Don’t get me wrong: I loved Vanna. If I could have swapped Georgia for her, I’d had done it in a millisecond. But I couldn’t go with her. I just couldn’t. I wanted to be Maria. I wanted to be famous and live in Hollywood. I had it all planned.

I didn’t give her an answer. Not that day anyway. I told her I was cold, showing her my goose bumps, and we went inside. They left not long after that.

“Think about it,” Vanna whispered as she hugged me good-bye.

When they’d gone home, I helped Mum clean up and then sat on the couch, staring at the turned-off TV. I kept thinking about what Vanna had said that afternoon and it made me feel all feelingy.

I could pretend or ignore it all I liked, but there was no escaping the truth. We’d come from this place on the other side of the world where there’d been war and suffering and poverty. Maybe our parents had died or maybe they hadn’t—we would probably never know. But that was where we’d started in the world. It was part of us.

And I knew nothing about it.

“Didi?” Mum asked, coming into the living room and seeing me staring. “Everything OK?”

I nodded.

“Can you tell Georgia it’s homework time? For both of you.”

“OK.”

Mum went into her study but I didn’t move. The word “homework” reminded me that rehearsals were starting at school the next day. Because Vanna had been visiting, I’d totally forgotten about anything to do with school.

I scowled, remembering. I wanted to be Maria. Why didn’t I get that part?

Now I had Cambodia on my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe I couldn’t be Maria because I had the wrong face. And that was something I could never fix, not unless I had major surgery, and even then there were no guarantees.

“Dara,” Mum called, “don’t make me say it again.”

“OK.”

I didn’t budge. I lay there chewing my hair and thinking. It didn’t matter how many soap opera faces I could make, I looked the way I looked. Was I going to get parts in anything ever in this entire world if I had the wrong face?

“DARA!” Mum shouted.

“I’m going! I’m going!” Mums hate saying things more than three times. Up to three times, you’re usually fine but after that, they get annoyed. I’ve tested it, so I know. Three times, guaranteed, and they start to lose it.

I slid off the couch on to the floor and then dragged myself up to get my school bag. I couldn’t stop thinking about Vanna and Cambodia. Nothing else came close to entering my mind. Not even a mind movie with Bradley Porter. Not even a mind movie with Bradley Porter in Cambodia where he helps me find my real mother and father and my seventeen brothers and sisters. Nothing.

Georgia was in Felix’s room. I could hear her through the door, complaining that she’d been so bored and it wasn’t fair and why did everything have to be about me? It wasn’t my fault she didn’t have someone like Vanna who was adopted from the same place at the same time. Sometimes Mum and Dad met up with families who had also adopted Russian children, but her and the other kids weren’t good friends or anything. It doesn’t mean you’ll get along with each other just because you’re in the same situation. Which is kind of my point about Georgia and me.

For a start, she was a squealy toad, but we were so different anyway. She was two years younger than I was. She was snowman-white, museum-tidy, and a teaspoonful of clever. She liked mountain biking, walking across freezing windy moors, and cooking with my mum. She’d been taken to her orphanage as a newborn baby. In Russia, babies have to live in orphanages for a year before they can be adopted, so she had to stay there until she was one, and then she came to live with us.

I knocked on the door. “Georg—”

“Go away!” she shouted.

“Mum said come and do your homework.”

Felix opened the door. I’d never felt it before, but with all this talk of Cambodia, I suddenly felt like an outsider. I wasn’t like them. Felix was a biological Palmer, and Georgia might as well have been, because she looked like them and she was like them—it was me who stuck out.

I was the most unPalmerish Palmer of us all.