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I was spending too much time alone on the computer. Instead her main concern was that I was going to get into serious trouble at school. She didn’t know that my cockiness was based on my knowing for certain that whateverI got up it, it would turn out all right.
    When I looked back to the cupboard, I winked at my friends, in the hope we could play a trick on Michael.
    ‘You know, most human beings can’t tolerate being in a dark confined space for very long. It’s called claustrophobia.’ My voice was just loud enough that I was certain Michael could hear me. ‘Zed, I bet you can’t stay in there a minute.’
    ‘A minute? Sure I can.’ Zed climbed in and we pushed the door shut. After about thirty seconds, he banged it open. ‘Let me out! That’s horrible.’ When it comes to devilment, Zed is really quick on the uptake. I’d learned it all from him.
    ‘OK, that’s thirty-five seconds for Zed.’ I was pretending to look at my new digital watch. ‘Your turn, Deano.’
    By now Deano had got it. He didn’t last much longer.
    ‘Forty-four seconds,’ I announced and looked around the room. ‘Anyone else?’
    I’m sure that Tara appreciated the psychology of the situation , because she looked up from her group of friends, disgusted. But as far as Michael was concerned, here were three of the most admired boys in the class, behaving feebly in the face of a challenge that any idiot could succeed in. He stood up, put his pen cap properly back on his pen – he was the first to have a real ink pen – strode over full of confidence and sat in the cupboard.
    ‘Time me.’
    ‘Thirty seconds. Keep going, Michael.’
    ‘A minute! Go, Michael!’
    ‘Two minutes.’
    At three minutes, Zed couldn’t help letting out a snort of laughter and we heard the faintest of whimpers.
    ‘Oh no.’
    ‘I’m afraid so.’
    No sooner had he got inside and pulled the door shut than I had silently lowered the latch, so he couldn’t get out. For a while he pleaded with us, but we weren’t even listening. We were at the back of the class designing logos for ‘Inextreme’, the band we intended to form. Then Michael banged on the door for a few minutes, fast at first, becoming more intermittent as he became disheartened.
    Towards the end of lunch break, two teachers came into the classroom, the usual dinner patrol to check everything was all right. We went silent and Michael must have sensed the change in atmosphere, because he started kicking the side of the press.
    If you ask everyone in my class what happened next, nobody will remember how it first went, which is that the teachers let him out and he blamed me. Locking Michael in a cupboard was pretty harmless really, but my mum and dad were getting fed up with complaints from school. I didn’t want them to get another. So even as the teachers were about to get involved, I searched out other paths. No one in this universe remembers the version where I got in trouble because I moved, to a universe in which, just as the teachers entered our classroom and the talking stopped, I began drumming with my ruler on the desk. Zed picked up the beat. Deano thumped the covers of a textbook together for the bass. Lots of my other classmates joined in. It was like a samba band. The teachers could tell something wasup, from our grinning faces, but they didn’t care enough to investigate and left us to it.
    ‘Close one,’ muttered Zed.
    ‘No kidding.’ In more than two-thirds of the possible universes they’d heard the noises from the cupboard and released Michael, who vented his annoyance by getting me into trouble.
    Before long, in twos and threes, the rest of our class returned and we were all sitting in proper silence when Miss Nolan came back in from lunch. After she had sat down and opened a textbook , she took a steady look around the class. It wasn’t long before she noticed Michael’s empty desk.
    ‘Where is Michael Clarke? He was here this morning.’
    There was this tense