I thought Mum was joking when she said that we were going to spend five weeks of the summer in a cottage in the country. How was I going to survive for five whole weeks without my best friends, Ella and Victoria? To make things worse, we had to bring Mum's friend's totally annoying eight-year-old son with us. To make things even worse again, the cottage was a total dump, and was exactly in the middle of nowhere. Then, when we got to the cottage, it turned out that the only neighbour was a girl called Sam, who looked like a boy, and who seemed to want to be my friend. It was like all my worst nightmares had just come true. Sam came over for lunch one day, and told us her life story. Her mum had died when she was a baby, and her Dad had raised her. A year earlier though, her dad had been killed in an accident, and now she had to live with her evil granny, Martha. Mum loved Sam, and she seemed to think that just because I had a weird friend at home (Ruby), having another weird friend wouldn't be a problem. She didn't know that as long as Sam was around, I was never going to be able to make friends with Cathy and Laura, the only cool girls in the entire village. Sam spent most of her days hanging around a huge tree, where she used to go for picnics with her dad. I had a horrible feeling that, before I showed up, the tree had been her best friend. I had to admit that it was kind of nice in the field where the tree was, but mostly I wished that Sam would leave me alone, so I could hang out with the cool girls. Then one day Sam came over to my place and she was really, really upset. She'd just met some men who were going to cut down her special tree. I was sorry for her - of course I was, but what was I supposed to do? Then I remembered how I'd helped Ruby the year before, and how helping her had made me feel really good. So I went with Sam, and we stopped the men from cutting down the tree. (Or at least I stopped the men from cutting down the tree, while Sam stood next to me, crying.) The men went away, but I knew they'd be back, and I knew we had to be ready for them. So I gathered all the people I could and we began a protest to save the tree. The protest went on for days and it was totally cool. Soon we had heaps of supporters, and Laura, one of the cool girls even joined in. It was like a big, weird party. Eventually, the tree was saved, but I couldn't understand why Sam wasn't as happy as she should have been. Suddenly it was like the tree hadn't been all that important to her after all. Then it turned out that she'd told me a huge heap of lies. She'd made up the whole thing about her dad being dead. He'd just had a fight with Sam's granny, and headed off to live in London. I was so cross, I couldn't talk to Sam for days - how dare she trick me like that? But after a few days, I started to feel a small bit sorry for Sam. It wasn't her fault her life was so bad that she felt she had to make up a more dramatic one. Anyway, in the end, Sam and I made up, and then the weirdest thing of all happened - when the time came to go home, I was almost sorry to leave.