Rule Number One: Don't Fall for Me

Tilly Dawson has three rules for surviving Year 13: keep your head down, deliver Nan's chips on time, and stay well away from Jude "Midas" Hartley. Everything he touches turns to trouble.

Then one dark night on the Rochdale Canal towpath, Tilly swerves her ancient bike to miss a fox and knocks Midas's phone into the water. She can't pay the £800, so she signs a contract written in biro on chip paper: forty days as his personal assistant. Rule 1: "Don't fall for me." Her amendment: "As if."

Meanwhile someone is spraying gold crowns and "THE SAINTS WERE HERE" across Ashcroft College. When £4,200 raised for a classmate's wheelchair vanishes from the college safe, Jude is the obvious suspect.

Tilly has found out the secret he's been hiding: every day at 2:58 he leaves college to look after his little sister. That's why he can't explain where he really was, and she's the only one who believes him.

To clear his name she has to take on the college's golden boy, a gossip account, a social worker's knock at the door and a loan shark with a gold tooth. All before day forty, and all without breaking Rule 1. Too late.