When Davey turns up in Mr Mackie's class, he seems different. Full of imagination and interesting ideas, but wearing rather disreputable clothes, he begins to be called names and made fun of. The class bully is particularly mean to him - until he begins to enjoy Davey's oddities and secretly makes friends with him. The bully, Sam, who tells the story, doesn't admit in the beginning that he is the bully, but when he does, the penitance that follows is very real. Sam sees Davey at home (their mums are friends) and when Davey saves him from being run down in the street, he announces that Sam's life now belongs to him. They go cloud busting together, lying on their backs in the grass and making up stories about the shapes of the clouds. But at school the bully is still a bully, and when he tells a friend about Davey's peanut allergy, tragedy almost ensues. After the anaphylactic shock (luckily there is an EpiPen available), Davey changes and becomes like the other boys. He and Sam are no longer real friends, and Davey seems to have lost his vividness. Sam must deal with the guilt of not having stopped the joke that caused Davey's nearly fatal collapse. When Davey leaves the school, Sam realises that his quirky outsiders way of looking at the world with joy and colour will always be inside him. Written completely in verse in different forms - all explained by Blackman in an afterward - this is a superb story/poem, wonderfully vivid in language and form and liberally sprinkled with expressive black and white pictures. Do read it and buy it!