Past or present?

I could write that I earlier wrote what Lorraine says here. But then, she says it a lot better than I.

The current part of your story is told by a ten-year-old girl, Kashaf. It works really well in the present tense because you can keep it in her real voice. If you write in the past, you must be writing as an older person who is looking back to those events and telling the story as a memory. Older people don't speak like children, and they have all that history in between then and now to colour the way they see those past events.

Using the present tense puts us there in the room, and the school, and the car with Lucy. We're hearing her thoughts and words exactly as she thinks and says them at the time. The other thing is that by doing this, we know that she has no knowledge at all of what is to come. If this were an adult looking back, she'd know how things turn out after this episode - what happens on the journey and whether the move is as good as young Lucy thinks it will be. That could colour the way she judges her younger self.

The present tense means everything you write is happening now. The character can know nothing about what will come afterwards, even though you as the writer have Lucy's whole life story plotted out. You already know who she goes to live with, and where, for instance; but she doesn't.

See the world through the eyes of your main character, as you clearly do, and tell the story in her words. I think you're doing a very good job with that.

Lorraine