Sorry that the chapter is a bit long.

Just by looking around the breakfast table I realise just how wierd my family is! My mom is busied at the stove making the 2nd batch of 'healthy breakfast muffins' which today are blueberry, I actually don't mind them. My mum is obsessed with healthy eating and all but todays breakfast, not so much.

I turn to face my younger brother, Noah, who has given up on the muffins and has instead got himself a slice of wheaten bread. But what disgusts me is what he's putting on it, blackcurrant jam and cheese. I really really don't want to look at that, so I divert my stare to my dad.

He has just finished his third muffin and is marking his students' homework that he was supposed to have done last night, whoops! He works as a history teacher in a secondary school, but not mine. Sometimes I wish he did work in my school because he's such a sound teacher, but at other times I'm like "nah, I'd rather not have him as a teacher"

I look around at Willow, my younger sister - Noah's twin. I know that she's only 10, but her eyes tell otherwise. Willow -and the rest of us too - has lost a brother and it took her quite a while to get back to her usual self, she did but isn't the same as she was before.

People are forever saying that me and Willow look so alike, I just don't see it, at all. We both have small frames, but that's about the only similarities. I have darker blonde hair while Willow has this really stunning blonde hair. I have a pair of deep grey eyes and Willow has icy blue eyes like mum and Noah's, but dad has just plain blue eyes.

Sometimes I feel like I just don't belong in my family, if anywhere really. But then I think of Lucas, he has beautiful brown eyes that aren't like anyone's I've ever seen, and he has sorta dark brown hair and a wee bit tan skin. Dad used to joke that he was adopted, but it hurt Lucas inside even though he didn't show it, so I told dad to stop it. He was only joking though. I have always wondered who Lucas looked like in our family, and dad always says that we have an uncle who has moved to Australia who has the same dark chocolate hair as Lucas. I actually am closest to Lucas out of all my family, he just gets me. Yes we do fight once in a while, but over nothing major.

In school Lucas always comes over to talk to me (he's 16 and a half years old, only 2 years between us) but I always get the feeling that even though he loves me (brotherly love) he is sort of embarrassed or ashamed in some way, like he feels as if he has to talk to me. As if its some sort of unspoken rule that he has to abide to, I don't want to cut the conversation short because then he would think I am embarrassed of him - which I'm not in any way - but I don't want to talk to him all day either (I actually do but I wouldn't in school).

The one thing that I can't stop thinking about right now is Lucas's smile, I don't know why though. He has the same smile as Mark has...

Had.

The same smile as Mark HAD.

Even though everyone else thinks that we will find Mark, I doubt that we ever will. My brother Mark has been missing for 10 months now, the last time we saw him he was walking out the back door into the garden or towards the lake.

After afew days of searching, the initial thought was that Mark had went out for a swim or something in the lake out the back and some thing had happened, like he drowned. Mark was 18 and had been swimming since he was 5, as have the rest of us. So I highly doubt that he just drowned, something must have been wrong. Mum got people to search the lake for anything, all they found was one of the shoes that he was wearing that day.

Mum still won't give up on Mark though, I doubt she ever will. When Mark disappeared so did a part of her. It was the same for the rest of us too. But out of all of us Mum was hit the worst, she will not accept that Mark is gone, and there's only just a chance that we will find him. It took me two months to accept it, but afterwards you feel abit better, even if its only a tad.

There are some things that you just have to deal with.