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First published 2025 001
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For Bob, Lucy and Clare
Major Chaos
I wake up with a slobbery tongue in my ear and a terrible smell wafting up my nose.
To be fair, I only have myself to blame. I mean, I didn’t ask my best friend to wake me by foraging for earwax, but I am the big softie who let him sleep in my bed last night. He deserved a reward for helping me to dispose of the huge bowl of bean casserole my mum dished up for supper. I should have realized: Aldo + beans = guaranteed stink bomb. Aldo’s my dog, by the way. You might have heard of him. He went viral on YouStream a few weeks ago.
I reach for my phone. 6.55 a.m. ‘What’s up, boy?’
I whisper. ‘It’s too early for breakfast. Need a poo?’
Aldo cocks his head to one side, then side-eyes my door as an almighty CRASH comes from downstairs.
The crash is followed by a CLATTER and Aldo’s back legs start to shake.
Oh no. There’s only one person who’d be up at this time on a Sunday morning. Aldo doesn’t need a poo. He’s warning me that my foster brother, Nile, is up to something.
Sigh . For reasons I’ll explain later, I promised my mums I’d be in charge this morning so they could have a lie-in. I just wasn’t expecting to have to start so early . . .
Sliding out of bed, I tiptoe on to the landing and see my three-year-old foster sister, Keely, peering round her bedroom door. She looks up at me with a cute little frown as she draws a circle
in the air round her ear: her way of asking, ‘What’s that noise?’
Keely sometimes uses Makaton sign language to communicate because she can’t talk very well yet.
She has no problem hearing or understanding though, so I put a finger to my lips, then offer her my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper. ‘It’s only Nile. Let’s go and ask him to be quiet.’
The odd banging noises stop as we reach the kitchen. Unfortunately, they’re replaced with the sound of my foster brother shouting:
‘FIVE . . .
FOUR . . .
THREE . . .’
TRY SOME MAKATON!
‘NOISE’
I fling open the door, intending to ask Nile to keep his voice down, but am met with an alarming sight: he’s about to drop a long string of Mentos into a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. Over the five weeks Nile’s been fostering with us, I’ve got used to his obsession with explosions. But I need to stop him before he tries this experiment. Not because I’m a fun-thief, but because the petition for an indoor play area, the one me and Cal (my best mate) spent ALL LAST WEEK collecting signatures for, is lying directly in the Danger Zone.
You know what happens when you mix Mentos with Diet Coke, right?
Nile grins at me.
‘. . . TWO . . .
ONE . . .’
Keeping quiet is suddenly the last thing on my mind.
‘NOOOOOOOOOO! NILE, WAIT!’
‘BLAST-OFF!’
I drop Keely’s hand and make a grab for my sheet of hard-earned signatures a second too late . . . SPLUUUUURGE!
‘And THAT,’ says Nile, throwing a salute towards his phone, which is propped up against the microwave, away from the mess and clearly recording, ‘is how you explode Coke with Mentos!’ He presses stop then flashes me a grin. ‘Best homework assignment ever!’
Without a word, I peel my soggy petition from the table. Coke drips off it and most of the signatures are so smudged you can’t read them. There’s no way Mr Yee, my head teacher, will take any notice of this . (Me and Cal are not trying to stop anyone playing outside, by the way. We just feel strongly that staying indoors during breaktimes
should also be an option for kids – like it is for teachers.)
Oblivious to my despair, Nile bounces around the room like Tigger at a tea party. ‘Epic or what, Ferris?!’ he shouts, as he watches his recording back. I gaze around the kitchen and shake my head. Most of the cupboards are ajar, and there’s STUFF on every surface: scissors, string, empty Mentos packets, cutlery, discarded funnels and pans, muffin cases, toothpaste, vinegar, baking soda
. . . even my mum’s sewing box has been moved and is now splattered with Coke. Nile obviously tried a few different experiments before he settled on the old Coke and Mentos trick. Not that that’s what our homework was, by the way; how does videoing an explosion ‘explain a fact about gases’?
I grab the mop. ‘No, not epic, Nile. Look at this mess!’
I’m trying to stop Keely from swooshing her bare feet through the brown puddles all over the floor when I hear footsteps on the stairs. Great, that’ll be my mums coming to investigate the cause of this early morning commotion. I mean, they’ll probably already have guessed. Since the minute he arrived to be fostered, all Nile’s done is cause chaos. He turned up late one evening. An emergency placement, Mum called it. Before that, he and his little brother, Lewis, had been staying with a foster carer called Irene. According to Nile, the reason he had to move but his brother stayed put was because Irene was ‘mega old’ and ‘only liked quiet kids’. At the time, I thought Irene must be really mean.
But over the past five weeks, though I’ve never stopped feeling sorry that Nile’s been separated from his brother, I have begun to understand why Irene couldn’t cope.
Disaster zone
‘What’s going on?’ asks Mum. Her bleary eyes immediately widen as she takes in the state of the kitchen. Without waiting for a reply, she darts to the sink for a dishcloth.
Miz, my other mum, gazes at the mess all over the table. Her mouth falls open so wide she looks like she’s about to take a bite of the biggest burger known to man. ‘Where did you get that bottle of Diet Coke from, Nile?’ she asks, narrowing her eyes at my foster brother.
Nile frowns as though that’s a ridiculous question. Which it isn’t. For one, Mums are big into saving the planet; we’re not allowed to buy singleuse pop bottles. And, for two, Nile has a history of ‘borrowing’ things from shops.
‘That twenty-four-hour garage on the main road,’ he replies. ‘Your dad gave me a fiver yesterday, remember? And you said I could spend it on anything I wanted. I bought it this morning.’
It’s true that Grandpa gave Nile, Keely and me five pounds each yesterday, but that doesn’t stop Miz’s eyebrows from disappearing under her fringe. ‘You’ve been out this morning?!’
I wait for Nile’s outburst. Last time he broke our ‘Don’t leave the house without permission’ rule, he argued for ages about how he’s TEN YEARS OLD, and how his mum, who he lived with until he was nine and three-quarters, let him go anywhere he wanted to and do anything he pleased. Today, though, he lowers his gaze.
‘Soz, Miz. But you were all asleep and I had this epic idea for my science assignment and – LOOK OUT, FERRIS!’
I glance towards the ceiling, where Nile’s pointing, and am just in time to catch a mini-waterfall of Coke in my eyes. Excellent.
Pausing her frantic table-wiping to check I’ve not been blinded, Mum notices the soggy paper in my hand. ‘Oh no. Is that your petition, sweetie?’
I dry my sticky face with the back of my free hand and nod.
Mum presses her lips together. Her nostrils flare as she takes a deep, calming breath before turning to my foster brother. ‘Did you not think to clear the table first, Nile?’
‘Soz, Chloe,’ says Nile, who uses Mum’s first name (which I get; he still has a mum of his own, even though he doesn’t live with her). ‘I did use a mat, though!’ He lifts up the Coke bottle, peels a wet sheet of A4 off the table and holds it aloft by a corner. Soaked through, the paper immediately rips and Nile is left holding just a tiny triangle between his finger and thumb. The rest of the paper falls on to the kitchen tiles and that’s when
I realize something that makes me want to scream: His ‘mat’ is my homework. Well, it was. My comic strip, illustrating the importance of trees for our planet’s oxygen, now looks more like a used paper towel.
Sensing my bubbling rage, Keely comes to hug my leg. Her sympathy makes my eyes well with more tears than getting Coke in them did.
Mum puts her arm round my shoulders. ‘Try not to worry, sweetie.’ She gestures to the back garden. ‘I’ll peg all your papers on the line. They’ll dry out in no time. No one will ever know they fell victim to an unexpected explosion.’
Unexpected? Uncontrolled and an-NILE-ated more like.
I grab my soaked ex-homework off the floor and screw it into a ball with my soggy petition. ‘Forget it,’ I mumble. ‘It’s all ruined.’
My heart racing, I run upstairs and fling myself on to my bed beside Aldo, who nuzzles my chin. I don’t need to say a word for Aldo to know
who’s upset me. The only reason he didn’t come downstairs in the first place is because Nile is such a disaster zone.
Keep Calm and Stroke Your Dog's Ears
After a few minutes of stroking
Aldo’s ears – a type of calming therapy I learned off Keely and that I’ve been using A LOT recently – I grab my phone, message Cal to share the news about our ruined petition, then stare at the photo on my lock screen.
‘If only Nile was more like Tia,’ I say, angling my phone towards Aldo, so he can see the photo of himself being cuddled by me and Tia, the ten-yearold girl we fostered before Nile. Tia only stayed with us for a fortnight, but we had so much fun. She was the first foster sibling I’d
had who wasn’t a baby or a toddler. She was also the person who helped Aldo to become a YouStream sensation, which resulted in me winning the drawing tablet of my dreams.
After how well things went with Tia, I was excited when Mums said another child my own age was coming to stay. When they told me it was a boy, I pictured us as brothers against the world: a like-minded buddy for Movie Night votes; a friend to hang out with when Cal was busy.
What we got was a rascal who can’t sit still for longer than five minutes and who, as well as being obsessed with explosions, is constantly dismantling stuff to ‘see how it works’. (RIP my favourite RC car, Keely’s light-up rubber duck, Miz’s solar-powered hairdryer, Mum’s antique yo-yo, and all the many other of our treasured possessions that have fallen victim to Nile’s fiddly fingers since he’s been here.)
Hands up for 'Love in the Trenches'!
You get the deciding vote, Nile . . .
I have high hopes for this movie night . . .
Hands up for 'Digby The Talking Dog'!
I vote we play TIME-BOMB with the remote. CATCH!
And that’s not even the worst of it.
Nile is STRESSING my mums out so much that I’m worried they’re thinking of giving up fostering. They haven’t actually said that to me, but last week, right after he’d smashed our shed window with his ‘pebble launcher’ (made from our water butt’s drainpipe, Mum’s best silk scarf and a garden trowel), I overheard Miz on the phone to a social worker, and she certainly made it sound that way. What else could ‘We can’t do this any more’ mean?
I definitely DO NOT want Mums to stop fostering. Mainly because I can’t bear the thought of them sending Keely to live with someone else. I love that kid to bits.
So I’ve come up with a plan.
Since I overheard that phone conversation, I’ve been trying to show my mums how responsible, happy to help out, and patient I am. It’s proving extremely difficult with Major Chaos around, but I’m doing my best. That’s why I said I’d be in charge