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kitchen, but when they came and
took everything away we stopped getting any visitors and our home felt empty and strange.
    It’s already July; it’s been months since Mum told me the bad news and next week will be my last week at school and I’m already dreading it. Mum doesn’t want anyone to
know what’s really happening, so I can’t tell anyone. She says that she doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her and that we have to start our lives again, but I don’t want
to start my life again. I want to go back to how it was before. Sixteen months ago, before Dad died.
    Our house is filled with photographs of Dad and normally I look at one of the pictures and say hello to him. I’ll say hello to him bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower or goodnight to him
in a suit at a fancy party, but last night I didn’t bother. The day Dad died was really sad, but it felt as though he was still here. Now I really wish he was so I could ask him why. I wish I
could properly tell him off for leaving me and Mum in such a horrible mess because sometimes I can feel really angry with my stupid dad and his idiotic ‘forgetting to pay the
taxman’.
    When I woke up this morning, I looked around at my bedroom which used to be full of cool stuff, but was now nearly empty. My computer, fridge, guitar, TV, model planes, they were all gone. I
looked at the empty walls, the piles of clothes on the floor and saw that Otter had made a new basket for himself in a mountain of towels. I leaned forward and stroked his ears; he loves that. He
loves being with me the most and he hates being by himself. The first time we left him in the house on his own he chewed the legs off Mum’s special sculpture, chewed the cushions on the sofa
and weed all over the new carpet. Dad used to say that Otter was just like me, that we both hated to be by ourselves for longer than five minutes. It’s kind of true, although I don’t
chew cushions.
    I got up off my mattress and thought about the week ahead. The last week at school with all my friends. Louis is my best mate; we’ve known each other since primary school and we do
everything together, but since I told him I was leaving London he and Ed have been hanging out a lot more than they usually do. I phoned him last night, but the two of them had gone to the cinema
together. Part of me thinks that Lou will forget about me once I’m gone, but I’m trying not to think about that.
    I’ve been wondering about what kind of school I’ll go to in September and what everyone will be like. I’ve never been the new kid before and it kind of scares me; it makes me
feel like that might be the worst thing about all of this. It makes me feel terrible. In fact, ever since I found out we were going to have to move, I’ve been pretty miserable.
    When Mum told me about selling the house, I wasn’t sure where we’d go. Then she showed me a photograph of our new home, the little house where she had grown up.
    Not only did I have to move out of my home, leave my school and all my friends, but we were going to leave London too and it made me so cross that I threw the last can of Diet Coke across the
room and kicked the bin on the way out. She told me to come back and sit down, but I wouldn’t; instead I just hovered by the door. She came closer and tried to put her hand on my shoulder,
but I just shrugged her off me, moved away and leaned against the fridge, folding my arms across my chest. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a shoebox full of photographs that I
didn’t really recognise.
    ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I was about your age when this was taken.’
    I turned away and sighed, but she moved the photo right underneath my nose so I had to look. It was of a row of three white cottages with a group of people outside the middle one. There were two
fair-haired boys that looked so alike, both of them smiling in the sunshine; the younger one looked as though the other had just told him the funniest