I stared blankly at the white notebook in front of me. My teacher asked me to write an article from five to ten pages long about my life. I rolled my eyes as I thought of my life. It was boring. I wake up, go to school, hear my little sister's nonsense about aliens, study, sleep. And then over and over again.

Should I write about my goldfish? Her life is of course more interesting than mine...

After a while, my parents entered my room with news. And what they told me next left me frozen in shock. I stared wildly at them...

The cursor blinked at Thom like it was losing patience with him.

Tell me about yourself. The essay prompt sat at the top of the page, mocking him. He'd written forty-three words in the last hour. Forty-three words, three bags of crisps, and one very long stare out the window at the neighbours' cat. He was trying to decide if "perseverance" had one r or two when the knock came.

It was sharp and decisive, far from the lazy drag of knuckles his mum employed when she wanted him off his phone. This was a sit-down knock. A we need to talk knock.

"Come in." Thom kept his eyes glued to the screen.

"It's Martina," his mum said.

His dad stayed standing by the door, which he always did when he needed a wall behind him.

Thom swivelled his chair. "What happened? Is she--"

"She's fine. She's not hurt." His dad said it quickly, the way you clear ice off a windscreen: clearer, but no warmer. "She's been arrested."

"Possession," his mum said, her voice careful and thin. "With intent to supply."

Thom looked at his dad, then back at his mum, waiting for the correction. The just kidding or the it's a misunderstanding that would follow. Neither came.

He felt something strange happen to time. The room didn't change: the same revision posters stayed blu-tacked to the walls, his half-drunk mug of tea stayed cold on his desk, his schoolbag slumped by the radiator like it too had given up, but everything inside it seemed to shift a half-inch to the left, as if reality had quietly rearranged itself.

Martina.

"She promised," he said. It came out quieter than he meant it to.

He could still see it clearly: last Easter, the two of them on the back step after Sunday dinner, Martina with her coat on even though it wasn't that cold, the way she'd turned to him with that particular look she had, when she had something to confess. It used to be 'I took Ronnie's jumper home instead of mine' or 'I snuck an extra sweet after dinner' or even 'I nicked a can of Coke from the shops' -- something harmless, lined with a laugh and childish folly. That day it was: 'I made some stupid choices when I was your age. Really stupid.'

He'd asked her what kind, and she'd shaken her head.

Doesn't matter now. I sorted it. Just — don't be a muppet like I was.

He had carried that moment with him. It had made her feel real to him in a way that older sisters sometimes didn't, a reminder that she wasn't a finished person looking back at him from a great height, but someone who'd once been exactly where he was standing and had found a way through. He'd felt, without quite having the words for it at the time, that she had handed him something.

Now he was turning that something over and finding it hollow.

There was a specific kind of hurt in being lied to by someone who'd lied on your behalf, who'd told you the lie for your own good, and a worse kind in not knowing how long the lie had been running. Had she sorted it, like she said, and then gone back? Or had she never sorted it at all?

Had she been lying to him on that back step, or to herself, or both at once?

She'd always been a little remote, a little guarded. He wondered now how much of it had been maintenance. How much energy it took to hold a secret in place, year after year, in front of everyone who loved you.

His dad crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again. "We'll sort it out. We always sort things out."

"Will she go to prison?" He sounded twelve again.

"We don't know yet," his dad said. "Solicitor in the morning."

After they left, Thom sat very still for a moment.

There was a photo of the two of them on his bookshelf. His primary school graduation, Martina seventeen and beaming, him in a too-big shirt with a gap where a tooth had just fallen out. She was holding his hand and pulling him sideways mid-laugh at something off-camera. He'd always liked that photo. Liked that she was laughing. Liked that he was the reason, before all was smoke and powder.

He turned back to his screen.

Tell me about your life.

He started typing.

"My sister got arrested" Thom wrote with a shaky hand. He has written 155 words till now which wasn't enough. He closed his eyes thinking about his sister and his life. But a light bulb lit in his mind. He wrote and wrote until until hands were tired. He know that this writing was gonna finish,and all his problem too

He knew it, deep from his heart.

The waiting room smelled of instant coffee and plastic chairs in a shade of orange that nobody had ever liked, arranged in rows as though this were a dentist's or a job centre. The dread of being called incompetent from someone on high sat heavy in the air all the same, as if not having running water or GCSEs led you all to the same conclusion. His mum had brought a book and hadn't opened it. The visiting hours were printed on a laminated sheet by the front desk, and Thom read them three times without absorbing a single word.

He had brought the essay.

He hadn't meant to. It was still open on his laptop when he'd closed it, and he'd put the laptop in his bag on autopilot, and now here it was: two thousand, two hundred and eleven words on the nature of his life, which had seemed like an embarrassment of nothing two days ago and now felt like a document he'd written about someone else, some version of himself that had existed on the other side of a wall he hadn't known was there.

I only have one sister, which, I guess is both better and worse than having two, or being an only child. You can't muck things up if you're the only child, there's so much riding on you. But I guess, when one of you's mucked things up like Martina, you have to do really, really good to make up for it.

She was seventeen when she first got arrested, but it was only for some earrings she stole from Claire's and some graffiti she did at the park. It wasn't even rude or anything. Just her name, her graffiti name, which was Haywire, written all geometric and weird. She didn't go to prison, she just got suspended. I have never been arrested, but I shoplifted once, when I was 11, to be like her and then I returned it an hour later . I gave the poor man £10 to say sorry. It was only a pack of gum.

I like Martina. I always have.

He stared at the essay and deleted half of it again.

A door opened somewhere down a corridor, and the sound of it made his mum sit up straighter.

It wasn't them.

The thing was, he was still angry. He'd expected the anger to do something more interesting with itself, but it just sat there in his chest like rust. He was angry at Martina, and then angry at himself for being angry at Martina, and then angry at the whole arrangement, at how neatly it had all rearranged itself into something like a stain in his chest that scraped his lungs when he breathed, sharp and metallic.

His dad's knee was bouncing. He stopped it when he noticed Thom noticing.

"She'll be glad you came," his mum said, not quite to either of them.

Thom nodded. He pulled the laptop out anyway, not to open it, just to have something in his hands. The hinge had a small crack in it from where he'd caught it in his bag zip two years ago. He'd never got it fixed. Martina had told him he should. You'll regret it when the whole thing splits, she'd said, and she hadn't been wrong, but somehow it had never split, and somehow the crack was still there, and somehow the laptop still worked, and he'd never quite been able to make himself care.

The door at the end of the corridor opened again. Martina looked smaller than he remembered.

He'd spent the whole week not saying anything, and he thought maybe that was enough of a rehearsal.

He stood up.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," Martina said.