Mum’s in front of the telly when I get home. She’s propping herself up from the floor, trying to sip from a too-full glass of something strong, while the TV entertains itself. I slam the door behind me, and she turns and clocks my face.

‘Oh Jesus, don’t you start on me again . . .’ she slurs.

I look at what she’s wearing – she hasn’t gotten out of those pyjamas in three days, and even the cotton material looks greasy.

‘I won’t mention it’s your turn to do the washing then. It’s been your turn for the last three months.’

She looks up from her glass.

‘Oh baby giiiiiirl . . .’

She’s looking hard at me and she reaches out, but there’s no way in hell I’m moving forward. At that moment the studio audience on the game show she’s watching starts to do a countdown, and it’s not until the jackpot goes off after a five-second count that she bothers to lower her arm. It’s like we have our own bloody soundtrack.

‘When did you grow up soooooo big?’ she asks me.

I bite my bottom lip, and I want to say that I grew up during last summer, while she wasn’t looking, but I don’t. She won’t remember in the morning anyway. Instead I step over her and head towards my bedroom, only looking back when she calls after me. Unsteadily, she gets up onto her hands and knees.

‘I’ll do the washing now then, Kirraaaaa. I’ll do the washing for us,’ but then her hands buckle under her, and her face is planted against the carpet. I don’t move forward to help her. In a feat of determination she pulls herself back up and onto her feet, and she wobbles a few steps until she bumps into the coffee table and tumbles back over again.

A memory comes to me, the kind of flashback that kicks you in the teeth. At the beginning of summer I’d found a Christmas beetle that’d fallen into a bucket of water I’d once grown tadpoles in. The creature’s back was shiny and its small legs flailed hopelessly as it tried to scale the bucket wall. I knew I could just trail my hands through the water, scoop it out, and it would be all right. But I didn’t feel like it anymore. I squatted down on my haunches and watched it, blankly, until it stopped twitching, and bobbed up and down all boat-like. I didn’t feel sorry for it as I was watching. It was like my feelings had all been wrung dry, and I remember the only thing that made me hurt in the gut was the knowledge that I wasn’t feeling anything at all. I’m thinking of this drowning beetle now, as I watch my mother stumble.

‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll probably break the bloody thing,’ I say to her, and start to stomp towards the laundry.

‘How was your father? I know you were over there!’ she calls out after me and her words smack me on my back. She’s begun calling him that – ‘your father’ instead of Lark – as though I owned him and she wasn’t connected to him at all, like they’re just two strangers placed side by side on the electoral roll because they happened to share their last names. She spits the words out, like I’m tainted too, by the association.

‘Lark’s fine,’ I shout back over my shoulder. ‘Lark’s always fine.’

Somewhere in the living room a glass smashes.

‘Well then, that’s proof that karma doesn’t exist, isn’t it?’ I hear her mutter.

It makes me wonder what I did in a past life, because if karma did exist I think I must have been Hitler, the way this life’s turned out.

I strip the beds and throw our things into the washing machine, that leaky shuddery thing that makes it sound as though there’s a swamp monster in our laundry, then I stomp back into the kitchen and take the yellow pages from its spot on top of the fridge. Flicking through, I find the ads for our local Alcoholics Anonymous. I rip the page out, and in bright-red marker pen I circle the ad and stick it on our fridge.

Fat lot of good it’ll do, though. I don’t think she even eats these days.

I don’t know much about happiness, but I know that in a small way, if nowhere else, okayness can be found slipping into crisp sheets at the end of a really long day. It calms me down as I open the linen cupboard, seeing those sheets pressed and fresh and stacked properly where I put them there last week. I like neatness and order. They remind me of respectable people’s hands. The way those sheets are all folded and just sitting there politely, it’s like the way that rich people hold their hands when they’re sitting in the doctor’s waiting room – you know, the type of people who wear pearls and have clean fingernails. Before I grab a couple of sets to put on the beds I stand there for a moment. I close my eyes and lean against the frame, and with my eyes still closed, I slot my hand inside the folds of one of the bed sheets at the bottom of the stack. I imagine, with the pressure of it, it’s someone holding my hand. Not just someone. I imagine it’s my mother holding my hand, and she’s soft and nice and smells sweet like washing powder. She’s holding my hand because she wants me to be safe.

Isn’t that ridiculous?

When I’m done with the sheets, I step into the shower and wash the sea off of me. I wash the day off me. As the shampoo suds crackle in my ear I think of Willow and her bare feet; I think of Boogie, and what he said that made both our words crack with sadness. I think of Lark, playing with the dog who wasn’t Mitzy, and then the surf and being throttled by blue. I think of my mother, the drowning beetle. And I think of Noah. I turn my face up towards the showerhead and I think of Noah. I think of how he looks like he got caught in a shower of freckles. Our shoulders when they were almost touching. The way he smelt. How he wanted my opinion. How he thought I was like Piggy.

Jesus, Kirra. He thinks you’re like Piggy.

I turn the shower off and wrap the towel around me, then wipe the fog from the mirror so I can see my face. My hair, clumping down my back in a shade of dirty yellow. My small face with its pointed chin. My small nose. My regular-sized lips. And then my eyes. I squint to try to see if I’d be pretty if they were smaller. In this fuzzy, squinty reflection I do look pretty, in a way. But then I open my eyes properly again, and the size of them, the yellowness of them, scares all the beauty away. It chases it right from my face.

I think of what Boogie told me. I wonder how I can draw blood with my words. What does that even mean? I think of Cassie, and Lou and the rest of them, and I think of the words they use on me, and I think of The Circle, and how it felt like their words were scratching me right up, except the scratches were all on the inside, and how it felt as raw and painful as it would have felt if they’d been using their fingernails to claw at my skin. Maybe more. Real scratches heal. Those words they used, they drew blood all right. I need to use those types of words, Boogie said, and I wonder where I can find them.

My reflection stares back at me, and it almost scares me, how intense that girl in the mirror looks.

‘Oh yeah, Cassie? Well at least the bleach hasn’t leached into my brain,’ I whisper to the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror nods back at me. I whisper a little louder.

‘Is that foundation you’re wearing, Tara, or did a concrete mixer unload itself on your face?’

The girl in the mirror can taste the blood. And she likes it.

‘Hey Sasha, is your favourite colour beige? It should be, because you’re so generic.’

The eyes staring back at me flash.

‘Hey Lou, Cassie doesn’t like you, she just thinks of you as an attack dog who’ll lunge when she says sic ’em!’

The eyes in the mirror aren’t flashing anymore, they’re on fire. They look like two yellow fires ablaze on my face. I look tough. I look fierce. And I scare myself.

I look away, then I peek back at my reflection through my eyelashes. Do I really want to be a person who has claws?