When I was in Year Six, we went on a school trip to Canberra. They took us to Questacon, and we stood for ages in front of two people in white lab coats putting rubber bands around a watermelon.

‘I’m leaving,’ Cam Davidson declared eventually. ‘This is boring.’

He turned around just as the watermelon blew up.

There’s blood in my mouth. All over my face. All over my hands. All over the bed and the walls and the floor, and all I can think about is Cam Davidson, and how I wish I’d been as smart as him. I wish I’d had the forethought to turn around before the explosion.

The machines go crazy, beeping, screeching, wailing. Nurses come rushing in, Cardy’s mum among them, and they all stop when they see me, dripping with pieces of Dave.

‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ I try to say, but I can’t, because my mouth is thick with gore.

I look around. There’re flowers on the nightstand. I throw them on the floor, drink the dirty flower water, swish it around my mouth, spit it on the floor, repeat and repeat and repeat.

‘Someone call the police!’ one of the nurses says.

‘No, wait!’ I say, and begin to sing.

I sing and I sing and I sing. I sing for hours, make myself small and invisible and let the fairy music fill me up so full I can’t help but let it spill out. I have to sing to everyone in the whole hospital, make them all mine.

‘There was no one in the room when Dave died,’ I say to another doctor, another nurse, another late-night visitor, another patient, another, another, another. ‘I was never here.’

‘No one,’ they repeat. ‘No one. No one.’

‘Now forget,’ I say. ‘Forget me. Forget the music.’

The sun is rising by the time I get home. I sneak in my bedroom window so that I don’t wake Disey, and catch sight of myself in my mirror.

Glimmering wetly in the pale orange light are pieces of Dave’s brain in my hair.