my crush harry styles:)

~chapter 3~

~chapter 3~

Miss obviously calls mum, of course, and tells her everything. She is on that phone to her the minute mum gets home from work, before she has even had a chance to change. My crimes are clearly too wicked to wait another minute. shes going to kill me or even worse make me go over ellie house and sorry again

I hide behind the kitchen door and listen.

mum tries to smooth down her hair.

There are lots of long silences, and lots of sighing. mum says 'I see,' quite a lot, in a sorrowful kind of way. What is miss telling her? That I need to see a counsellor? That I am crazy, violent, living in a fantasy world?

She is the one with the over-active imagination, if you ask me.

mum flicks on the tv and we sit on the sofa eating our dinner.

miss told me you were making up stories again,' mum says, munching on her food. 'Apparently she didn't get my letter explaining the move?'

I bite my lip. 'My pen leaked all over it,' I admit. '.So I had to explain it out loud. I don't think she believed me. She said that I live in a world of make-believe!' She thinks im a liar in fact the whole school think am a liar,.

I bite back a smile. mum doesn't like the word 'lies'. Whenever teachers have used it over the years - which they have, quite a few times - she is quick to tell them that I am not a liar, but a skilled and imaginative storyteller, and if they cannot see that then perhaps they need their eyes testing.

It makes me smile, but these days I make a point of keeping mum away from school parents' evenings, just in case.

It is great to have a mum who believes in you, who backs you up and defends you from mean-faced teachers. It is great to know that mum thinks I can sing and she also wants me to go on the x factor, but there is a little voice inside me that wonders if, sometimes, sticking to the truth might just be easier all round.

'I've explained it all now,' mum is saying. 'miss doesn't think you have settled in too well at your high school. She says that a fresh start might be for the best.'

'I settled in fine!' I say, outraged.

Well, maybe I didn't ... but I scraped by, didn't I? miss has made it all sound so much worse than it really is, so much more of a big deal. And none of this would have happened at all if it hadn't been for Ellie, of course. i made friends i got along with others.

'She deserved it, anyway,' I say. 'ellie.'

mum raises an eyebrow. 'Is this the same ellie who came to tea when you were seven, and made you cry.? she says

'That's her.'

'Well ... perhaps,' she sighs.

I was seven years old, and I'd never wondered where my dad was, or why I looked so different from mum or from the other kids at school.

'Am I adopted?' I had asked mum, a few days later. she'd rolled his eyes and folded me in her arms and wiped my tears away, and later she gave me a photograph of my dad.

His name was jamie.

I never missed my dad until I saw that photograph, I swear. Afterwards, though, he was all I could think about.

'Are we really leaving australia?' I ask mum now.

'We really are,' mum says. 'No more miss, No more ellie...'

I laugh. We clank Coke cans and drink to the future, then mum tries to flick the TV over to one of those bakery programmes so we wrestle over the remote control and I manage to grab it and chuck it across the room, where it lands by my cat fluffly where she gives me evil looks.. looks like she can kill

It starts slowly, the packing up. In the first week of the school holidays, I tidy my room and chuck out a lifetime's supply of broken plastic toys, dusty teen comics and I sort out a bag of book, two bags of board games and fluffy toys and a bin bag of outgrown clothes for the charity shop. mum adds a few bags of her own to the haul, chucks the whole lot in the back of the little red minivan and takes a trip to the tip, stopping off at the charity shop on the way.

It feels weird, disloyal somehow, packing away my special things. Scary.

'A girl needs a farther,', the old lady next door, used to say.

I told the old woman next door that some girls could cope just fine without a dad, look at me and nicole your mum, after all. I don't think she believed me, and she was right. She knew me a whole lot better than I would ever admit. I wish my dad was still around to say and do all the stuff that dads meant to do.

Some things you cannot talk to your mum about.

It's not like I have never wondered what it might be like if mum met someone special. I'd picture someone cool.

A dad was what I wanted, more than anything.

I never realized he might come with strings attached.

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