“Maybe the boy knows, maybe he doesn’t. I just think you need to ask him.”
“I’m not going,” I said. Bee shrugged and stared up through the leaves. “I mean it,” I said. “I’m not going.”
“You’re chicken,” she said quietly, almost like she didn’t want me to hear. “You’re being a coward.”
I said she was right. I said I was a coward, a sensible one. Isn’t that what you’re told to be when you’re growing up and you’re a girl? Don’t go to chat rooms, don’t go out alone, don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers and don’t meet them, ever. I’d had it drummed into me so hard, safety, safety, super safety, and I’d soaked it all up like a sponge. I hardly ever crossed a road unless the green man told me to. I didn’t sleep right if the door was unlocked or I knew there was a window open somewhere. I carried my keys, stuck out sharp between my knuckles, if I was out after dark; even if it was still daytime, even if it was just the walk home from school in winter. So why the hell would I send myself to that part of town to look for some strange boy I had no reason to trust?
I told Bee about the time me and Stroma were walking down the canal. We came round the corner on an empty path and ahead of us was a man, fishing. He was dressed like he’d seen too many war films, combats and dog tags and mirrored shades. He had a bare, bright white, too-bony chest and instantly I didn’t trust him. I got this picture of him in my head, slicing open a fish with a big glinting knife. I grabbed Stroma’s hand and ran back the way we’d come, looking behind me to see if he was chasing us, dragging my poor sister through nettles and dog shit. And he wasn’t, poor guy; he didn’t do anything.
“He was just fishing,” I said. “But I didn’t think so because I’m paranoid. That’s my point.”
Bee listened and she said she got it, the whole stranger-danger thing. She said it was good to be careful. She also said there was a big difference between being careful and being shit-scared of everything. She said, “Being afraid all the time is no way to live. What’s it going to be? A bomb? A dark alley? Some boy who picked up a photo off the floor? Do you think you can stop bad things happening to you just by fearing them?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why are you bothering?” she said. We were quiet for a minute, then she said, “He’s not some fifty-year-old bloke pretending to be a teenage girl on the Internet, Rowan.”
“I know that,” I said. “But he still might be an axe-wielding maniac.”
“Whatever,” Bee said. “He might also be a cool person. If you insist on never trusting all the people you haven’t met before, just because you’ve never met them, your world’s going to be a very lonely place.”
“I’ve got enough friends,” I said. “I’ve got loads.”
Bee laughed and said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. She changed the way she was sitting and turned to me. “How would you like to die?”
I said I wouldn’t like to at all and she laughed and said I had to choose a way, I couldn’t say that.
“How would you like to die?” I asked her.
She said, “I want to fall out of an aeroplane,” and I said, “What? You’re joking! Why?”
She said that she’d want to really know her time was up and there was no possibility of hope, so she could kind of throw herself at it and dive straight in. “Plus,” she said, “I’d be flying.”
I stared at her with my mouth open. To be that brave, I thought.
Bee said, “So, what about you?”
I didn’t want to say now. I felt like a fool.
“In my sleep, when I’m old. Nice and peaceful,” I said. “I thought everyone did.”
“You surprise me, Rowan,” Bee said. “The shit you deal with. I think you’re way braver than that.”
We sat under the tree and I thought about it. Mum and Dad moved us to a school because they thought it was better. They moved house to keep us safer. They gave us swimming lessons and cycle helmets and self-defence classes and a balanced diet. They paid our phone bills so we’d never run out of credit in a crisis. They promised us five grand on our twenty-first birthdays if we never smoked.
And still one of us died.
What can I say? Death is just one of those things that you can work out a thousand different ways of avoiding, but you’re going to meet head on regardless.
I looked at the side of Bee’s beautiful face under the shadow of the leaves. I thought about the things she knew and the places she’d been and the books she’d read. I thought about how much better I felt just for knowing her. I thought about her and Carl and Sonny and their front door with the flowers outside. I thought it couldn’t hurt to be a little more like her. What was the point of being afraid of things before they happened? Why not wait till they were on top of you and then deal with them?
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re always right.”
“So do it,” Bee said. “What have you got to lose?”
Which is how I found myself at half-past four on a grey afternoon, getting rained on and looked at, cycling not too slow and not too quick, counting down doorways on Market Road. Bee was looking after Stroma. That was the final brick in her house of getting Rowan to do it.
Market Road was long and the buildings were fairly spaced out. There was a massive estate set well back from the road, six huge blocks with cheerful names like Ravenscar and Coldbrooke. I tried to look purposeful (but not businesslike) and I kept going. I was beginning to wonder if 71 even existed. And then I passed it. It was on a corner, a smashed up, boarded up, covered-in-bird-shit old pub. The signs had been painted out in black and the number 71 was daubed on the front door in white gloss. It didn’t look like anybody but the pigeons lived there. There was no way I was going in.
I stopped at the kerb a little way past and turned round. I was balancing my bike with one foot on the ground, looking for my mobile to call Bee and tell her it was a big nothing, when I saw the van parked outside the building, round the corner. It was an old ambulance with long double doors at the back and stripy curtains. The driver’s door was open on to the pavement and Harper Greene was sitting there, his seat pushed back, both feet up on the windscreen. He was reading a book. For maybe ten seconds I stood quite still. His hair was cut so short you could see the skin beneath, the shape of his skull. I liked his face. I could break it down and say his nose was straight and his eyes were brown and all that, but it wouldn’t work like his face worked, together all at once. Like Jack used to say when something good happened, you had to be there. I watched the slow movements of his breathing, his quick eyes scanning the page. I breathed in hard and I thought, What would Bee do?
When I got off my bike and started pushing it towards him, he looked round and smiled like he’d been expecting me. Then he got up and disappeared over the back of his seat and opened the double doors at the back, as if that was the way you received guests in an old ambulance, like everyone knew that was the way you answered the door.
We said hello at the same time. I wasn’t doing a great job of looking him in the eye.
“I’m Harper,” he said.
I nodded and said, “I know,” but I was supposed to say, “I’m Rowan,” so I did, when I finally realised.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he put his hands in his pockets, I guess instead of shaking mine.
“Is this where you live?” I said.
“At