0.4 by Mike Lancaster

sudden seriousness on her face shut me up.
    ‘Can either of you tell me what the hell is going on?’ she demanded.
    Lilly and I just shook our heads.
    ‘Nothing good,’ Lilly said. ‘My . . . my parents aren’t my parents any more.’
    ‘Mine neither,’ I said.
    Mrs O’Donnell looked at us with a kind of weary acceptance.
    ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘You’re both out of breath.’
    ‘We ran here,’Lilly explained.
    We sat down on one of the two sofas. Mrs O’Donnell disappeared for a few moments and returned with a coupleof glasses of orange squash. She handed them out and took a seat on the other sofa.
    She asked me what had happened, so I sketched the events since we had parted on the high street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though Mrs O’Donnell’s clock told me it was just less than an hour. Again, my body and a clock disagreed. Time passed weirdly through the looking glass.
    Mrs O’Donnell heard me out, then shook her head and gave an exasperated tut.
    ‘And this thing he called you . . .
nought-point-four
. . . you’re sure that’s what he said?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Well, what do you think
that’s
supposed to mean?’ she asked.
    I told her that I didn’t have a clue.
    ‘Nought-point-four,’ she mused. ‘Decimals. Pretty meaningless unless you know what they’re referring to.’
    She turned to Lilly and her face softened a little.
    ‘And what’s been happening to you, my dear?’
    Lilly sighed.
    ‘It hasn’t gone a lot different to Kyle’s afternoon,’ she said. ‘Simon was, like,
totally
weird. I met up with him when everyone got moving again, and I thought he might be a little . . . I don’t know . . . disorientated by the . . . well, you know, whatever it is we’re calling all of this.’
    She waved a hand in the air as if showing how hard this whole thing was to describe.
    ‘Anyway, I started asking him about what had happened to him, you know, all the freezy stuff, and he looked at me like I was mad.’
    She broke off and then she shook her head.
    ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘Except he didn’t look at me like that. I think I could maybe have coped with that. This look was something else.’ She paused as she tried to pin down her thoughts. ‘He looked at me like I was . . .
dirt.
’
    I thought about how Doctor Campbell had looked at me.
    ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I got angry with him. At first I thought that he just didn’t believe me, or something. But it wasn’t that. It was like he was . . . looking down on me. As if he knew something that I didn’t. So I got cross with him, and hejust walked away. Just turned his back on me and walked. He didn’t turn around.’
    Her top lip was quivering and she had tears welling in her eyes.
    I felt a sudden flare of anger at Simon for doing that to Lilly, and then a stabbing pang of guilt when I realised it actually wasn’t a whole lot different to what I had done to her after visiting her parents’ house.
    ‘So I think:
Fine. Be like that
,’ she continued. ‘And I walk home – the whole thing rolling round and round inside my brain. And I’m scared and angry and confused and angry again. And my parents are like:
What’s up with you?
And I don’t even know where to start. And they look like my parents, they sound like my parents, but there’s something . . .
off
about them, so I tell them that we’ll talk later and I need to go to my room, and that’s when Doctor Campbell rings the doorbell.’
    ‘Your parents didn’t call Doctor Campbell either?’ I asked her.
    ‘No,’ she said, sounding a little baffled by the question. ‘They didn’t have time. I mean I hadn’t even gone upstairswhen he turned up, so how
could
they have called him? And then there’s the whole
telephones not working
thing.’
    Mrs O’Donnell leaned forwards in her seat.
    ‘Do you think
Simon
told him to come around and see you?’
    Lilly looked genuinely shocked.
    ‘Why would he . . .?’ she started. ‘I mean . .