Tas is eight years old when Dad announces the family is moving to Abu Dhabi. Goodbye Arlington. Goodbye best friend. Goodbye bike. Nobody got a vote. Especially not Tas.

Now the weekend lands on a Friday, school starts on a Sunday, and the bathroom has a secret water hose that ambushed him once and will never be spoken of again. He is the new kid in a school with students from over 80 countries, armed with exactly one Arabic word. He keeps getting it wrong. There is no polite way to thank a lunch lady with “Shakira.”

All he has left of home is a tin under his bed and a best friend nine time zones away.

Then a whistle blows, a coach points, and Tas lands on a team with four strangers who have no idea how much he needs them.

Tas is back for Year Two in Abu Dhabi, and something strange has happened. He knows things. Which hallway smells like shawarma. How to count dirhams without checking twice. What the lunch lady means when she calls him habibi. For the first time in his life, he is not the lost one.

Then a new kid arrives from Canada and eats lunch alone for three days, holding his tray the way Tas held his last year. Tas knows that move. He invented that move. His big brother is suddenly wearing headphones everywhere, his little sister is counting every cat in the neighbourhood, and Dad’s work phone keeps winning at the dinner
table.

Between a watermelon jack-o-lantern, a shawarma Christmas, and a girl who draws a star on his seat, Abu Dhabi is finally starting to feel like home. Which is usually when the grown-ups start talking behind closed doors.

Tokyo. Country number two. Tas is ten, his new journal is Hello Kitty (yes you read that mright!), and every sign in the city is written in an alphabet he cannot read.

He has already washed himself in the family bath, which is very much not allowed, run the wrong way in the school relay, and lost a fight with a toilet that has seven buttons.

He is the loudest kid on the quietest train on earth. Then a boy named Kenji sits down next to him at lunch, no invitation, no announcement, exactly the way Tas once sat down for a lonely kid in Abu Dhabi.

The Arabic he worked so hard for is fading, the calls from Arlington keep getting shorter, and a girl from the old compound keeps messaging like the distance is nothing. Tokyo is quiet. People bow, trains stay silent, and friendship starts small. Tas has to learn a new kind of welcome.

Tokyo, Year Two. Tas has cracked the code. He bows at the right depth, slurps at the right volume, and a kid at the ramen counter just said he sounds Japanese. After two countries, Tas is finally, officially, cool.

Cool has rules, though. Rule one: at school, be the kid who draws. Rule two: never mention what is happening at home. Because at home, his big brother is packing for art school in Berlin one box at a time, giving away his manga, his charger, even his mheadphones, and pretending nobody notices. Five Ardens are about to become four.

Between a Kit Kat ranking that now runs to two pages, a karaoke rematch, and a voice that cracks without permission, Tas jokes at school and saves the truth for the journal. Then his brother’s room goes empty, and the joking gets harder.

By country three, Tas has done the maths, and the maths is cruel: making friends just means losing them. So, when the Ardens land in Brasilia, he makes himself three promises.

Do not make friends.

Do not speak Portuguese until he can say it properly.

Do not even unpack the Kit.

The problem is nobody in Brasilia lets him stick to his promises. There is a boy at the capoeira circle who corrects his cartwheels and walks him home. There is a girl at school who laughs at things that are not funny yet and somehow makes them funny.

There is a whole country that hugs first and asks questions later, and Tas still cannot work out how many cheek kisses are coming. Brazil refuses, absolutely refuses, to let anyone stand alone.

Add one own goal in front of the entire school, a berimbau that sounds like a dying cat, and a road trip to Carnival, and Tas’s no-new-friends plan does not stand a chance.

Brasilia, Year Two. Tas is thirteen, his Portuguese works, his capoeira group trusts him, and he walks home from school with his best friends like he has lived here forever. After three countries, the new kid is finally just a kid.

Then Justin flies in from Berlin with a girlfriend nobody has met, and the apartment suddenly feels too small for all the people the Ardens are becoming. Hailey is making her own friends, Tas is learning to breakdance badly, and everyone seems to know where they fit except him. At school he is one Tas. At capoeira he is another. On the
phone, he is someone else again. Only the journal knows all of them.

Belonging was supposed to make everything easier. It does not.

Germany brings order after Brazil. Quiet Sundays, cash only, school without uniforms, and the first time Tas writes anxious.

The Berlin Wall is outside. The harder wall is inside. Independence, heartbreak, and the private journal becoming less private.

Load shedding, hadedas, geckos, braais, purple jacarandas, and almost being grown up while starting over again.

The last notebook. Tas is eighteen. The Kit is full. The question does not disappear. It changes shape.