To prove it was me, I'd get one of my lipsticks and, every night, gently draw a small red kiss X on his forehead as he slept. In the morning Norman would rush to the bathroom mirror to check for the mark and squeal in a five-, seven-, or eight-year-old muddle of delight and frustration.

"I didn't feel a thing, Mum!" he'd say. "Nothing, nada, niente, nyet! How'd you do it?" Even when he got older and I eventually stopped doing the kiss (and, come to think of it, wearing lipstick), he was still fascinated by how deeply he could sleep. He asked me once if I thought it was how being dead felt.

"Like you go off to sleep and one day you just don't feel anything ever again, Mum? You reckon?"

In the bad-parenting manual I'm thinking of writing I'd have to say I've never been able to give Norman a definitive answer on death, because, frankly, I still haven't worked out where I stand on it myself. You'd think after both my parents died by the time I was twenty I would have formulated some kind of theory to pass on to my son, just in case. But after hauling up a few stuttering "maybe's," a very lame "quite possibly" and the grand finale of "I don't really know," I had nothing. Nada. Niente. Nyet.

Whenever I came into Norman's room after Jax died, I'd find him just lying there, sheets and blankets spread smoothly over the minidune of his body. Not reading, not writing down a joke that had suddenly popped into his head; just staring at the wall where my father's shabby old mulberry-colored velvet suit jacket hung. All gussied up in that jacket, with his polished shoes and a rainbow Lurex cravat, Norman had been the perfect complement to Jax in his performance outfit of baggy trousers, T-shirt and braces.

Now the mulberry jacket hung in a semi-open-armed stance, straining its wire hanger shoulders, slowly sagging into a depressing shrug and, if I wasn't mistaken, taking Norman with it. And those sheets stayed smooth all night.

The other thing that happened was that Norman stopped telling me his nightly joke. Every night, for as long as I could remember, bedtime was when he'd try out his new material on me.

"Mum! Hey, Mum!" he'd call out as I passed by on my way to the bathroom. "Why did the scarecrow get promoted?" I'd stop and pretend to have a think, but he'd never give me any time before shouting out the answer. "Because he was outstanding in his field, Mum!" Or whatever the punch line was, before whacking the bed with a flourish. "I reckon Jax'll love that one!"

And while it might seem pretty par for the course for a boy who's lost his best friend to stop making jokes, for Norman, you should understand it was a lot to lose. Two weeks after his twelfth birthday, which made it four weeks after Jax died, as I passed Norman's room I slowed down, giving him time and hoping for even the faintest "Hey, Mum!" to stop me in my tracks. It didn't come, like I knew it wouldn't come, like it hadn't come for the past month. His bedside lamp was dimmed down as low as it could go and he looked like a sad little bat blinking in the bed.

"Hey, Norman," I whispered into the doorway. "You still awake?"

"Still awake, Mum."

I took the deepest breath I could and prepared to launch the joke I'd been silently deliberating on for ten minutes at the top of the stairs. Go, Sadie, go.

"I... I was just wondering. What do porcupines say when they kiss?" I thought I saw the corner of the bat's mouth curl up a little in the half dark. But I couldn't be sure.

"I dunno, Mum. What do porcupines say when they kiss?" I could imagine the cogs and wheels moving beneath his flattened fringe and I wished I could see them grinding. Anything to show he was still there.

"Ouch!" I saw a flash of teeth as Norman's lips opened slightly, mouthing the punch line, miraculously getting there at almost the same time I did. I'd said it too loudly, though, and the word was left hanging out on an uncomfortable limb in the silence. But he managed a snuffle into his chest in a pretend laugh anyhow.

Excerpted from The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson . Copyright © 2021 by Julietta Henderson . Excerpted by permission of Mira. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.