would confirm the simplest truth he knew about himself: that he wasn’t up to this, and never had been.
Now Kat’s letter gave him strength – he had done that. For better or worse, it propelled him forward.
‘Yeah,’ Wesley said. ‘I’m up for it.’
If this strange fade was caused by withdrawal from the real world, maybe all Kat needed to do was re-engage. Maybe she just needed to go outside. Suzy had always told her to get out more.
There were a few hours before she was due to meet the Lonely People, and sitting at home was driving her crazy. Going to school would at least give her the chance to test the limits of the fade – it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go, and she might feel better knowing what she was up against. Right?
Alongside her usual school clothes, Kat added tights and a blazer in an attempt to make herself as solid as possible. She was almost dressed when Dad knocked on her door. ‘Are you okay in there?’
Dinner had still been waiting forlornly in the oven when Kat snuck downstairs in the middle of the night. She’d thrown it away and helped herself to a selection of luminous orange snacks instead, although once she’d brought them up to her room her appetite had abandoned her.
‘I’m going to work now,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s catch up later, okay?’
Kat had always joked – to herself – that she learned most of what she knew about video game mechanics from studiously avoiding her dad. Over time, she’d realised it might be true. In the evenings Dad would pour a glass of wine and spread his marking across the living room carpet while Kat stayed upstairs, making toilet runs when she was certain he wasn’t nearby.
Excluding the weirdness of the fade, there was no actual reason for it be so difficult to talk to Dad. Generally speaking, they got along fine. The word that always came to mind was estrangement. It had only become apparent after Suzy went to university.
Before Mum left, Dad and Suzy had always got on. They watched films and went shopping together. They even looked more alike, Suzy’s skin a similar dark brown where Kat’s was lighter, closer to Mum’s.
There was a vacuum to be filled after Mum was gone. Suzy’s already BIG personality expanded further to fill the space. It was always unclear why, but she began to clash with Dad, and after a while it seemed like they never stopped fighting. Kat was left no territory but the sidelines. Even though Suzy was gone, and had barely been in touch since, Kat hadn’t found a way back. She thought if they kept to themselves, their relationship couldn’t sour like it had with her mum and sister. So they became like former best friends who had moved on, obliging them to be cordial and nothing more whenever they ran into each other. Awkward, when you live together.
Now, as she listened to Dad’s feet shift uncertainly on the carpet outside her bedroom door, she wondered if trying so hard to find herself online had made her neglect the scraps of life she still had here.
She wanted to show Dad what had happened. She wanted him to see and tell her that she would be okay. There had to be a not-crazy way to do it. Maybe she could wrap herself in a hooded cape, hurl a smoke bomb into the room, and then unveil herself – ta da! She had the cape (for cosplay reasons) but she was fresh out of smoke bombs.
‘Have a good day,’ said Dad, before he headed downstairs.
Kat knew the real reason she couldn’t show him. It was one thing to be invisible to the world. Her dad not seeing her would be to lose a fundamental part of her existence.
Once he had left, she went downstairs and stood behind the front door, trying to psyche herself up.
In the Doctor Backwash episode ‘The QWOP Factory’, Vladimir is stung by an escaped genetically modified hornet and his hands swell to three times their normal size. The only way to fix it is to get back to his lab, except he can’t drive and his wallet is stuck in the hornet hive (long story). So he faces up to the ridicule he knows he’s going to face, and sets off across campus.
‘For science,’ Kat said, and opened the door.
There was no sign of her in the canteen or the playground, in any of the