with a suitcase. She pushes her hair out of her face and looks up at me with a smile.

“Oh, good, you’re home. The taxi will be here in five minutes.”

Hurrying away from my bedroom, I grab the handle of the suitcase and help her downstairs. Mutti is standing at the front door, adjusting her bright red bobble hat. The tension between her and Mum seems to have disappeared for now. Whatever the issue is, maybe a week in London will help.

“Have a good time,” I tell them, trying to steady the tremor in my voice. “Good luck for your events, Mutti.”

Mum starts going over the rules for the week, including that I have to leave my phone downstairs before I go to bed.

Right then, I remember the posts that I’ve got scheduled to go up on Neon’s main account.

I whip out my phone and open the app to delete them – Caitlin and Hannah both follow Neon, and they’d be really confused if they saw those.

“There’s money in the elephant teapot for a takeaway. One takeaway. Try to eat at least semi-healthily the rest of the time, please. Five a day, and all that.” Mum waves a hand in front of my phone. “Are you listening, Laurie?”

I nod but don’t look up – I’m sure she’ll notice something is wrong if she looks me in the eye. “Five takeaways a day. Got it.”

Mum chuckles and swats at me with the end of her scarf. “Remember to lock the back door if you’re both going out. Call Gio if there are any issues at the shop. Oh, and absolutely no parties.”

She shouts that last part through to the kitchen, where Joel is sitting at the table. He gestures to his laptop and the pile of textbooks beside him. “Do I look like I have time for parties? I’ve got three assignments due next week, and I haven’t done the reading for two of them.”

“They’ll be fine, Liv.” Mutti picks up her coat from the end of the bannister and eases her arms into it. “And Carrie’s around if there are any emergencies.”

Joel joins us in the hallway. “Carrie will definitely know if there are any emergencies.”

A loud voice calls from outside. “I heard that!”

Our next-door neighbour Carrie is without a doubt one of the world’s nosiest people.

It would be more annoying if she wasn’t so nice – she’s always coming over to our house with food or newspaper clippings about Mutti’s books, and she’s got a random and ridiculous story for every occasion.

She’s sitting on her front step when we follow Mum and Mutti out to the car, a cup of tea in her hand and a book that is probably a cover for her eavesdropping in her lap.

“Is that you off to London, then, Monika?” she asks Mutti. “Sounds so fancy. You’re like literary royalty.”

Mutti wheels her suitcase down the garden path and laughs. “We’re staying in a two-star hotel and will probably eat Tesco meal deals all week, so not quite.”

“Still – London!” Carrie says dreamily. “Did I ever tell you I lived in a houseboat on the Thames one summer? With a painter from Tuscany and a goat named Sally.”

She launches into one of her stories, but this time I’m too nervous to listen.

Upstairs, the curtains of my bedroom window twitch.

My heart leaps, but luckily Mum and Mutti are too busy laughing at Carrie’s account of the time the Tuscan painter and the goat got stuck in the toilet together to notice anything.

A moment later, the taxi pulls up by the pavement.

“Right! Be good, duckies.” Mutti still calls us that, even though I’m fourteen and Joel is nineteen.

She gives me a tight hug before scurrying over to him.

Mum does the same, then they load their suitcases into the boot and climb into the taxi.

We all wave goodbye, Carrie raising her cup of tea into the air like she’s making a toast.

“Pop round whenever if you need anything, you two,” she tells us as the car slips out of view.

“I’ve got Pilates on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and my friend has asked me to keep an eye on their bonsai collection while they’re shooting a film in Thailand.

But apart from that I’ll be around all week. ”

Carrie works from home, so she’s almost always in.

That could make getting Neon in and out of the house without being spotted tricky, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

I thank her, then race back upstairs to my room.

Neon is crouching by my chest of drawers and rifling through my old notebooks and pens.

“Er, what are you doing?” I hurry over and shut the drawer – I’ve got some diaries from when I was eight or nine in there that I would rather die than let anyone see, even made-up people like Neon.

“Sorry, I got too curious.” He holds up a purple pencil case that I haven’t seen in forever. “Stuff is so much more real here. The colours are brighter and it feels different, and—”

“You have to be quiet! Joel is downstairs.”

I open my computer and turn on some music so that Joel can’t hear us talking, but that makes Neon bounce to his feet, shouting that he’s obsessed with this song.

According to the story I made up about him, he loves singing, like me, and he also plays guitar and piano and a bunch of other instruments.

I turn the music up and put a finger to my lips.

Neon begins to lip-synch along to the song instead, but the floorboards creak with his enthusiastic dance moves.

“What are we going to do?” I run my hands over my face and sigh. “You can’t stay here until Saturday.”

“I think I sort of have to?” He smiles apologetically. “Reminder: you did invite me.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually – never mind.” I shake my head. “How about a hotel? There are a few B&Bs in town – you could try one of those.”

“No money, remember?” Neon pats the purple backpack lying on my bed. “Look. Empty. You should have imagined me as a millionaire.”

He laughs but that gives me an idea.

“Could I start now? Not necessarily a millionaire – but what if I imagined you had loads more money?”

“It doesn’t work now that I’m out of the Realm,” Neon says. “Back there, you could have made me the richest person in the world, or a dragon or a koala bear or whatever you fancied. Remember when you changed my birthday? That was quite confusing.”

Originally I’d decided on the middle of June for Neon’s birthday, but then I realised that would make him a Gemini.

I’m Pisces, so I shifted it back a few weeks to make him a Cancer so we’d be more compatible as friends.

It seems silly now – I don’t even really believe in star signs, but I figured that Neon would.

“What about your mum?” She flashes into my head as soon as I mention her – a tall, willowy hippy who I named Karma. “Can we get her to come here? She’d have some money, surely.”

Neon sits up and takes a turquoise pen from the pot on my desk. “Not possible. You never believed in my mom the way you started to believe in me, and she didn’t have loads of online followers who thought she was real. Besides, we don’t have any way to contact her there.”

I sink on to the bed beside him, out of ideas and out of energy.

There’s a big part of me that wants to call my mums and get them to turn the taxi round, come home and sort this out for me, but I can’t.

These events are a big deal for Mutti, and there’s no way they’d believe any of this anyway.

Neon flops back, already at home in my space – the very space where I spent so long imagining him, talking to him, wishing he was real.

“Chill out, Laur. It’s only a week.” He twirls the pen in his fingers and grins. “How much could go wrong?”