‘Were we supposed to be having a test today? Because I didn’t—’

‘You moulting, Hayes?’ Someone flicked the back of my head. ‘It’s all over your shoulders.’

I turned to find Michael Devis behind me, a tuft of black hair between his finger and thumb, held out as if it were something distasteful.

‘Losing your hair at your age, Hayes? Is that what happens to nerds?’ He let the tuft drop.

Michael Devis had a broad face, dark flinty eyes, and a remarkably clear complexion for a fifteen-year-old boy. He deserved acne. You want people’s badness to show. The poison inside him should be bursting out. Instead, he looked almost amiable when he wasn’t sneering. I was taller than him, but he filled his blazer out in that chunky sort of way that’s part muscle and part fat. ‘What?’ he asked, the sneer deepening into threat.

But the falling hair had taken my attention. A thick dark tuft. The kind you should have to rip out. They said that if the chemo was going to take your hair it would do it somewhere between the second and third week. I wondered if eight days were a record.

I came to Simon’s house the next day wearing a woollen hat. Not one of those colourful things with a bobble, but a thin black one my dad once took skiing before he realised he couldn’t ski and would never learn. It was the kind of cool hat New Order would wear . . . if they wore stupid woolly hats.

‘Vampires carry class H treasure.’ Simon opened the door practically as I reached for it and began talking. ‘With the right rolls, this could be a gold mine for us.’

I followed him up the stairs.

‘Hey, Nicko! Nice hat!’ Simon’s mum, milk bottles chinking as she carried them to the front door.

Even with that hint Simon remained oblivious. I could have come in wearing a full Mickey Mouse suit and I doubt he would have commented.

‘What’s with the hat?’ John walked in before I’d finished getting my books on the table.

‘Religious thing. I’ll tell you all about it at the end of the session.’

‘No, really. What’s with the hat? Is it lined with tinfoil?’

‘Seriously.’ I lifted my hands. ‘End of the session. All will be revealed!’

‘Bad haircut.’ John nodded to Simon, who was blinking at the offending item of clothing as if it had been a state secret up until this point.

We went through the same process when Elton and Mia arrived, but Simon proved to be the driving force that moved us on past the sartorial issues, motivated by avarice. ‘I’ve been waiting a week to see what this pile of dust was carrying. I don’t care if Nick has grown horns. Tell me!’

Elton settled to business. ‘Well, there’s a leather pouch with fifty gold ducats in it, and a ruby about the size of your thumbnail.’

‘Fifty gold. Medium ruby. Check.’ Simon wrote it down on his personal treasure list, ever the thief. ‘C’mon, there has to be more than that.’

‘And an iron tube, a foot long, two inches in diameter, worked like coiling ivy, capped at both ends.’

‘Scroll case. Check. What else?’

‘That’s it.’ Elton leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head.

‘Damnation!’ The closest Simon came to swearing, though his mum could make sailors blush.

‘What’s on the scroll?’ Mia asked. Her cleric could cast spells, and a scroll in a posh case was most often going to be an enchantment.

‘You open the case. There’s a hiss as the stopper comes loose, like someone sucking air over their teeth, and a smell . . . a kind of dry bones smell that makes you want to stop breathing. You fish out a scroll of thick, yellowed parchment. It looks suspiciously like human skin and you’re kinda glad you’re wearing gloves.’ Elton conjured the vision. ‘The letters have been branded into the parchment, maybe while it was still someone’s skin. It hurts your eyes to look at them and none of it makes any sense.’

‘Some bad juju here.’ John reached out to edge his warrior away from Mia’s cleric.

‘Give it to Nicodemus,’ Simon said. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not holy.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I held up my hand before Elton could open his mouth. ‘I’ll put on some gloves.’

Elton shrugged. ‘So you study it. The letters make a kind of sense to you. It’s the style of magic you practise, but way above your pay grade. It’s so difficult to understand that it starts to give you the headache from hell.’

‘I sit down and press on with it. The others can wait.’ My character had maximum intelligence. A kind of conceit since it rarely mattered beyond a certain level.

‘OK. Well, you can only just understand it.’ Elton reached out and gave me a folded piece of paper so I would know what the spell was and could choose to share the knowledge with the others or not. I read it and handed it back.

‘The lamest spell in the game,’ I said. ‘Power Word Kill.’

John frowned, Mia looked blank, Simon inhaled. ‘In what universe is Power Word Kill lame? It’s a ninth-level spell! We could sell that scroll for thousands!’

‘What does it do?’ Mia asked.

‘You speak one word and point at someone,’ Simon said. ‘They die. Then the scroll turns to dust.’

‘See what I mean?’ I asked.

‘You can kill anyone?’ John’s frown deepened.

‘Well, any person or creature we’ve met in the game so far, yes.’

‘Just like that? No saving throw?’

‘Yes.’

‘That is lame.’ John nodded.

‘It’s brilliant!’ Simon said.

‘Why don’t you like it, Nick?’ Mia tilted her head to one side, watching me. I found that I liked her attention.

‘Pretty much everything that happens in this game gives you a chance. You get a saving throw, or some other roll of the dice, and if you get a good enough result you can wriggle out from under. It might be an impossible ask. One chance in twenty. One in a hundred. But you get a chance. Not a choice, but a chance. This, though? Nothing. The person with the spell says “die”, and you do. End of story.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t like that.’

Mia pursed her lips, then nodded. ‘I get it.’

The game moved on, with the scroll tucked into Nicodemus’s backpack: too valuable to use and still a bone of contention around the table. Hours rolled past, as they do when you’re wholly occupied with something. The real world took a seat at the back and Elton’s imaginary one held centre stage.

Mia proved to be funny, shockingly rude on occasion, and the sneaky kind of clever that gets things done. I found myself stealing glances at her. She threw herself into the game in a way that I still couldn’t, without reservation. I wanted to be more like her. If I was going to die young, I wanted to at least squeeze the juice out of life rather than pick at it. But you can’t change who you are. Not even with a gun to your head.

‘You OK, Nick?’ Mia, pausing with the dice ready to throw. ‘You look pale.’

‘All good.’ I waved her on. The pain in my leg eased for a moment.

In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery. Playing the game kept my mind on something else. For most of the session, the pains in the long bones of my legs and the sickness in my stomach subsided to annoyance. At other times, they were a spike pinning me to the fact of my disease.

‘So . . .’ Elton closed his notebook and scooped up his dice. ‘That’s all got to keep for another day, ’cause I’m out of here.’ He started to pile rulebooks into his bag. ‘All we got to know now is, how come the hat, Nicky? How come the hat?’ A broad grin.

And suddenly all eyes were on me. There had been times at the table that I’d forgotten I was wearing the hat. All at once it felt heavy. I had considered lying. Just telling them that it was hair loss due to anxiety. Stress alopecia they called it. I looked it up. But although I felt a wholly unwarranted degree of shame in admitting to cancer, it seemed somehow worse to declare myself to be going bald at fifteen without good reason.

‘Yeah, what about the hat, Nick?’ Mia asked, smiling.

My mouth went dry, and suddenly out of nowhere I was struggling to keep my voice steady. As if I might burst into tears at any moment or something equally stupid. ‘I didn’t come to school this Thursday, or last, because I was on an oncology ward.’

‘Onk-what-ogy?’ John snorted.

‘Ward?’ Simon frowned. ‘Like a hospital.’

‘Cancer.’ A scowl from Elton. ‘Not cool, dude. That shit’s not funny. Don’t joke about it.’

I paused. Even while sat there trying to get the words out without my voice breaking I was struck by the fact that each of them had said almost exactly what they said in my weird hospital vision.

‘I’m not joking.’ I pulled my cap off.