The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.

It is strange to hear your mother talk about being human because, honestly, it's too easy to forget.

I would never say snog. I would say osculate." She looks at me as if to say: why do you exist?

...I want to grab her collarbones as if they were handlebars.

Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.

After that, we had a short conversation about how your body can sometimes seem totally separate. She said her body can feel like a distant bureaucracy controlled by telegrams from her brain, and I said my body is sometimes like that of Mario Mario, being controlled with a Nintendo joypad. Mario's surname is Mario.

I spin around on the swivel chair and look up at the ceiling; Oliver being Oliver being Oliver being Oliver. I am suddenly aware of the separation between my-actual-self and myself-as-seen-by-others. Who would win in an arm wrestle? Who is better-looking? Who has the higher IQ?