Fate had more to chuck into the mix before October ended. There was news about GG Block at my old school. It was being torn down.

I suddenly didn’t feel like going to the mall opening. Big deal – shops again. Who cared? Not me.

As it turned out, I should have sucked it up and gone to the stupid opening of the dumb mall. Not going gave the parents the opportunity to ask Probing Questions. ‘How are you feeling, Lyla?’

‘Fine. Don’t keep hassling me.’

‘Is school going okay? How are you coping with the homework?’

‘No problemo, I get it done in the mornings.’

‘How are you coping without Katie and Shona around?’

‘I miss them, but Joanne, Freya and I hang out now.’

‘Are you as close to them as you are to Katie and Shona?’

‘Oh for crying down the broken chimney! Stop hassling me!’

They were always watching me, checking my mood temperature. It drove me nuts. I was fine. If sometimes I felt like I was wading through thigh-deep liquefaction, so what? I wouldn’t be the only one in the city who wasn’t exactly a box of fluffies right now.

The liquefaction hit the fan thanks to Mrs Ghastly Nagel. She rang the landline at ten one Tuesday evening. Mum snatched it up, all of us thinking Late call. What’s happened? Who’s sick/injured/in hospital? Mum automatically hit the speaker button – best to do that. It avoids the need to repeat rotten news.

The voice of the Queen of Ghastliness erupted. ‘Clemmie, I want you to go and get some things from the house. I’ve got a list. You’ll need to write it down.’

Mum took a deep breath, or maybe two. Mrs N said, ‘Clemmie? Are you ready?’

I never liked to be on the receiving end of Mum’s voice when it went deadly calm and icy cold. ‘Candace, I am not going near your house. It’s red-stickered and very unstable. Goodbye.’

Then the Queen of Horrible said, ‘I should have guessed you’d refuse to help me. And as for your daughter’s egregious behaviour…’

What?

But yay for my mother. In a voice colder than the July snowstorm, she said, ‘And what about your part in this egregious behaviour, Candace? What did you do to make my daughter angry enough to lose her temper?’

Apparently Mrs N didn’t want to go into her own eg-whatever behaviour. We heard her splutter before the line went dead.

Mum plonked down the receiver. ‘Bloody woman. What happened, Lyla?’

So I had to tell her the whole gory story of me ordering the woman out. Mum winced – at Mrs N, not me. ‘Unbelievable. Matt’s not got it easy with a mother like her.’

I shook my head and kept it down to hide the tears just waiting to spill over and alert the parents that I was a tad shaky.

But apparently parents were meant to be looking out for signs of stress in their kids and I got even more attention focused on my ‘well-being’.

I held it together, mainly by talking to Joanne and Freya about how other people were coping. Joanne said her grandmother took a friend from New Plymouth to look at the Red Zone. They peered through the wire fence at the cathedral and her grandmother cried.

Freya’s mother wouldn’t go into a supermarket. ‘She’s terrified of things falling on her.’

I told them about Myra’s friend Elaine who went to Auckland for a break. ‘She’s wanted to go up the Sky Tower forever. But Myra said when she got there she freaked out. Tall building. Lifts. No way.’

We didn’t talk about ourselves and we didn’t talk about the demolition of our school. I didn’t want to discover they were as jumpy as I was. We needed each other to be okay. I could keep on going if everyone around me just got on with it.

The wheels fell off the trolley in the middle of November. All I did was stomp in after school and kick the door harder than usual to get it shut.

‘How was school, Lyla?’ Mum asked, her gimlet eyes boring into me.

Leave me alone. I dumped my bag. ‘It was okay. Not brilliant – it’s not the same without Katie and Shona. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I kind of miss having Matt around.’ Pick up on the decoy topic, Mum. Let’s talk about Matt. Or Shona and Katie.

Why did I think that would work?

‘I’ve made a counselling appointment for you for Friday.’ She plonked a hand on my shoulder. ‘No arguments, Lyla.’

‘Mum! I don’t need counselling!’ I got out of there before I exploded all over the kitchen.

I just one hundred per cent knew the parents would be exchanging one of their worried-over-Lyla looks. Well, let them. I was fine. I was handling it. I was one of the lucky ones – somewhere to live, parents who cared (a bit too much), new friends. I wouldn’t be the only one to think earthquake when I heard the roar of a truck engine or a plane. It wouldn’t be just my heart taking off like a racehorse, because I wasn’t the only jumpy one in the city.

I absolutely was not going to sit down with a counsellor, unless they could stop the aftershocks and magic the city back to whole again. Like that was going to happen. Neither of the parents mentioned the counselling appointment all week, and I didn’t remind them.

On Friday, Dad was waiting for me after school. He opened the car door. ‘Hop in, Lyla.’

I got in. It was nice to be picked up from school, but unusual enough to make me suspicious. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Counselling.’

Oh. Hard to believe, but I’d forgotten. ‘If it’s not in a single-storey building I’m not getting out of this car.’

She was in a single-storey office in Riccarton, where every business that used to be in a high-rise in town seemed to have relocated to.

When Dad stopped the car he said, ‘It’s hard living here now, hon. Take all the help you can get. Clemmie and I – both of us have regular counselling.’

He leant over to give me a hug. ‘You’re a great kid. But your mum and I suspect you’re struggling more than you realise.’

Am not struggling.

The counsellor said to call her Cilla. Her grey hair might have been tidy when she’d arrived at work, but by the looks of things she’d dragged her hands through it more than a few times since then.

It took her about three point five minutes to crack me open. Utter humiliation for an entire hour. I howled and hiccupped and bellowed – I was my own personal earthquake.

I went through all the tissues she had left in the box on her desk. I know she asked me questions, because each time she did I howled a whole new gush of disgusting wetness.

Exhausting. By the end of the fifty minutes, I couldn’t sit up straight.

Dad came in. Through the fog, I heard battle fatigue and complete break somewhere safe.

If I’d had any energy left I’d have had hysterics – there wasn’t anywhere safe. Nowhere. Nothing was ever going to be safe again.