The teenager allows the silence to linger as Mary Ann thinks about the situation. After about half a minute he pipes up again to lend her company in the uncertainty, “My first two Echoes... I had no idea what either of them did for a long time, and it wasn’t until the day of the Pride parade that I got some inclination about one of them. That was only when I suddenly managed to avoid a collision with someone by doing a backflip. I had never even attempted one before.”

Echoes are strange things.