Chapter 1

Emma

Dear Diary,
My life is officially a mess. My Dad has decided that we are going to France again this summer. Again!!!! We’ll go to the same boring little village, with a boring little beach, and a boring little shop, and a boring little café, and a boring little cinema that is so out of date it shows films that most people have actually got on video now. 

As I said, my life is a boring (16-year long) mess. It’s not as if I have many friends to miss me while I’m away, because I don’t go to school, my Dad teaches me at home. I don’t mind that so much, he’s quite cool (is my Dad). It’s a pity that he hasn’t got a girlfriend though; it might make him slightly happier, (and slightly less likely to shout if I haven’t done my homework!)

My Dad is lovely. He has light brown hair with a fringe that flops into his eyes when he is concentrating. He is an architect and works from home, so when we have done the teaching bit of the lesson we both sit side by side in the conservatory with the sun streaming through the vine leaves that have tangled round the roof supports over the years, working in companionable silence. I often sneak looks at him whilst I’m supposed to be working, and watch him demolish the end of his pencil whilst he is trying to work out how best to fit in a Georgian hipped roof onto a council house!!

He had a girlfriend last year, but that fizzled out after a few months, shame, she was quite nice as potential ‘Mother-figures’ go! I think his heart is still broken after (my real) Mum left us. My Mum is called Kate, she ran off with the bloke who ran the corner shop down our road when I was five. One day Dad came home to find me playing quietly in my room and a note on the kitchen table. I think the worst of it was that she took my twin sister Jenny with her. The note said that she didn’t think she could be happy with Tom (my Dad) anymore and that although she didn’t really want to split the girls up, she couldn’t bear to leave us and yet she could take us both away from him. I can remember my Dad crying a lot for a long, long time. He’s not so bad now. Sometimes though, I still catch him looking at the photo of all of us taken at the London Zoo, which he keeps polished and in pride of place on the piano in the Sitting Room.

Sometimes I can’t help wondering what Jenny looks like. In the baby photos that Dad has of us, we are pretty much identical, but considering we are sixteen now I expect we have both changed a hell of a lot! 

Mum must have gone through a lot to actually leave one of her daughters behind, but it does upset me when I wonder why she chose Jenny and not me. Was Jenny better, prettier, quieter, more intelligent or what? Or did she flip a coin? Not that I would want to be with Mum anyway, why would I want to exchange the wonderful, quiet friendship that I have with my Dad for someone who didn’t love us all enough to stay with us for ever? I don’t think I would have liked her anyway. And as Jenny is obviously bigger, better, brainier, (and undoubtedly a big head to boot); I don’t think I would have liked her either!

Well, I suppose on reflection my life isn’t that much of a mess, I could have quite easily been living in a bed-sit, being a big-head, with a Mother who doesn’t love anyone enough, instead of being here, (being bored admittedly), in a big beautiful house in London, looking after my lovely (boring) Dad, and going on holiday to (boring) France…again!

Oh well, must go and pack before Dad starts complaining.