** Alistair **

Sometimes, I wondered how I hadn't made friends with Anson before. He was mental. More mental than some of my other friends, and I was starting to think he might even be more mental than me. I mean, come on, he'd asked me to break into his house and steal his stuff so he could run off with his hot girlfriend. The guy was off his rocker. It just goes to show: It's always the quiet one. I snickered at the thought as I hopped the back wall into the garden behind his house.

I glanced around to make sure I hadn't been spotted. The garden was small and rough and full of weeds among the brightly-coloured flowers. Very quaint and exactly what I'd expected Anson's back garden to look like. I'd have been surprised if I'd discovered Anson secretly had a green thumb. Sneakily, I slunk along the far wall of the garden and pressed up against the back of the house. Peering slyly in the through the window, I found myself looking onto a cosy kitchen flooded with warm light. There was a woman, standing by the sink and peeling potatoes, who I assumed to be Anson's mother. I ducked as she turned to drop a peeled potato into a pan on the stove, and hoped I hadn't been spotted.

After a few moments, when nobody came running out the back door to yell at me, I slid away from the window and straightened up to eye the drainpipe hugging the wall. It ran right up the roof and spread out along the slates. Little metal cuffs held it firmly to the wall, but I shook it to be sure none of them were loose. Nope, it seemed sturdy enough. So I hiked my foot onto the first metal cuff, stuffing the toe of my trainer into the irregular gap between the cylindrical pipe and the flat wall. Grasping the cold, slick pipe with both hands, I pulled myself upright, pressing flat against the pipe, balancing my weight on the toe of my right foot. This was the bit I hated: Climbing. I was probably going to lose the skin on the tips of my fingers. Still, I got my fingers curled around a metal cuff just above my head and pulled myself up until my left foot scrabbled against a cuff about two feet higher than the one my right foot was on. And then I did it again and again, using the metal cuffs like the rungs of a very tricky, awkward ladder, until I reached the upper windows of the house.

I peered in through the window closest to me, clinging to the drainpipe like a friggin' lizard, and let out a silent sigh of relief as I spotted Anson's schoolbag on the floor and a familiar notepad sitting on the desk, next to the computer. It was the same notepad he brought to school with him, though I had no idea what he wrote in it. But clearly this was his room. Hopefully, he'd left the window unlocked and I wouldn't have to jimmy it open. Prying one hand from the drainpipe, I reached over and got my nails under the window frame, then pulled. Thankfully, the window slid up easily and I grinned as I edged carefully over using my fingers and climbed in the window.

Once safely in the room, I grinned. Anson's room was dim, unlit, but there was enough of the summer sunlight pouring in through the window behind me that I could see okay. It's not like I was stupid enough to turn on lamp – unnecessary fingerprints, and the possibility of somebody in the hallway noticing the glow from under the door. I moved quietly across the room, completely unsurprised by the stack of books piled on the bedside table, but the weights nestled in the corner, hiding in the shadows, did catch me a little by surprise. I hadn't thought of Anson as the kind to work out – but then again, I hadn't thought of him as the kind to run away with his new girlfriend for a sexy weekend. I wished I could say I wasn't jealous, but I so was. I fancied Poppy, no denying it, and since Miranda broke up with me, I was an available man again. I had no trouble getting girls really; it was just that I couldn't seem to hang onto any of them for very long. Probably a fault of my own that I hadn't figured out yet – maybe the rat tattoo.

Still, I didn't resent Anson for getting Poppy. The guy had effectively spent the last two years alone, without a single friend, let alone a girlfriend. He was a good guy, a good friend, and despite my rep for partying and minor felonies, I did right by my friends – and if they were really decent friends, they stuck around long enough to find out that my rep was mostly just talk. I crashed a party now and then, just to keep it going because it amused me on a whimsical level, but most of my bad-ass behaviour resulted from stories I made up to impress folks and to keep the bullies off my ass. Little bits of the stories were true – I'd done some pretty crazy stuff a couple of years back – but the rest was just gaff. Like the stuff about my criminal record. Yeah, I was pretty good at breaking and entering but that was because I'd been locked out of my own house too many times to count (my older sister was a real bitch sometimes) and I'd mastered the climb into the second storey window of my bedroom.

Returning to the land of here and now, I cautiously skirted the edges of Anson's room, where floorboards were less likely to creak, and kept an eye on the bedroom door. I searched out a duffle bag from under the neatly-made bed and started shoving clothes from the dresser into it. I reached the wardrobe and inched the wooden doors open, wincing at the squeak of an unhappy metal hinge. I glanced at the closed bedroom door, watching the line of yellow light pouring through the gap at the bottom for a shadow, but the door stayed closed. Turning back to the wardrobe, I pulled random things off the hangers: Two pairs of jeans, a couple of dark shirts, a grey hoodie. Into the duffle bag they went, joining the party of socks, boxers, t-shirts and simple, necessary items such as a can of deodorant and a comb.

I was just about to close the wardrobe doors when I spotted something glimmering inside a black dress shoe at the bottom of the wardrobe. The shoe and its partner were tucked away at the very back, almost hidden under an ugly chequered shirt that had fallen off its hanger. Curious, I leaned in and fished out the glimmering thing from the left shoe. It was cool and irregular in my fist, and when I opened my hand to look at it, I saw it was a necklace of sorts. Various sizes of shiny, silver safety pins lined up orderly on either side of a chunk of red stone, all laced onto a string of leather. Oddly, I got the feeling it was important to Anson, even though it was lying in the darkest recess of the wardrobe, and, following a gut impulse, I dropped it into the duffle bag along with his mysterious notepad.

I considered, for a moment, finding out once and for all what was in his notepad that was so special he had to take it everywhere with him. But then I thought better of prying – I certainly wouldn't want anyone perusing through my scribbled thoughts, and I had the impression that Anson's notepad was like a journal to him. And no, I didn't think it made him a pussy. I thought it made him pretty damn brave, to write down his thoughts and stuff on paper. I couldn't admit to myself the kind of stuff you'd write in a journal. Freaked me out just to think about it – and zipped up the duffle bag before the curiosity had the chance to get to me and change my mind.

I got out of there without too much trouble, tossing down the duffle bag before skimming down the drainpipe and beating dust out of there, hopping the wall and sticking to the shadows until I was safely out of view of the house. Right, I thought, heaving the duffle bag onto my shoulder, Let's go find out where he and Poppy are hiding out.