I didn’t even have that Friday feeling when I went home from school. Weekends are usually a reason to celebrate and dance around the living room, and that weekend was especially amazing because we only had Monday and Tuesday left before spring break. But when I got home, I just stomped up to our room to change. I had to share a room with Georgia, which was a teaspoonful of terrible. We didn’t really speak to each other unless we were on one of those lame family vacations where you rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing but green stuff outside and—surprise, surprise—it’s pouring rain. Then Mum and Dad would make us play board games because we were that bored. Even then, we argued.
Our room was OK—nothing special. It had four beige walls and a beige carpet covered with a stripy rug. The bookshelf was stacked with picture books we’d outgrown, teddy bears gathering dust, and games we didn’t play with anymore. I had posters of Bradley Porter and Liberty Lee on the wall near my bed, and Georgia had a poster saying YOUNG EXPLORERS—GO EXPLORE! with a photo of someone walking through a cave. You’d think she was some big brave adventurer, but if you looked down, you’d see her fairy bedspread and the fluffy Tigger she slept with every night sitting on her pillow.
Her bed was under the window and the wardrobe was at the end of it, near her feet. My bed was on the opposite wall near the door. To make sure there was no funny business, I’d drawn an invisible dividing line down the middle: Georgia wasn’t allowed to put any of her stuff over the line and neither was I. I didn’t cross over into her side except to get clothes out of the wardrobe. She had to walk across my half or she wouldn’t have been able to get to her bed, but apart from that, we didn’t set foot in the other half of the room. We still found a trillion ways to argue, don’t get me wrong, but at least there were boundaries.
Mum had this habit of putting the clean clothes she brought upstairs in a pile on the end of Georgia’s bed before she put them in the wardrobe. And Georgia didn’t like that, not one little bit. Georgia was majorly tidy—she made her bed every morning (I didn’t) and had a neatly organized drawer for all her important stuff (mine was a mess). Everything had its place and she didn’t like having a pile of clothes on her bed. Having my clothes there was even worse. And boy did she let me know it.
She’d obviously had it up to here that day because she’d left me a sticky note on the wardrobe door.
Take your stupid, ugly clothes off my bed or I’ll throw them out the window.
It wasn’t my fault my clothes were on her bed. So I wrote her a note back.
Me = Dara Palmer = Megastar
You = Georgia Palmer = Boring annoying person who sucks up to Mum and Dad and has nerdy friends.
Then I went down to eat.
The second I walked into the kitchen, Georgia went upstairs. I smirked at my hilarious note and then argued with Mum (I couldn’t see why I had to have a banana when what I really wanted was a bowl of cereal).
Georgia came downstairs. I looked to see if she was angry or annoyed with me, but I got no satisfaction because she wasn’t. She seemed fine. So I ate the banana (Mum won) and went up to our room.
Georgia had left another note on the wardrobe door.
You’ll never be a megastar because even Rocket Robin can act better than you.
Ucch. Rocket Robin was the dog next door. That was harsh.
I sneaked across the invisible line in the middle of the room, picked up Georgia’s precious Tigger from her pillow and squashed its face hard so its eyes went right in and its nose folded up. I counted to ten until it had well and truly suffocated, and then put it back on her pillow.
Before I went out again, I left her a reply.
Rocket Robin must be totally amazing then. And don't think you're coming to my movie premieres because you're not.
All Saturday, I practiced my singing. I mainly sang songs from The Sound of Music in case Ella Moss-Daniels broke all her limbs in a skiing accident and by some random miracle, Miss Snarling gave the part to me.
After five minutes, Georgia yelled at me to stop singing and then Dad and Felix joined in and even Mum asked me to please sing something else or go to the very end of the yard and sing there for a while.
Huh. If I ever got famous, it wouldn’t be because my family was right behind me.
I wanted to watch TV on Sunday morning, but Mum wouldn’t let me because she’d organized lunch with Vanna and her family, the Percys, and I had to help her prepare. They lived in Bath, so our families only got together a couple of times a year, but Vanna and I stayed at each other’s houses often during school breaks, so we were quite close.
I put my silver shoes on and got into the car. As we drove, I thought about Vanna. She was the closest thing to a real sister I had. She wasn’t related to me, but she was adopted from Happy Angels at the same time as I was so she just got it. Because on one hand, being adopted is totally normal: you’ve lived with this family for as long as you can remember and that’s all you’ve ever known.
But on the other hand, it’s totally weird. For a start, it was obvious I wasn’t the Palmers’ real child because I looked nothing like them. Mum was tall with short blond hair, sticking-out cheekbones, and long limbs. My dad had reddish hair (cut very short because he was going bald), a big beaky nose, and lips so thin, it was hard to do his lipstick when I put makeup on him. (Which he didn’t agree to very often.) That makes him sound ugly, but he wasn’t, because he had sparkly blue eyes and a great smile.
When other families met mine, even though they tried not to, they looked surprised. If we were in airports, people gave us sly sideways looks as if my parents were abducting me. I wanted to say, Ha! Not this time, people—once was quite enough, thank you.
On the street and in shops, people looked at us. They tried not to stare, but they usually did. At parties, when I went out of the room, I just knew the adults asked my parents questions. Their kids did too. They asked me why I didn’t look like my family and where my birth parents were. They asked me if my parents were dead and if I’d ever been back to my country. Then they asked what it was like there and if there was Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi?
How was I supposed to know? It wasn’t like I was from Cambodia. I was just from Cambodia. Completely different.
And apart from looking nothing like my family, I wasn’t anything like them either. They all liked cycling and hiking and basically being outdoors when it was freezing. I liked being on the couch under a blanket, watching TV.
We got to the supermarket, parked, and went in to buy salad stuff, baguettes, drinks, and chips. It’s great going shopping with your parents because you can put all kinds of things in the cart without them noticing and when they get to the checkout, they hold them up and say, “This isn’t mine,” and you smile sweetly and say, “Ummm…acccctually…” Half the time they say no, but some things get through.
Then we drove to a Cambodian restaurant called Lemongrass that had opened a few months earlier to buy some takeout food. I’d never had Cambodian food before. There aren’t many Cambodian restaurants around—there are lots of Thai restaurants, so I’ve eaten Thai food, but I wasn’t sure if it was almost the same or majorly different.
I made Mum promise not to get noodles though. I didn’t want to look at another noodle ever again. I think I had like proper medical noodle-o-phobia and needed treatment. Chocolate-flavored treatment was probably going to work the best.
And then something odd happened.
It had nothing to do with noodles.
Well, not directly.