When you have a kid, don’t call it something stupid.

Don’t call it Apple, or Pear, or Mung Bean.

Don’t call it Owl.

This advice is a bit late for me. Because she did. She did call me Owl. Thirteen years ago she looked down at a tiny little baby – me – and decided that Owl would be a good way to go.

I guess she didn’t know then that I would grow up to have white-blonde hair that flicks around my face like feathers, no matter what I do with it. That my eyes would turn from baby blue to the palest brown, almost yellow; that my nose would be on the beaky side.

She should have seen that last one coming, though; I inherited it from her.

I like owls. I think they’re beautiful. But you know, my head doesn’t rotate 360 degrees. I can’t fly. I don’t hunt at night.

All these are questions the other kids have asked me, over the years. Mum laughs when I tell her.

‘See!’ she cries, looking up from whatever she’s doing, a glint in her dark eyes. ‘Already you stand out from the crowd. Already you are different. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?’

She’s beautiful, my mum. Not in a subjective way, like she’s my mum therefore she must be beautiful. She’s actually beautiful. She has these big dark eyes, masses of dark hair and when she smiles, when she laughs, it’s very difficult not to join in.

I do try my very best not to join in.

Her name is Isolde. She wears lots of bright colours, and tinkling bangles on her wrists. She smells of warm things: vanilla, cinnamon, oranges and blackcurrants, and something deeper that’s just her, I guess.

My friends love her.

Which is annoying.

‘Owl McBride!’

I look up from my desk. Mr Leonard is perched on the edge of his table, his ankles crossed in front of him. His hands rest on the table, one finger tap-tapping against it. There’s a diagram on the board behind him but it’s all squiggles to me.

‘Are you concentrating?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘On the lesson, I mean, as opposed to your doodling?’

I blush as a roll of laughter goes around the room.

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘That’s all right. If you can tell me what pi is.’

Clearly it’d be a bad idea to tell him it’s something I eat with my chips. His eyebrows are just daring me to do it. They look like black marker pen stripes, drawn too high on his forehead, trying to hide beneath his shaggy dark hair.

‘It’s where the circle has a diameter and the circumference is . . . when you calculate it . . . that’s pi.’

I smile hopefully, but Mr Leonard drops his head and sighs.

‘I suppose,’ he says, standing up and walking to the board. ‘I suppose I should just be happy that you know the right words, even if you’ve no idea what to do with them.’ He starts jabbing at the board with a blue marker, making more squiggles. I copy them down in my book. The rest of the class does the same. Mallory, next to me, is still laughing.

‘Shh!’ I hiss at her, my pen moving across the paper, making alien mathematical shapes I’ve no use for.

It was an owl. The doodle in my maths book. I draw them, over and over. Little ones, big ones, owls with crazy whirly eyes, owls swooping from the sky. They’re in all the borders of my lined schoolbooks. They’re on Post-it notes around my bedroom. I have sketches of them, paintings, even little clay figures.

I’m not saying they’re good. Actually, if you walked into my bedroom you’d probably run back out again screaming. They’re a bit intense.

Mum loves them. Loves them. She thinks it’s me expressing myself.

Drawing myself, over and over again.

Mallory just rolls her eyes when she sees a new one now. She bought me a card with a puffin on it for my birthday a couple of weeks ago.

‘Maybe a change?’ she wrote inside. ‘Now that you’re thirteen?’

But I’m not called Puffin.

And there has to be a reason.

A reason Mum called me Owl.