You can tell by looking at our place that no-one’s living in it. It’s not just the piles of junk mail bursting out of the letterbox or the grass being a bit too long. It just looks empty, somehow. Dad’s van is parked out the front and I can see him sitting in it, smoking a cigarette. That’s not a good sign. Dad only smokes when he’s mad or upset. He gets out and crushes the cigarette on the road when we pull up.

Mum and Dad start up their usual routine before we’ve even gone through the front door.

‘You sure took your time getting here,’ Dad says. ‘So it’s my fault that the traffic was bad?’ Mum says.

‘I bet you took Glenburn Road,’ says Dad. ‘Even though I’ve told you a thousand times that Wendall Road is faster.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Mum says. ‘Glenburn is the quickest way.’ They argue about roads for a while and then the topic switches.

‘Why was Anya wandering around Westland Mall on her own, anyway?’ Dad asks.

‘Because I have to work, Steve,’ Mum snaps back. ‘And I thought I could trust her on her own for an hour.’ Then they both look at me like they’re thinking, Well, that’s obviously not the case.

As we walk inside, Dad launches into the lecture I knew would be coming. About how disgusted he is with me. How disappointed. But I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I haven’t been to the house for a few weeks and it’s weird how different it feels. It’s all echoey for one thing, and it feels much bigger than it did when we were in it – like the emptiness has pushed the walls further apart. It stinks of fresh paint too.

‘You’ve really let me down, Anya,’ Dad says as we all troop into the lounge room.

I am listening (it’s impossible not to) but I’m also trying to work out what’s missing from the room. I mean, obviously there are a lot of things missing. All the pictures are gone and pretty much all of the furniture. All that’s left are two armchairs, which have been pushed into the centre of the room and covered with white sheets. They look like ghosts – short fat ones. The painters covered them to stop them getting paint-splattered, I guess. But the thing that’s missing isn’t the furniture or pictures. It’s something else. I just can’t work out what it is right now.

Mum is frowning at the two chairs. ‘Why are those still here?’ she says.

Dad groans and plonks himself down on one. ‘I don’t know where you expect me to take them, Jill,’ he says. ‘My place is the size of a cupboard.’ He sits up. ‘Anyway, we’re not here to talk about chairs.’ He’s looking at me as he says it. ‘So, what did you take?’ he asks.

I really, really don’t want him to know – it’s way too embarrassing – but Mum fishes the bra out of her bag and hands it to him. It’s all squashed out of shape now, as well as being ink-stained, and I can tell that Dad isn’t really sure what it is at first. And when he does work it out, he’s even more puzzled.

‘What did you take this for?’ he asks. I just shrug and look at the ground. How can I explain to him about wanting to boost my profile and about how good it felt when I was wearing that bra? How it helped me feel better about the whole Ethan thing and forget about that scary blue vein. Dad wouldn’t get it. He’d probably just tell me the story – the one I’ve heard a thousand times already – about how he worked two jobs for three years so he could afford his first van.

Dad dumps the bra on the arm of the chair. ‘What’s her punishment going to be?’ he asks Mum.

‘Well, she’s going to be working off the money she owes me by helping out in the doctor’s office,’ says Mum. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Mum must have come up with this plan during our long, silent drive home.

‘How long do I have to do that for?’ I ask, and instantly realise I’ve made a mistake. Mum whirls around and glares at me.

‘For as long as it takes me not to be angry, Anya.’ Judging from her face right now, that could be a while.

Frankly, I think this is a massive punishment, but it’s not enough for my parents. They become almost civilised as they talk about how else to punish me.

‘What about no movie nights with her friends for a month?’ suggests Mum.

‘Two months,’ says Dad. ‘And no pocket money for three.’

I keep waiting for them to remember the school social, because the moment they do they’ll ban me from going. But neither of them mentions it. ‘There needs to be something else,’ Dad keeps saying. ‘One more thing.’

In the end I can’t stand it anymore. ‘The school social,’ I blurt out. ‘You’re supposed to ban me from that.’

They both look at me in surprise. ‘Don’t you want to go?’ asks Mum.

‘Yes, I want to go,’ I say, a little sulkily.

‘So why did you suggest it?’ asks Dad suspiciously.

I sigh and flop into one of the ghost chairs. ‘Because I knew you’d remember it in the end and I want to get this over and done with.’

My parents agree that I can’t go to the social, and I think that maybe we’re finally done when Mum says something that makes everything way, way worse. ‘And how about you rein in the gift-giving too,’ she says to Dad. ‘No more expensive jewellery for a while, okay?’

Dad looks astonished and straight away I know this won’t be good. ‘What?’ he says.

Mum rolls her eyes. ‘You know. The silver bracelet you gave Anya a few days ago.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ says Dad.

And then they both look at me, and Mum says, ‘Anya?’ So I have to tell them about the bracelet. And even though I explain that I put it in the charity bin (which you would think they’d be happy about), I’m now in so much trouble that basically my life is over.

For some reason, it’s then that I finally realise what’s missing from the room. The pencil lines in the doorframe. The ones that Dad made to measure our heights on each birthday. The doorframe is now shiny, clean and white. I jump up and run over to examine it, and there’s already a lump forming in my throat. Even up close, there’s no sign of the lines. No-one would know they’d ever been there at all.

‘They’re gone!’ I say, and there’s a wobble in my voice. ‘Our heights. You let the painters paint over the top of them.’

Mum and Dad stare at me for a moment. ‘Well, we had to,’ Mum says eventually. ‘The person who buys the house won’t be interested in how tall you girls were when you were five. You didn’t really think we’d leave it, did you?’

It’s funny the things that make you cry and the things that don’t. I didn’t cry when my parents told us they were splitting up. I didn’t cry when they announced they were selling the house. And even today, when I was caught by the security guard, I didn’t cry. But for some reason, knowing those pencil lines have been erased forever makes me burst into tears. ‘I knew the new owner would paint over them in the end,’ I sob. ‘I just didn’t think you guys would do it for them.’

I run back over to a ghost chair and curl up into it. Mum comes over and sits on one arm, and after a while I hear Dad sit on the other. Neither of them say anything. They just let me cry.

‘It’s really happening, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘The house is going to be sold. We’ll never live here again.’ I feel like my past is being painted over, along with those pencil lines.

Dad’s hand starts to stroke my back, just like he did when I was a little kid having trouble getting to sleep. ‘Ah, kiddo,’ he says softly. ‘Change is tough, isn’t it?’

Yeah, it’s tough. And these two haven’t made it any easier. Suddenly I’m mad – really mad – at them. I sit up. ‘You guys shouldn’t fight so much,’ I say. ‘It’s really embarrassing when you shout at each other over the phone when we’re out in public.’

Mum looks shocked. ‘We don’t do that, do we?’

‘Yeah, you do,’ I say. ‘All the time! I hate it. And you shouldn’t say mean things about each other to me. It makes me feel like you want me to take sides.’

They both go really quiet then and it’s obvious they’re shocked. Finally Mum says, ‘Like your dad said, things are changing a lot at the moment. And we’re at a really difficult, stressful point right now. But this is the worst bit. After the house is sold, things will get better, I promise.’

But I can’t be talked around that easily. ‘How can you promise that?’ I say. ‘You don’t know for sure that things will get better. They might get worse.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure of it,’ Mum replies. I want to believe her, but I’m not sure that I do.

Then Dad makes a suggestion – one that really surprises me, and I can tell it surprises Mum too. ‘Maybe we need some help with all of this,’ he says. ‘Not with staying together,’ he adds quickly, although he doesn’t really need to. We all know there’s no way that’s going to happen. ‘But help with splitting apart. You know – developing an exit plan or something.’

Mum nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Shelley if she can recommend anyone.’

Things kind of calm down a little after that. Dad grabs his toolbox from his van and does a couple of repair jobs that Mum’s been pestering him about for ages. Mum cleans the downstairs windows.

I go upstairs to my old bedroom to check if anything’s been left behind. The door of the built-in wardrobe is open and I have this sudden memory of how I played in there with a torch as a little kid, pretending it was a cave and I was an explorer. Taking my keys from my pocket, I climb inside the cupboard and scratch some words into the wood, right at the back. Anya Saunders was here. Maybe some kid will find it one day. I guess it’s a kind of dumb thing to do, but it makes me feel better somehow.

Then Dad phones for pizza and we end up eating it on the lounge-room floor. I can tell they’ve been talking while I was upstairs because halfway through dinner, Mum says, ‘Now, Anya, your dad is going to pay for the bracelet you took and that’s going to count as your birthday present from him this year. Does that sound fair?’ It sounds totally terrible to me, but naturally I don’t say that. Besides, I know my dad and he’ll find it almost impossible not to buy me something for my birthday. But I don’t say that either. I just nod.

Then Mum takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. ‘Anya,’ she says, and her voice is very soft now. ‘We’re really sorry about how things have been recently. We forgot what this break-up is like for you and Carolyn. Your dad and I have agreed that we’ll try to do better.’

Then Dad joins in. ‘But kiddo, you’ve got to promise us something too.’ I know what’s coming, of course, but I let him say it anyway. ‘We’d like you to promise us that you’ll never do anything like this again. No more stealing.’

I say that I won’t and they both seem satisfied. But I wish there was some way that I could really prove to them just how truly I mean it. How I know that I absolutely won’t ever do anything like this again. I never want to feel like I did in that security office again. But I guess the only way I can show them is over time. Which sucks, because I hate waiting.

We eat the rest of our pizza in silence. But it’s one of those good silences. As we’re finishing up, Dad says, ‘This is a good house, isn’t it?’

Mum nods. ‘I bet whoever buys it will be happy here.’ And for the first time, instead of feeling jealous of someone else getting our house, I feel good thinking that maybe they’ll love it as much as I did.

When it’s time to go, we all leave the house and Mum locks up. I wonder to myself if this is the last time I’ll go inside, and what it’ll be like to drive past when there’s another family living in there, playing in our backyard, marking their own heights on the doorframes. Maybe it won’t be so bad. It’d have to be better than seeing the place look all sad and empty like this.

Dad goes around to the back of his van, opens it and slides in his toolkit. Then he pulls out a cardboard box and comes over to hand it to Mum. It’s the missing iron.

‘Took this by mistake,’ he says with a sheepish grin. ‘Thought it was my old sandwich toaster.’ He kisses the top of my head goodbye. ‘See you on Wednesday, kiddo,’ he says.

As he drives off, Mum puts her arm around me and hugs me close to her side. We wave until he’s out of sight.