That night I sneak out the front door again. The full moon lights up the street – the kind of moon that’s chosen to show all of herself, and for the first time in months I jog down the street, ignoring the Bakers’ dog as it snarls against the wire fence. I jog as the bridge rattles underneath my feet, and don’t stop even when I have to negotiate the branches through the bush track.

Boogie’s there when I pick up the phone. I scrape my shoes against the side of the booth while I choose my words.

‘What you did, that was so many shades of messed up,’ I tell him. He sounds dejected when he finally replies, his voice is flatter than a shadow.

‘I know. Don’t you think I already hate myself enough?’

I curl the cord around my fingers as I think of what to say next. ‘But I’m not going to make you stay where you are all alone.’

I look over to the tree stump next to the booth – the stump of the tree that Boogie had hung from. We learnt in school that you can tell the age of a tree by counting the number of rings in the wood. Boogie will always be fourteen and six months. He’s trapped in time. If he were a chopped-down tree, he’d always be fourteen rings, while I get to grow and stretch my branches out, and become so much bigger than he ever got. My heart breaks for him. It shatters into a thousand different shards and scatters all over the floor of the phone booth.

‘I can still talk to you over the phone. I’ll come back and tell you what it’s like to be fifteen, and sixteen, and twenty-one, and forty,’ I say. ‘I’ll always come back, if you want me to, you don’t have to be all by yourself. I can start off by telling you what it’s like to be fourteen and eleven months?’

I can almost hear his smile through the phone. ‘I’ve never been fourteen and eleven months,’ he whispers.

I tell him about Mum, and how she’s getting better, and how when she smiles now, she glows.

Boogie’s crying.

‘Kirra . . . Can you . . . can you tell her I’m sorry?’ he sobs. ‘For the way I treated her, and for the way I treated you? I don’t know why I did it.’

His voice is all scratched up. ‘Nobody wants to be the bad guy, you know? But sometimes . . . sometimes the pain is so overwhelming that you forget who you are, and when the fog clears and you look down you find that you’re the one wearing the black cape, and you don’t know how the hell that happened.’

I look up to the sky, and it’s so dark, but there are also stars, and they’re like pin pricks of light. Millions of tiny spaces where the light still wriggles through. I try to focus on them.

‘Just please don’t try to kill me again.’

When Boogie speaks there isn’t any colour in his voice. Colour needs light to exist.

‘I understand if you hate me. I can understand why everyone always hated me, you know? I taught them how to do it, ’cos I hated myself and they just copied. Except Judy. She never copied anyone, so I went ahead and forced her to believe it and I forced her to hate me. Then I did it with you, too. I’m so sorry, Kirra.’

I cradle the receiver into my face and look over at the scrub where the shadow of a possum slopes along a branch.

‘I’ll tell her that you’re sorry,’ I whisper. ‘And Boogie . . . I forgive you.’

Boogie’s cries sound so jagged that they must be cutting him right up. Then the sobs turn strangled as his breathing gets quicker and then the line sounds like a storm’s mucking with the reception.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask him. His voice is crackling when he answers.

‘I don’t think I’m going to be around to hear about being fifteen . . .’ he croaks. ‘I feel strange, Kirra. I’m scared. I feel like there’s something pulling me away . . .’

And I listen on the line until his breathing becomes fainter and fainter.

‘Boogie?’ I call out to him, but he doesn’t reply.

‘Boogie!’ I scream.

He’s not at the phone box anymore.

I hang up the receiver and I look up to the moon, which stares back at me, with her yellow, puffed-out chest. I pull my cardigan tight around myself and shiver. The stars wink down at me and I close my eyes to make a wish.

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight.

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

I wish that wherever Boogie is, he’s okay.