Dad was sitting on the sofa, reading the paper. He reads a pinky-orange newspaper that’s all about money and business and boring stuff. It has no guess-the-celebrity competitions (where famous people have hair plastered all over their faces after being caught in a gust of wind or you could only see their eye or their leg or something). Guess-the-celebrity was the only thing worth opening a newspaper for but, thinking about it, none of the celebrities looked like me. Not one. So I wasn’t sure it was going to be so much fun anymore.

Mum and I walked in together and Dad looked up from the paper, his face knotty with suspicion. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Mum explained. I knew what he was going to say. He was going to ask how much drama group was going to cost. Mum probably knew that as well, but being Mum, she still asked if I could go.

“How much is it?” Dad asked. (We knew him so well.) Mum told him and he made a how-much? face. Honestly. All he thinks about is money and how much things cost all the time. Luckily air is free or he’d put a limit on how much we could breathe.

I made my best but-I’m-totally-worth-it face. Those faces usually work on dads. Dads can be suckers like that (as long as they’re not accountants).

“Please, Daddy?” I asked, sitting close to him and putting my arm through his. I thought about rubbing his head on the shiny part like I do when he says good night, but he’s touchy about it so I didn’t. He put the paper down and pushed his glasses (buy one get one free) up his nose (they kept sliding down—Mum said that’s what happens when you buy cheap brands: they don’t sit right).

It’s amazing that my dad agreed to adopt us in the first place. Adopting a child can cost quite a lot of money. Mum said he wasn’t as careful (meaning stingy) back then and that children have a value that has nothing to do with money. I think life got more expensive once I came along and then Georgia turned up. Or maybe he just got better at his job and brought it home with him.

Dad peered at me through his two-for-one glasses and said, “If you spent as much time thinking about your schoolwork as you do about acting, I wouldn’t mind. You need to concentrate on reading and math, because they’ll be more useful than this drama malarkey any day.”

It was true: I wasn’t amazing at English or math. Especially reading. I mean, I could read. I just couldn’t read very well and didn’t like reading one tiny bit. Focusing on words on a page made my legs get so full of electricity I had to jiggle and kick and I felt like my whole body was going to explode with frustration.

Course, Georgia loved reading. She was in Blue Group, which was for the top readers. They read books way above their age range. And she was in the Book Box reading group at our library, where every month they chose a book and then discussed it. In their spare time.

Creepy.

She even asked for books for her birthday, which is a teaspoonful of madness. I’m sorry but books are not birthday presents—they’re instruments of torture. You only give them to people you really, really hate. You don’t ask for them. Not unless you’re called Georgia Palmer and you have sentences running through your body instead of blood.

“Daddy, pleeeease? I’ll help in the house a tiny bit more and wash the car once a year and…um…”

Dad turned to Mum and said, “I don’t know, Sarah, she’s not exactly… I mean, is she?”

I went huuuugghhhhhhhhht.

My own dad (who wasn’t really my dad but was at the same time) thought I couldn’t act. Charming. I could actually act very well. I could do all kinds of faces my dad hadn’t even seen yet. (I had to stop going huuuugghhhhhhhhht then because I had no space in my lungs for any more air. Good thing it was free.)

“Dad! How could you?”

“Oh,” he tried to cover his tracks, “I wasn’t saying that—”

“I think we should make a deal,” Mum said.

Mum was so awesome. She was always on my side (except when she wasn’t), and it wasn’t as if she had a stress-free life and nothing else to do. Inspectors were coming to her school so she had lots of teachery tension. Felix had his college entrance exams and she was stressed about that, more stressed than Felix was, actually. And Georgia was doing a one-mile fun run to raise money for charity.

Going out to do sports in the wind and the rain is so like Georgia. Mum gave Dad the job of training with her in the park on Sundays because that was Dad’s most favorite thing anyway. Going into the great outdoors, which is free. Cycling, walking, or running, which are free. Filling your lungs with fresh, damp air (free). Getting freezing and tired (free).

She turned to me and said, “If you work harder on your homework, and read a book every week—and I mean a proper book, not just Where’s Waldo—you can go to drama.”

Ugh. I wasn’t expecting that. I take back all the nice things I said about my mum.

“Matt? Fair deal?” she asked Dad.

Dad muttered and made faces even better than mine. Personally, I thought going to drama was crucial because if I ever got to be a megastar, I’d be able to buy my parents a house (so they wouldn’t have to work), give Felix a job as my driver (so his college entrance exams weren’t even that important), and buy Georgia a hut far away (so I wouldn’t have to live with her).

If I ever got to be a megastar. If.

Which was looking more and more unlikely.

Which was majorly not OK, if you ask me.

“It depends on whether Dara’s going to keep her side of the bargain,” Dad said. “Dara? Do we have a deal?”

I wanted to say Err…no, duh, but saying duh to your parents is mega-rude—I know this because I did it once by accident and they freaked. If you want my advice, don’t ever do it.

I actually didn’t get a chance to say anything at all, because Dad carried on: “If we do, then I’ll shake on it now.”

I put my left hand behind my back and crossed my fingers.

Then, I stuck my right hand out and we shook on it.

“Deal,” I said, grinning.

Ha.

Sucker.

Before school the next morning, I looked around the playground for Lacey. I was still hurt, but I’d forgiven her because yes, she had a big mouth and yes, she said stupid things, but I knew all that already. Despite everything, she was still my BFFEAE, and deep down in my heart I wanted her to come to drama group with me.

“LACE!” I said when I saw her. “Guess what?” I told her my dad had agreed, so I was going tomorrow night and that she should come with me. Halfway through, she scowled.

“What? Why are you making that face?”

“You KNOW drama group is lame. It’s for people who don’t know how to do faces. We do, Dara.”

“Yeah, but what if there’s more to it than that? Let’s go anyway and see.”

She folded her arms. “Can’t, can I?”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I have tap on Wednesdays. Duh.”

Well, I didn’t remember that, did I? I didn’t know her whole after-school schedule.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t exactly go to drama group without her—she was my proper real BFFEAE (when she wasn’t being stomach-curdlingly mean). Going without her would be mega-selfish and not very best-friendish of me, so it was actually obvious what I should do.

“Fine,” I said. “I won’t go either.” I felt my whole body rise with kindness, as if I was an inflatable angel. What a great friend I was. I was going to heaven for that one deed alone.

“Unless…” Lacey said, “unless…she has another drama group on Mondays. I could go then.”

“That’s no good,” I said. “I can’t go on Mondays. Mum takes Georgia swimming.”

“Yeah…but that’s all right.” She looked to the side innocently. “Maybe I can go and tell you what it’s like.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. What the…? She actually wanted to go? After all that?

I couldn’t believe she’d even think of going without me!

“There isn’t one on Mondays,” I muttered. I folded my arms and made up my mind there and then. I was going to go anyway. Without her.

We started walking into school. “You’re not actually going, are you?” she asked. Cold deadness radiated from her eyes. I’m not sure whether people who are actually cold and dead have cold deadness radiating from their eyes seeing as they’re, you know, cold and dead, but living people do for sure.

I stuck out my chin. “Yes, Lacey. I am.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s…nice.”

She didn’t think it was nice. Not one little bit. She swung her head braid grumpily and went into school without me.

I learned an important thing that day.

Sometimes your best news is something you can’t even share with your best friend.