Leo stared out the car window as they drove to their new home. Mum and Dad said it would take ten hours, maybe eleven. He hadn’t seen even a photo of the house. He only knew that Dundle was a small town, a tiny black dot on the orangey-brown part of Peg’s map. They’d always lived in the green corner of the map, close to the city, not far from the beach. Now they sped along a bumpy highway towards the orangey-brown, away from everything he knew and away from Ralph.

Peg sat across from him on the back seat. She caught him looking at her. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Whatcha thinking about?’

She stared out the window. ‘Clouds. See that big fluffy one?’ She pointed to the sky. ‘What do you think it looks like?’

He stretched across the seat and looked out her window. Any other day he would have said it was something from space. A Gronk or a Grimble. A marshmallow planet. But not today. ‘It looks like a turtle.’

She angled her head. ‘I thought it was a cow. Anyway, there won’t be many clouds in Dundle. Dad said it never rains.’

There was nothing else on the highway, then a dot appeared in the distance, straight ahead. It grew bigger as it came towards them on the other side of the road and Leo saw it was a huge truck. When it roared past them, as loud as a hailstorm, it felt like their car might blow off the road.

Peg turned to Leo. ‘I can’t stop thinking about school, either – who my teacher will be, what the kids’ll be like.’

‘Yeah.’ Leo winced at the thought of school. His chance to start again, like Mum and Dad said. Leave Ralph behind and find someone real.

She tapped his head. ‘What are you thinking about?’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not much.’

‘I thought you’d be thinking about Ralph.’

‘Well.’ He faced his own window. ‘Yeah. A bit.’

He had thought about nothing else for the whole drive. With every small town they passed, a memory of Ralph flashed in his mind. They drove past a rusty ute in Wilcott and he thought of the day he and Ralph carved a dirt track for his toy cars. A girl cycled along a path in Craven Creek and he remembered riding his bike along a forest trail, Ralph clinging to his back the whole time. The towns whizzed by and he daydreamed of all they had done together. Climbing trees, making cubbies and swimming like a pair of sea otters.

After dinner in Mount Logan, Dad said there was only an hour left till they got there. Leo let his head fall against the car window. The sinking sun spilled apricot and plum into the sky. Silhouettes of sleeping cows rested in paddocks and, out Peg’s window, a field of sunflowers caught the last breath of light. The car tyres hummed and the song on the radio dissolved into fuzz. Leo closed his eyes and yawned. The last thing he heard was Peg snuffle and snore, and it reminded him of Ralph’s sniffly nose when they’d said goodbye.