I know I’m a little bit broken, and that’s okay. I know what happened when I was a kid has left stains on my new life and the people I randomly meet. But Amy wasn’t random. She used to live here, in a house I don’t quite trust. And now she goes to my school and seems to have chosen me as her friend.

Maybe it was just because Mr. Trafford picked me for the tour. But she wasn’t pleased to see me, then, so why did she ask for a second go? Why were her smiles a bit too wide and her words slightly too rehearsed?

She’s covering something up. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s my job to figure out what.

11

“Why are you so interested in me?” I ask Amy.

I spent yesterday hiding from her, watching from afar and trying to work out if she’s got a secret or if she’s just a girl attempting to settle into a new school.

She hasn’t spoken to anyone else, not while I’ve been watching. At break, she sat alone in the courtyard, writing in her notepad, and, at lunch, she picked the table closest to the trash. It’s as if she doesn’t want to be included.

But, this morning, she crept up on me and said, “Eat lunch with me,” leaving before I could answer.

So now we’re back in the cafeteria, and she grins and asks, “Who says I’m interested?”

“Because you want to eat with me…and, on your first day, you asked for a tour you’d already had.”

I keep having flashbacks to the first time we met. This isn’t the same person, and that worries me. But I’m still sitting with her, and that worries me more. When she looks away, I stare, trying to make sense of her.

“What you said before…about me being scared of you…why did you say that?”

Amy’s smile slips, then fades, but she doesn’t answer.

Instead, she packs up her lunch and says, “We all scare each other, sometimes.”

I should tell her I live in her house, now. But something stops me.

It feels like a secret I need to keep; a mystery I can control while I try to figure out the one sitting next to me.

12

“Where are you?” Mum asks, standing in my doorway.

“What?”

“You zoned out. Where did you go?”

“Nowhere.”

I can’t tell her the truth—that I was daydreaming about a girl. When I think of Amy, something swirls inside me, a strange kind of sickness that wraps around my nerves. I was replaying what she said and how she said it, and now it feels like Mum can read my mind.

Mum smiles and sits on my bed. Glancing at the walls, she says, “We should decorate. Whatever you want.”