10
REVELATIONS IN TIME AND SPACE
In the days that followed, I kept my head down. Underwood had enough ammunition already. When he said run fifty laps for looking at him the wrong way, I ran them. When he called me a dreaming moron who ought to have been murdered at birth, I agreed with him.
And it was killing him.
My walks home with Lily Fielding were the best part of every day. We compared notes on the insanity of school life and laughed until we could hardly walk. She often asked how I was getting on with my magical piano, and I was in the habit of telling her the truth.
“So, what does Underwood put into his film diaries?” she asked me one day. I told her about his angry rants. “You make it sound so real, Joe.”
“That’s because it is real.”
She would often compliment me on having a
