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THE BOY KNOWN AS Carter Street was dreaming.

In his dream, he was in an empty space. There were no windows, no lights, but it wasn’t dark, just a dull, bland grey. He was standing because there was nowhere to sit — no chairs, no sofa. He couldn’t even sit on the floor because there didn’t seem to be a floor. Maybe it wasn’t a room at all. He could have been hanging in the air. Or he might have been inside his own head.

But the room, the space, wherever he was — it wasn’t completely empty. There was a big television. And an unseen hand turned it on.

What he saw on the screen was vaguely familiar, like a rerun of a programme he’d seen before. A young boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, was riding on a roller coaster. He was accompanied by two shadowy, larger figures sitting on either side of him — the boy’s parents? The boy was laughing, throwing his arms up in the air as his car went into a steep descent.

The vision on the screen dissolved, and was replaced by another image. The same boy, with the same shadowy figures, at a dining table. Then he saw the boy splashing in a swimming pool. And now the boy was running round a baseball diamond. Then, abruptly, that unseen hand switched off the TV and the screen went dark.

That was when he woke up. For a moment he just lay in the bed very still and stared at the white ceiling above him. That boy in the dream. . Did he know him? Maybe, maybe not. But there was definitely a connection. Whoever he was, the boy had been turned off, and Carter Street could relate to that.

He sat up and looked around. There was no television in this room, but it wasn’t dark and empty. Light streamed in from a window. There was a desk, a chest of drawers, a basin with a mirror over it. There was even a picture on a wall — a small brown puppy lapping water in a bowl. Did the boy in his dream have a dog? No, because his mother was allergic to dog hair.

But he couldn’t have known that, could he? Not if he didn’t know the boy. Anyway, it was just a dream. He shook his head vigorously as if he could shake out the memory of it, but he knew it would linger. They always did, those dreams.

He didn’t want to remember dreams — he had to concentrate on the present. His name, for example. Carter Street. At least, that was what everyone called him. And his location. . He wasn’t in the home of his foster family, the Grangers. And he wasn’t in Madame’s ‘gifted’ class at Meadowbrook Middle School. Then it came back to him: he was in a place called Harmony House, a special place for teenagers who were in trouble. Was he in trouble? He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He wasn’t in danger, that much he knew for sure, and that was all that mattered. He wasn’t cold, he had a roof over his head and a bed to sleep in. He wasn’t hungry — well, maybe he was, just a little, but he knew that he’d be having food very soon. So everything was OK.