Mum’s bedroom door is still closed when I head to school the next day. I know she’s alive, because she told me to bugger off when I tentatively knocked on it before I left. It’s the last day of school before the first-term holidays – a whole two weeks stuck with Mum.

Super.

I know that something’s wrong as soon as I step through the school gates. Kids are shooting me sidelong glances and the air is thick with whispers and that sharp hyena laughter. It doesn’t take too long to figure out why – the local paper had taken my photograph while I was performing my speech, and now they’ve gone and stuck it on the front page.

My heart drops.

My soul slinks out from under my feet and scampers off to hide in some small, shadowed corner.

Everything turns the colour of shame.

Photocopies of the paper are plastered all over the school, except whoever did the photocopying has drawn all over my face, adding glasses, blacked-out teeth and alien antennas, and there’s a speech bubble coming out of my mouth saying E.T. phone home. Another one has me with whiskers and cat-ears, a collar around my neck, and a sketch of Mrs Thomas leading me by a chain. The caption there reads Kirra Barley – the teacher’s pet. The drawings were done by Tara, I can tell. She’s always been a bit of an artist.

I hate Mrs Thomas for making me do the speech.

I will hate her for as long as I live.

The tears pooling in my eyes make everything blurry and warped, like the world is one of those mirrors you see at the fairground. I race around the school, tearing all the posters down from the walls, and by the time I’m done there’s a pile in my arms that reaches up to my chin. I shout and stomp at an ibis to chase it away, and stick them all in a bin near the drama hall, ripping each of them to pieces before chucking them. Some slouchy, skater kid laughs and quotes the poster as he passes me. I turn around to confront him.

‘You want to start something?’ I shout and I know my eyes are blazing like wildfire. The kid stops snickering.

‘Oi, settle down . . .’ he shoots back, arms raised and fingers splayed, in that gesture that says ‘keep away from me, crazy girl’.

I’m the crazy girl.

I’m the crazy girl and I don’t give a shit.

First period is history, and the teacher hasn’t arrived yet. Early mornings have never really been his thing. I slam my bag down at a free desk up the front and I brace myself for the barrage. I don’t have to wait long, teenagers and restraint don’t really go hand in hand. Willow shoots me an unimpressed look as she’s walking to her desk.

‘Extracurricular activity, hey?’ she mutters. I want to say sorry, but sorry is one of those words that you really have to mean if you’re going to say it. It’s only two syllables, some air, and teeth, and tongue, but it’s the meaning behind the word that gives it power. Otherwise it’s just teeth, and tongue, and air, and sound. I’m not actually sorry, not really. I mean, I’m sorry that I didn’t tell her the whole truth about the speech, but she’s mostly mad at me because I didn’t trust her. The thing is, even if I did tell her, she wouldn’t believe me anyway, and then she’d still be mad at me because she’d think I was a liar. I can’t tell her I’m sorry, so I don’t say anything at all, and she looks disappointed in me as she stalks over to a desk at the other side of the room.

Cassie, Lou, Sasha and Tara are falling over themselves laughing up the back. Sasha misquotes from the paper, mimicking me in a whiny voice, ‘All I’ve ever known in my fourteen years is spit balls!’ as Lou flicks a spit ball at me. I ignore it, and focus on the blackboard, my eyes blazing.

‘Nerd alert,’ laughs Tara. My knuckles are white, gripping the edge of my desk.

And then Cassie. ‘Will your mum still gatecrash like a pathetic drunk when you’re living that glamorous life in the city?’

With her words, it’s like the wiring inside me has been tripped, something snaps, the husk which holds everything in cracks apart, setting everything free, and rage tears me open. I see red, the world is pulsing with red, and the words that have laid dormant all my life come to me. They’ve been triggered, and they’re screaming inside of me, the ones that Boogie told me to use, the ones that draw blood.

I want to taste that blood.

I slam my desk back and face Cassie, my eyes wide and fierce and flaming.

‘Come up with some new material, Cassie, you’ve done that one to death. Oh wait, you can’t, because you’re so stupid that your parents had to take you to hearing and sight specialists when we were in year five. Remember that? They figured you had to have some sort of impairment to account for your bad grades but it turns out there was nothing wrong, you were just actually that dumb.’

Cassie’s mouth swings open in shock. I’ve never talked back before, and I wasn’t supposed to know this, I’d overheard her parents speaking about it at a sleepover once, when she and Lou had locked me out of her bedroom. The class is cracking up now, and the words hang in the room, as real and solid as if I’d painted them on the walls in thick red paint.

‘I dare you to come closer and say that, you freak,’ she hisses.

Drunk on the words, I swagger up to where she’s standing. She’s half a head taller than me, and she looks down at me, her lips curled in disgust in a way that almost makes her ugly. More words are itching inside my mouth. In a steady, sharp voice I speak up.

‘I didn’t want to come too close, in case you wet yourself, you know, like how you wet the bed until year seven.’

The class starts howling in laughter, hooting, the walls are echoing with it. Cassie’s face cracks, like a dam has broken, and shame spreads through her capillaries and stains her face red. The next thing I know, her perfectly manicured hand swings around and slaps me in the face. It doesn’t even hurt.

It feels like before all of this, I was born inside out, my nerve endings worn on the outside of my skin, so that even the slightest thing wounded me. Now, I feel like I’ve been turned back the right way again, and my skin has grown over and become tougher, like the skin on Lark’s fingertips, how they’ve become stiff and calloused from playing the guitar. It feels like nothing can penetrate it. It feels like I have scales and claws.

I smile at Cassie.

I smile at her, and I remember what Boogie taught me, and I punch.

Shoulders back, knuckles tilted, strong.

This punch draws blood.

Cassie’s crying, holding her nose, which is gushing blood all over her pretty face and down onto her school shirt. Willow raises a disbelieving eyebrow at me. Noah is staring incredulously. The rest of the class is gape mouthed and silent.

The history teacher walks in, five minutes late and all befuddled. He’s surprised to see the class so quiet, and it takes him a moment to clock us. By then it’s too late. I’ve grabbed my bag and I push past him and out of the classroom.

I run.

My feet are pounding down the street, matching the swollen pumping of my heart, and a sentence repeats itself in my head. Boogie’s words, when I was asking about Mum. ‘Drag her to get help. Chain her up. Scream at her.’ I pass the puckered, slouching houses down the bad end of town.

My end of town.

My legs burn as I run up the hill to where the houses start to shine from fresh licks of paint, and I stand wheezing for a moment when I reach the top. If I looked behind me I could see the strip of bush down far below, where Boogie and the phone box are. I don’t look. I run down the hill now, to where the houses stand tall and proud and solid and new. I don’t stop until I’m at the main street of town, and I double over, hands on knees, trying to catch snatches of breaths where I can find them. After my breathing has returned to normal, I walk into the hardware store, and I take the fifty dollars Lark gave me out of my wallet. I take that fifty dollars and I buy chains and padlocks. The tattooed, mop-headed owner of the store gives me a quizzical look. I return his stare.

‘We have dogs.’

He shrugs and takes my money. I still have twenty dollars left, so I go next door to the grocery store and stock up on Gatorade and vitamins.

‘You doing lots of sports, honey?’ the lady at the counter asks me.

I plaster on a smile. ‘Training for the Olympics.’

Her gaze sweeps my skinny, completely muscle-free frame.

‘Sure you are, honey.’

Once outside I take a breath. This is it.