Winter’s properly set in, but the heat hasn’t exactly left, it’s just sort of wandered into the next room – you’re still vaguely aware of its presence even if it isn’t sitting right beside you any longer. I’m in maths and Willow isn’t here. She’d been sent to the principal’s office during sex education in PE last period. Somebody made a crack about whores and Willow stood up so suddenly that the chair she’d been sitting on cartwheeled backwards, crashing into the desk behind, and she’d threatened to break his face. It didn’t go down well.

So right now I’m sitting by myself, my hair a knotted curtain around my face, and Mr Bryant is asking about the surface area of a cylinder.

Silence.

‘Kirra?’ he asks.

Shit.

Everyone’s looking at me and I hate eyes. I can understand why stares are used as deadly super powers in the comic books and the mythologies. Medusa with her glare that turns people to stone. Cyclops and his eye energy beams in the X-Men comics.

I look up at the teacher and wish with all the force of my big, yellow, alien eyes that he won’t make me say anything. But this is maths class. My yellow eyes have no power here.

‘I don’t have all day,’ Mr Bryant sighs, exasperated. I take a breath.

‘Ummm, A=2πrh+2πr2?’ I peep.

‘Correct,’ he replies, and I wait to hear the fall out, but there’s just the swoosh of pages being turned, the groaning metal as kids shift in their seats and the squeak of chalk as Mr Bryant turns back around to write on the blackboard.

Somehow, Cassie and the others have stopped heckling me. The whips of Willow’s comebacks are too much bother, but it’s more than that. I think of what Willow told me all that time ago – people can only make you feel bad about yourself if you give them permission. I don’t let Cassie have the power to dictate how I feel about myself anymore. I’ve withdrawn my permission, changed the locks and reset my pass code. She can’t pierce through my skin to claw away at my insides these days, and she can sense that. If she does say anything, her words just drift down weightlessly around me now, like the ash that falls from the sky every November when the sugarcane farmers burn their crops. I dust her words from my shoulders.

Willow’s waiting for me in the hallway when the bell rings.

‘I think the principal had been cryogenically frozen in the fifties and they’ve only just thawed him. K, I am so angry.’

Noah’s slouching past and he overhears. A blush flames like a bushfire across my cheek and I can almost hear it crackle. He doesn’t meet my eyes, and instead he shifts the weight of his bag on his shoulder and turns his freckles to face Willow.

‘Willow Parker . . . angry? That’s so unlike you.’ It’s sar­castic, but not in a mean way. He’s got deadpan down pat.

‘Quit with the sass, Willis,’ snaps Willow. ‘I have had it up to here with your gender today. Do you know what the principal said to me? He told me that young ladies shouldn’t threaten violence, and that if I was going to continue with my hostile attitude then maybe the school environment wasn’t for me and I should think about leaving once I have my year ten certificate. Then he had the hide to tell me that he might be able to get me a position as an office assistant at his friend’s business, if I pull my socks up. An office assistant. That’s basically nineties speak for a secretary. I swear, I wish I could get my hands on whatever killed the dinosaurs and use it on him, because he obviously is one. A principalsaurus.’

‘A Velo-CRAP-tor?’ offers Noah. Willow’s scowl cracks and a small smile wriggles out from her angry face.

‘Freckles, for that crap-tastic pun I’ll let you join my feminist gang. Kirra and I are blowing this popsicle stand for the afternoon to practise our roaring elsewhere. Because we are women and we roar. Wanna come?’

This is news to me.

‘We are?’

‘Yes, to South Beach. Chop chop, my lovely little starlings.’ And she turns to skip towards the back oval, out to where the track snakes its way through the bush. I’m left with Noah and the silence between us is aching. No, not just aching, it’s sharper than that. It’s painful little stabs like the air is made of knives. I look where Noah’s looking and so we’re both standing there, looking intently at his scuffed sneakers.

‘Practising roars sounds better than geography with Mr Gobstopper,’ he says, the words tumbling down towards his shoes. ‘He’s more powerful than a sleeping tablet.’

‘I think we’re maybe too harsh on him,’ I reply, peeking up at Noah through my eyelashes. ‘It must be hard to know that the school could replace your job with an atlas.’ He looks up, finally, and something like a smile twitches at his pensive mouth.

‘You guys head over to the sand dunes and I’ll meet you there in a sec, yeah?’ he tells me, then without giving me a chance to reply he races off in the direction of the canteen. I watch him slice through the hallway, a loping sort of grace, and I sort of wish he was always facing away from me, so that I could look at him whenever I wanted to, and I could look at him without feeling embarrassed.

Willow is hurling roars up against the sky when Noah scrambles the dunes to meet us at the top. Under his arms are a couple of flattened cardboard boxes bandaged with gaffer tape.

‘Nice roaring.’

‘Thanks. Kirra says she’s roaring on the inside. What have you got there, mister?’

Noah holds out the boxes and Willow takes one from him and examines the makeshift toboggan. It’s not quite jealousy that’s punching its evil little fists into my heart this time. It’s envy. The way they can be so comfortable around each other. Whenever I speak to Noah it’s so uncomfortable, it’s like all my words are wearing six-inch heels, and not in a sexy way. My words totter out from my throat all pinched and pained and stumbling.

‘The gaffer tape’s to stop the friction, so we can slide down faster,’ Noah explains. Willow sits down on a piece of flattened cardboard but she doesn’t slide down. She just sits there with the wind blowing back her coffee hair and she wears the sky like it’s a giant cape fanning wide and blue behind her.

‘You know what, Freckles, you give the Y chromosome a good name,’ she tells him. ‘Not like the principalsaurus. I mean, me, an office assistant. Pfft. I’m going to study law one day, when I get out of here, and I’ll be a hot-shot criminal barrister in the city.’

Noah shoots her a wry look.

‘You? A barrister? Ha!’

Her eyes glint and become the colour of gunmetal. Everything about her turns hard.

‘Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you’ve just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you’re nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?’

Noah looks red in those small spaces of unfreckled skin.

‘Shit, Willow. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, if anyone’s not made for boxes it’s you. I just meant, like, law is all about defending the rules, and like, you break the rules more than anyone I know. You hate rules.’

Willow sighs and lies down and grabs fistfuls of sand, which keep slipping through that space between her fingers. She’s forgiven him.

‘I don’t hate rules. I hate rules that make no sense. Being a barrister isn’t about defending rules, it’s about defending justice. I want to fight for that. I believe in justice.’

Then she tips her chin up at the sky.

‘Rooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!’

Noah joins in.

‘Rooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!’

Willow reaches her arm across and bats at me to join in.

‘Rawr?’

‘You need to work on that,’ she tells me. Once we’re done filling the sky with sound she brushes herself off and examines the piece of flattened cardboard she was just lying on. ‘Speaking of boxes . . .’

And then she runs and jumps off the edge of the dune. She slices through the slope, sharp and quick and whooping, and behind her she cuts a gash in the sand like aeroplanes do with their vapour trails in the sky sometimes. She leaves her mark.

Noah and I are alone.

It feels like there’s a mallet at my chest.

Be cool, Kirra.

I am anything but cool.

I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do, but he leans against me so our shoulders touch, and I don’t understand how my shoulders can grow so many nerve endings whenever Noah’s next to me, because that’s all I can focus on, and I don’t understand how my mum used to wear shoulder pads when she was young in the 80s because she’d be missing out on so much of the zinging that’s happening right now. And then he touches my hand.

It’s a quiet touch. My palm is open and he just moves his fingers over to it, gently, like if touches were whispers. We’re not looking at each other, he just starts to follow the lines of my palm with his thumb. I’ve never felt so attached to my hand like I am right now. I’ve never been so glad that just underneath my skin are strings of veins and nerve endings that branch out and connect to all of me, like strands of fairy lights that Noah’s touch just lit up. Right now, all of me, all that I am, is the feeling of Noah’s skin against my skin. Nothing else exists.

I am alight.

I watch and follow his thumbnail etching the creases of my palm, and it’s like all of the lines in my hand are a hundred different roads branching out, and he’s following each of them, one by one.

‘So what are you going to be one day?’ he asks me, directing his words at my hand. I want to close my fists to catch them, but instead I glance over to him and the wind is making his sandy hair dance against his brow.

God, he is lovely.

‘You’ll laugh,’ I say, and I look down at our hands too, and I peek up at him and then look away, taking tiny sips of his face. I look down at his thumb tracing my life line all the way down to my wrist.

‘I won’t laugh. I promise.’

Noah’s finger is still at the spot where my life line ends, and I hope he can’t feel my pulse through my wrist, because it’s drumming.

‘I sort of want to make a difference,’ I tell him, finally. It sounds so ridiculous, saying this out loud.

Me.

The speck.

The dot.

The grain of sand.

But I know that I want to leave behind footprints so much bigger than the soles of my size six Dunlops. Noah doesn’t laugh. He waits for me to go on, so I do.

‘I was thinking maybe politics, or something like that,’ I admit. ‘I just kind of want to speak up for people who are never listened to, you know?’ Then I look over to him and he’s doing that sort of smile that scrunches up his face and makes his freckles bump.

‘You promised you wouldn’t laugh!’

‘I’m not laughing, you idiot. I’m smiling, because you’ll be perfect at it.’

Then he lets go of my hand to lean over and scoop out a periwinkle shell from where it’s half buried in the sand by his knee. He offers it to me, his bottom lip disappearing under his adorably only-slightly-crooked teeth.

‘Here. I know it’s not a great big conch shell like in Lord of the Flies, but we can pretend it is.’

I take it from him, rolling the weight of it in my hand. Somewhere inside my heart something sprouts, and from it a smile blooms. I don’t know how women go crazy for diamonds like they do, because nothing in this world right now is more precious than a periwinkle shell. I hold it against the sky and watch it spiral as I turn it, then I put it in my pocket where I can keep it safe. We sit there, watching the foam crash on sand. I think of the shell, and of being the person who has everyone’s attention.

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, though,’ I confess. ‘Going into politics, I mean. I’d really have to get used to people looking at me.’

Noah takes my hand properly now, and presses the map of his palm against mine. I think of our love lines and our life lines pressing against each other. Aligned. We catch eyes, and I can’t look away.

‘Kirra, you should already be used to it. I mean, I’ve never been looking anywhere else.’

He blushes but he keeps staring into my eyes, and he’s not looking at the size of them or the yellowness of them. He’s seeing the person I am inside of them, and he’s looking at me like I’m really worth looking at.

There’s a moment, I discover. That moment just after you know that someone’s about to kiss you and just before they do. Time gets fuzzier. It stretches and contracts so it’s both a blink and an eternity. It’s like the space between words in the kind of book that makes you stop and just rest the pages on your chest from the truth of it, or in that winged space in between the notes of a song. It’s a space that sits shoulder to shoulder between lovely things, and those lovely things make the nothingness of the space fat and full with thingness. In between Noah’s eyes making a promise, and his lips touching mine, I live an eternity wrapped inside a blink, and then he kisses me and time stops existing altogether.

His lips are as soft as they look.

Everything stops.

Time might not have ever started ticking again, the whole world could have stayed frozen, like it was nothing but painted scenery on a backdrop, except Willow’s climbed back up the dune and she clears her throat.

‘Don’t let me interrupt you two adorable face mashers . . .’

We pull apart, embarrassed, but the moment doesn’t shatter. It just sort of flattens, then folds into itself, becoming dense and small and beautiful like origami, and I take that folded moment and I put it in my pocket, next to the periwinkle shell, and I know that I’ll keep that folded moment next to me for always. Willow plonks herself down at the other side of me, happy as a bird.

‘Well that only took, what? A couple of years?’ she chirps. ‘I swear the unresolved sexual tension between Ross and Rachel on Friends had nothing on you two.’

Noah looks over at me, and a small smile pulls at the edge of his mouth.

‘I would have said more like Superman and Lois Lane.’

Willow rolls her eyes and throws a tiny shell at his head.

‘Well, one of us has to pretend this isn’t awkward, so I guess it’s up to me, hey kids? On a totally unrelated note, K, I almost forgot. I swiped this from the principalsaurus’s waiting room. It’s vintage 1982.’

She digs through her bag and hands me an old school magazine. I thumb through it and I come to a picture of my mum in year twelve. She’s holding a certificate, her hair fluffed and feathered and ridiculously big on such a tiny girl. Lark quit school in year ten but he’s in the photo, too, in just his boardies, like he’s dropped past to congratulate her on his way back from a surf. He photo bombs the picture and he’s sticking out his tongue and making bunny ears with his fingers above her head. Despite their goofiness you can tell that the rest of the year wishes that they were them. They’d had that something. I wish I’d inherited it, whatever it is, but I guess it’s one of those things that skips a generation.

‘I didn’t know Lark used to have a mullet,’ grins Noah. Willow checks out the photo.

‘Mullet or no mullet, I think I have a crush on the 1982 version of your dad, K, and I don’t know how to feel about that.’

I ignore them and stare at my mum. At eighteen her eyes aren’t so fearless as they were when she was fourteen, but the whole world was still there, dangling in front of her delicate nose.

‘She was voted most likely to succeed,’ I say, faintly. ‘That was just before she fell pregnant with me, before she threw her future away.’

Willow looks hard at me.

‘Read her bio, Kirra. When it asks about her hobbies and interests, she says Lark. Seriously. Gross. When it asks about where she’ll be in five years time, she says with Lark.’

She pretends to puke. I read it for myself, and after Willow’s finished with fake puking she wraps one arm around me and pulls her hair behind her ears so I can see into both her eyes. She takes the magazine from me and places it on the sand, and I watch as the breeze tosses the pages back and forth so that all the kids from long ago look like they’re dancing.

‘Here are my thoughts. It’s easy for you and me, little one. We’re nothing here, so there’s nothing here to miss, but it’d be so much harder to find yourself suddenly a nobody in a big world when you’re used to always being a somebody, like your mum was, or how Freckles here is. Sorry Freckles, no offence. But it would be so much easier to just stay.’ Then she holds up an imaginary champagne glass and pretends to cheers me.

‘Here’s to starting so low that you have nowhere to go but up.’

I grin and pretend to cheers her back.

‘Here’s to starting so low that you have nowhere to go but up.’

‘Chink chink.’

I lean over to grab the school magazine from where it’s flapp­ing by itself and I shove it into my bag while Willow turns to Noah.

‘So what are you going to do when you’re older, Willis? Wait, don’t tell me. Like every other guy in this town you want to be a pro surfer?’

Noah’s staring out at the horizon and his forehead is furrowed and as rippled as the ocean and all I can think of is how his shoulder feels so warm and good against my own right now.

‘Maybe,’ he says, as he watches the sea froth and tumble. ‘But, you know, there’s a big world out there that I don’t know anything about. A world that you never learn about in geography. Not really. I’m gonna see what’s out there, and maybe there’s a job for me that I don’t know anything about and I won’t know about it until I go and find it.’

He points out to the horizon. It’s so many shades of blue. Blue on blue on blue. The only other colour is the splash of white that the occasional seagull silhouette daubs onto the sky.

‘See that horizon out there? It’s infinite. That’s what our future is, you know? It’s infinite. And I’m racing towards it!’

He picks up his piece of cardboard and throws himself against the dune’s edge.

Willow turns back to me.

‘How is your mum going?’

I pick and tear at my nails.

‘My mum’s not so mad anymore,’ I tell her, finally, and she squeezes my hand. Noah’s reached the bottom and we get up to walk over to the dune edge and look down at him, so tiny down there. So tiny that if I closed one eye and pointed he could dis­appear beneath my fingertip.

And yet up close, he is everything.

He waves up to us.

‘Here’s to infinite horizons!’ Willow yells back to him as she grabs my hand.

‘Here’s to infinite horizons!’ I scream out towards the edge of the earth.

Willow and I grab our pieces of cardboard and we run to the edge, and we aren’t afraid. We hurtle down the slope and we fly.