Enter the dungeons and you’ll find that the lockers and the doors and the rubbish bins are small, even the toilets are made for dolls. Tinytown, infantville, the basement corridor where we can observe the lowest of the low in their natural habitat, the Year Sevens and Eights.
I’m a giant of course, metres taller than the rest—I’ve been almost twice my usual size for six days now. Walking on stilts, walking the corridors like I have army boots on, not scuffed school shoes, stomp stomp stomping on the cack green carpet with my loyal supporters trailing behind. New headphones clamped on, shiny gold ridiculous, but what no one knows is that there’s no music trickling through them. The corridor sounds muffle down to almost nothing and I move to an imaginary beat and that’s how I keep fooling everyone.
Sarah is with me, and Marley too, but Ally is in sick bay with monster period pain under the care of patchouli-reeking Nurse Lee and Nurofen Plus, but only two every four hours because dependency on legal drugs is almost as serious as dependency on the fun ones.
The Year Sevens cling to their lockers like scared little baby dolls, with round faces and big eyes and squidgy mouths and spiky eyelashes. They hobbit about doing babyish things with their lunch hour, building forts with the tables, swapping worthless plastic bracelets, trying to figure out what they can afford at the tuckshop with their last $2.30.
‘That’s Natalia,’ I see one mouth to another. ‘Year Ten.’
Let them see my summer uniform hitched high, hair unbrushed for days, Sharpie tattoos on my thighs. Let them know they don’t have to care about the rules despite what everyone says. Disobey, but don’t get caught.
I ignore the lapping at my ankles, the still-rising tide of if it happened to her it could happen to me, the swishing I need to be ready and what if I’m next. Put your gumboots on because, they haven’t caught him he’s still out there and it’s not going away, how long will it be before he gets the urge again.
I’m high and dry because I gave up at 36 hours, along with the police. Because you can choose to be hopeless, that’s what I’ve learnt.
After six days it’s almost as if she never existed at all.
I wave at Posy, this year’s favourite baby doll, and Posy waves back. Even at twelve you can tell that Posy is going to grow up to rule her year level and be a mega-babe, the sort that isn’t the prettiest, but is the most interesting, the most magnetic. Posy is sweet now, but she’s only months away from realising her superiority and then she’s gonna turn from a sugary little lollipop into a sour lemon nightmare and her parents and teachers will be disappointed because she used to be such a nice girl.
I turn the corner out of Tinytown right as the end-of-lunch bell rings. This next part of the dungeons smells of unwashed PE uniforms and forgotten sandwiches. The Year Eights are smack-bang in the middle of their awkward phase, labouring under their oversized backpacks like beetles.
‘You are no longer cute!’ I yell in celebration because I’ve decided that my Friday afternoon gift to myself is that I’ll stop working at lunchtime. I’ll spend periods five and six snipping off my split ends and planning my weekend with my phone hidden inside my inside blazer pocket because they make secret agents out of us with their nonsense rules and they make liars out of us with their lies.
I stop.
I survey the emptying dungeon with an odd metallic taste in my mouth. Something is askew, like in those puzzles I loved when I was a kid: find five things wrong with this picture.
‘Where’s Amanda?’ I ask the closest beetle.
‘Her parents took her out of school.’
‘Why?’ I ask, even though I already know the reason. Amanda’s older sister Ruby wasn’t in Biology this morning. Cowards run away, and Amanda and Ruby’s parents clearly have no grasp on the statistical probability of teen abductions.
Why is everyone thinking about themselves, when they should be thinking about Yin?
‘I don’t know.’ The Year Eight girl quails, looking away. ‘I’m gonna be late for Maths. Mr Scrutton will give me detention.’
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Scrotum is way too nice for that.’ The Year Eight looks confused so I have to explain. ‘Mr Scrutton. Scrutton, Scrotum—remember it.’
I let her go. She’ll run to her friends and report on what I’ve told her and they’ll say Scrotum for the rest of eternity.
‘What are we going to do with our spare?’
Sarah hasn’t spoken in five minutes and I wouldn’t be able to tell you the last time that happened, hallelujah it’s a miracle. I’d almost forgotten she was there.
I flip my headphones off.
‘Oh, I have detention. I got busted wagging RE this morning.’ The lie slips out beautifully—the best sort of lie, the one you don’t know you’re going to tell until it’s half-said. A good lie gives me a warm tingle. ‘I said I couldn’t stay after school so Mrs Preshill said I had to do it in my free period.’
Sarah pouts. ‘We have a theory. We need to tell you.’
I should be relieved, I suppose, that Sarah is talking about something other than herself. But if she says one more thing about Yin’s parents, I don’t know what I’ll do.
Marley nods furiously behind her. ‘But we shouldn’t discuss it here.’
Sarah ignores that. ‘It’s Mr Martell. You know, Tyrone.’
I do know. Mr Martell is the school’s official photographer and he’s not ancient and he’s rumoured to have had sex with a handful of Year Twelves, or at least copped a handful of almost-legal Balmoral boob.
Mr Martell is supposedly hot, but his legs are bandy and he’s going to go bald early, you can already tell. He’s a bagel in a shop full of sliced wholemeal bread: not that exciting, especially if there are donuts available right around the corner.
‘Did I tell you about the time during theatre sports when I caught him pointing his camera right at my tits? Right at them! I should probably tell the police that.’
And there it is again. The me me me-nologue. Sarah is sparking with manufactured outrage.
‘Teaghan said that Rochelle saw a folder on Tyrone’s laptop that was called “Sports Day Cuties”,’ Marley says. ‘He had close-ups of all these girls’ faces and was going to take them home, you know, to fantasise over.’
‘Fantasise?’ I say. ‘Don’t you mean “masturbate”? Also, you know that Teaghan lies for attention, remember?’
There’s no way that Rochelle could get access to that computer. Marley blinks at me, but Sarah takes up the thread.
‘We remember, Tal. But maybe Tyrone’s got a pervert room at his house with photos of Balmoral students covering the walls and that’s how he plans who he’s going to take next. It’s his special collection of favourite girls.’
‘You got that idea from Devil Creek,’ I say.
They’re squashing the buzz I built up during lunch, the fuzz that crowded out the bad thoughts.
I see I’m going to have to jog their memories. ‘That happened at the end of the first episode, remember? When they found that creepy shed in the bush? It was for only a split second before the credits. They’ll come back to it later.’
We binged three episodes of Devil Creek together on Saturday night, not together as in the same room, but messaging each other from our separate houses. No one else picks up any of the clues, though.
The small country town of Devil Creek—where everyone is suspiciously buff and good looking and totally not inbred or married to their cousins—is rocked by the murder of the prettiest girl in town, Emily Blake, and of course she’s the nicest person too. Only after she’s dead do her secrets come out—and not just hers. Everyone in town is a suspect and the police still haven’t found the murderer, and conveniently probably won’t until the very last moments of season one.
Mere hours after the first season of the show dropped, Yin went missing.
I’m pretty sure they’re setting it up to reveal that lovely dead ginger Emily Blake was slutting it up with both of the two hot-but-ignorant brothers, each without the other knowing, and if they’re thinking that has anything to do with anything in the real world then they need to get a grip.
Yin doesn’t talk to guys. Maybe she talks to them once a year when our orchestra joins our brother school’s orchestra for two weeks of orgiastic rehearsals and they compare their reeds or work on their embouchures or whatever.
I feel sick all of a sudden and that’s not only an expression, because bile rises up into my mouth, acid and putrid, and I have to bend at the waist to stop things going further.
I’m a terrible human being for entertaining myself with thoughts about a fake show about a fake murder while Yin was getting ripped out of her ordinary life. When I try to imagine the first moment she realised there was a strange man in her house, I can’t breathe.
I pretend to be sure that she’s gone for good because isn’t it better to think the worst? Deep down, though, there’s stubborn hope that I wish I could wipe away forever, just for some certainty.
I push it all down and straighten up, once I’m sure I won’t puke.
‘Hello, are you listening to anything I’m saying?’ Sarah waves her hand in my face. ‘Are we going to Moose Juice on the way home?’
We’re the only three people left in the hallway, but pre-weekend electricity still crackles in the air; the normal kind plus extra nasty electricity because girls go missing on weekends and don’t come back to school on Monday morning. I realise that I don’t want to do anything this weekend but lock myself in my bedroom and stay in bed.
‘Maybe,’ I say.
We get the announcement at lunchtime that they’ve cancelled our classes for periods five and six and instead our entire year level crams into the gym and we spend the final hours of the school week trying to maim each other.
‘Ladies!’ hollers our new self-defence teacher, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who used to be on TV and calls herself the Ninja Trainer. ‘I’m going to teach you to use your natural feminine strengths to defeat attackers who are bigger! And heavier! Than you! Get into sparring pairs!’
I’ve read that ‘In the Unlikely Event’ email three times and I’m pretty sure peeing myself will not be considered a natural feminine strength.
I put up my hand. ‘Why do we have to learn to defend ourselves? Maybe men should have classes about not assaulting and killing us?’
But my voice gets lost in the chaos of everyone trying to pair off for the ticklefest and I consider going over to Mrs Benjamin to ask her, but I can see that Audrey is already monopolising Benjo’s attention to complain about the Ninja Trainer’s name on the grounds of cultural appropriation.
A wide circle devoid of all human lifeform has opened up around me, but luckily I find Petra hiding behind the vaulting horse.
‘You are the Chosen One!’ I say, but instead of looking ecstatic, as she well should be, Petra looks terrified. She’ll change her tune. I’m a natural actress and she’s really going to benefit from fending off my believable attacks.
Chloe from my Art class has been left with no partner, so when Audrey finishes complaining to Mrs Benjamin she comes over to try and manipulate the pairings.
‘Can we switch so I can go with Petra and you go with her?’ Audrey asks me. Rude.
‘Absolutely not,’ I say. ‘And she has a name, by the way; it’s Chloe.’
Chloe is tall and big and broad like an Amazon, with long long hair down to her butt and square black glasses. I suspect she’s good-looking under those two things, but you’d never know it. Audrey, on the other hand, looks like a movie star from the silent era. Her natural setting is a satin-sheeted boudoir where two half-naked manservants fan her with palm leaves. I’m positive Chloe can take her. I sincerely hope she sits on Audrey’s face repeatedly.
White Ninja has us doing warm-ups, then drills, then combat situations. Petra and Audrey gaze across the two-metre gap between them with yearning, although surely trying to beat up your best friend isn’t great, right? They should thank me, truly.
Mrs Benjamin leans against the climbing wall and everything in her body language indicates her extremely low expectations.
I prove her completely wrong by pinning Petra against the wall before she even has a chance to yelp.
‘You win, you win!’ she gasps.
‘Balls, Petra.’ I release her and point to my eyeballs and then my groin. ‘Balls and balls. I had you easily. If you don’t find a way to get pissed off, you’ll find yourself tied up in someone’s van.’
‘Well, I don’t think she should be encouraging us to get angry,’ Petra says. ‘If we’re in a dangerous situation, it’s better to stay calm.’
‘Switch roles!’ White Ninja calls out. ‘Remember, he won’t want you if you’re loud and strong. If he gets within striking distance, shred him.’
The gym fills with yelps and shouting and laughter. Audrey strolls over to Chloe and taps her on the shoulder.
Chloe sighs and looks at me.
I take a deep breath. ‘HEY! CAN I HELP YOU? ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME, PRICK?’
Petra pushes her hands out but I’m already rushing her and then she’s flat on the ground with her arms cradling her head. I crouch over her, miming all of the moves we’ve been shown—jabbing her in the throat, poking her eyes, play-pulling ears and hair.
‘Ow!’ Petra yelps loudly. ‘You got my eye!’
I sit down on her chest, attack over. ‘Oh, come on, it was a mistake, Petra. I slipped. I barely touched you.’
I prise Petra’s hands away from her face. Her eye looks fine. Maybe it’s watering a little bit. I guess her cheeks are quite red, too.
‘Why are you so angry all the time, Natalia?’ she asks.
If anyone sounds angry, it’s her. I’m not angry. That was controlled technique right there.
‘Are you okay?’ Chloe comes over. White Ninja is making Audrey do punishment sit-ups for not trying hard enough.
I stand up and hold out my hand to help Petra up, but she closes her eyes and shakes her head. Sarah and Ally are laughing like I planned this; that suck Teaghan is in hysterics too. I wish she would stop trying to get back into our group.
‘Suit yourself,’ I say. I find my water bottle and suck on it. I won’t apologise, then.
Chloe and Petra whisper to each other, and then they both go off to the change rooms. Audrey watches them go.
I don’t hang out after school, despite what I’ve sort-of promised Sarah. Instead I throw my blazer on over my PE uniform and sprint the secret shortcut through the Junior School to get the jump on my friends and am rewarded with an almost-empty tram.
I hang off the handle, lifting my feet and spinning as if I’m still a kid. My dress hikes up, my arms ache, I scrape my school shoes along the floor and I grease off any man that dares look in my direction, even the pensioners.
Don’t they know I could shred their balls right now?
The look on Chloe’s face as she led Petra away sticks in my mind. For some reason I would prefer that Chloe doesn’t think I’m the kind of person who pokes people in the eye deliberately. I don’t know why everyone always assumes the worst of me.
The Junction races past the dirty tram windows and still I don’t get off. Instead I wind up near the train station and the shopping centre.
I should be thinking about Sarah and Marley’s theory about Mr Martell, but now I can’t stop thinking about whether I went too hard on Petra. A restless itch sits under my skin. What do I hear all the time, from Mum, Dad, teachers? Natalia, you always go too far.
I buy a handful of red liquorice twists at the sell-everything kiosk by the station, and the old guy there says, ‘You’re too pretty to look so sad. Why don’t you smile?’
So I smile, and while I’m smiling I drop a pack of chewing gum into my school bag, down low where he can’t see it. Smile, smile, white teeth, fresh breath, smile.
‘And you’re way too ugly to look so happy,’ I say in my sweetest voice, only I don’t say it for real.
When I look down I see Yin’s Year Seven school photo smiling back at me from a tabloid front page. KIDNAP VICTIM FEARS, it says. Every muscle on my face tenses.
Was he following Yin for weeks without her noticing? Is he watching us all from a distance now, checking our reactions, feeling superior? Is he someone I know?
I go into the heat of the shopping centre and trawl the shops, liquorice twist dangling from my lips. Touching candles and buddha heads and prayer flags in the hippy shop, saucepans and cupcake trays and Thermomixes in the kitchen shop, memory-foam pillows and bamboo sheets in bedbathland. I stare through the window at the blonde ladies getting their toenails painted by Thai women, until one of the customers looks uncomfortable. She has a smooth bob and could be my mum.
The next shop has dance music pulsing into every crevice and I trail my hands over the racks of clothes. Stretchy leggings with mesh panels, crop tops, yeti jumpers, my fingers stick to everything they touch.
The assistant smiles at me, and picks at her phone like a chicken pecking at the ground.
I take an armful of clothes to the change room and they’re not what I’d usually wear, but I dutifully squeeze into them, zip and button and pull into place.
All of it is cheap and horrible but when I slip into a satin bomber jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back and a light sprinkle of plastic jewels, I can’t help but pause. I look at myself in the mirror. Plain schoolday face, tinted-moisturiser-only face.
The jacket isn’t me, but it’s something Yin should want to wear half-ironically, half-defiantly, on account of it being so blingy and Oriental. She never did have any fashion sense.
I zip up the jacket and put my school dress on over the top, arranging the collar carefully. Woollen school jumper next, even my blazer.
Saunter out, put things back, pretend to look for one minute more.
‘Thank you!’ I call out to the shop assistant as I leave, but she doesn’t even lift her head. She’s swiping her phone left and right, left left left left left left HOT. I hope none of the dudes she meets is a serial killer.
The side gate is open and the back door ajar when I get home and the prophecy unfolds right before my eyes. I leave my school bag on the back step and creep through the laundry. My feet won’t stop moving forwards, it’s as predictable as a B-grade horror movie, until I grab the squeegee my dad uses to keep his precious windscreen pristine.
I didn’t think I was worried but all of a sudden I’m close to being a complete mess.
Our cat Dylan Thomas wraps himself around my ankles and together we flow towards our doom.
Dylan Thomas: Your squeegee will save my fluffy little tail.
Me: I will smash their brains out. I will.
The cogs in my brain start turning over but my panic levels plummet when I see Liv parked in front of the open pantry doors, scooping giant wads of peanut butter out of the jar with her fingers. Making a big spoon out of her hand and ladling it in. Disgusting. I drop my weapon.
On the kitchen bench lies an unwrapped block of cheese, a jar of olives and an open packet of chocolate biscuits.
‘Where do you put those calories?’
Liv jumps. She’s rake thin and always has been, always will be. Even now, the only thing keeping her jeans on her bony hips is a studded belt.
‘Anywhere I can, little sis.’ Liv wipes crumbs from her face and sloppy kisses my cheek, and I pretend I hate it and don’t want her anywhere near me. I catch a whiff of comforting menthol smoke through the peanut butter haze and stare at her head. Just when I think Liv can’t choose an uglier hairstyle, there she goes, with the shaved bits and the spikes.
‘I’ve been waiting, so bored and hungry. What’s this?’ She points to the photo pinned to the fridge.
‘It’s my abduction photo.’
She doesn’t get it so I have to explain it to her like she’s a child.
‘It’s so if I get abducted Mum and Dad don’t give the police an awful photo of me that winds up on the news. That one’s a good one.’
Mum keeps taking the picture down and I keep sticking it back up again because I had no idea it would bother her and it’s a genuine superpower being able to irritate her this much. It’s up-to-date, unlike Yin’s photo. It was taken on my birthday earlier this year, and I look hot.
No one seems to be able to tell us if it’s safer to look good and be noticed, or whether it’s better to be forgettable and fly under the radar.
Instead of laughing, which you’d think she’d be generous enough to do, Liv’s face twists into something I’m horrified to see is pity.
‘I should have come much earlier, Tal. I’ve been flat out this week. I’m so sorry.’
I turn my face away, quicksmart. ‘He doesn’t take the pretty ones, don’t you know? So I think I’m going to be safe.’
I don’t count the moment a minute ago when I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to be safe.
‘It’s not about you getting kidnapped. That’s clearly not going to happen, so it’s not what I meant,’ she says.
I pick up the biscuits. The stolen jacket under my school clothes is scratchy. Liv’s duffel bag is on the floor. ‘Are you staying the night?’
‘I thought we could do a movie marathon.’
I’m sensing pity in everything she’s saying and doing now and I won’t have it. I can’t let her crack me open.
‘Well, that’s a shame, Liv, because I’m going out tonight,’ I lie. ‘Dad’s working late and Mum’s at the Parkers’ for book club. So you’ll be hanging out on your own. It’s going to be sad for you.’
I line all the unbroken biscuits from the packet along the bench. ‘Mmmm.’ I pop the first one in my trap, planning to eat them one by one until she leaves me alone.
‘Stay home with me.’
‘No.’
Liv gets down on her hands and knees and clutches my ankles. She looks up with her puppy-dog eyes. I can see she’s got a brand new tattoo on her forearm, shiny and furious-red, plastered with greasy lotion.
‘Pleeeeeaaassse, stay home. Pleeeaaasse.’
I look down at my sister and try to feel nothing. I can feel nothing about most things, but not Liv, unfortunately. A diversion is what’s needed.
‘Is that a hickey?’
I point to the red blotch next to the flower tattooed on her neck.
‘Yes. I have several, if you want to see them.’ Liv lifts her t-shirt. A black sports crop flattens her boobs.
‘You’re such a slut, Liv. Do you even know who gave that to you?’
Liv works at a bar in the city, and as far as I can tell, between the customers and the hornbag staff, it’s a good place for finding hookups.
‘That’s the little underage pot calling the consenting adult kettle black, isn’t it, Tal?’
I narrow my eyes, but my traitorous mouth turns up at the corners. Liv tugs on my bunched-down school socks, tugs on the invisible strings between us. She’s good at reeling me in when she wants to.
‘I miss you, Tal,’ she says and there’s no way you can doubt her sincerity. ‘I want to know if you’re okay.’
I play it like a soap opera, tossing my hair about, because all the world’s a stage et cetera. I’ve been acting for my life ever since Yin was taken.
‘I take pity on you, my sister. I will stay home.’
After Liv has tortured me with me one of her favourite Japanese horror movies I torture her with episode six of Devil Creek. Even though I’m pretty sure I hate the show, I have secretly watched two more episodes on my own, breaking a sacred promise to only watch it with my friends.
We fall quiet as the opening credits start.
A beautiful pale redhead in a nightie runs through the bush barefoot; everything around her blurred and streaky. The soundtrack is composed of ragged breathing and a pulsing drumbeat.
‘Nope, no, no way, we’re not doing this.’ Liv tries to pause the computer and I grab her hand.
‘Don’t be silly, I’ve already watched half the season, it’s fine.’
Two detectives, a man and a woman, stand by their car in the early hours of the morning, eating sausage rolls. Senior Detective Hillary Burns wears a woollen jumper, a no-nonsense parka, and has unbrushed hair and no makeup. By contrast, Senior Detective Pokerface McUptight is in an immaculate grey suit. He crumples his sausage roll packet and wipes his mouth.
‘You’ve got sauce on your face,’ he tells the woman, but she gives no fucks because all she cares about are the victims and she’s crushing patriarchal standards on a daily basis.
Together they cross the car park and head up the stairs of the huge glass-and-concrete building. McUptight, real name McManus—way too close to anus—tries to wave her through the door first but Burns won’t have a bar of it.
You’d think that the makers of Devil Creek would run out of reasons to show Emily Blake’s corpse, but you would be wrong. They keep sliding her out of her drawer in the morgue to do different things to her body or pan the camera over it one more time. When they’re not showing the body, the police detectives are flapping the crime scene photos of her wounded, half-naked corpse in front of every single person they interview, trying to shock them into a reaction.
This episode, the quirky forensic pathologist with purple hair is fizzed-up over something she’s pulled out from underneath Emily Blake’s toenails and also what she describes as ‘tiny ritualised marks’ she’s found on the body. She says her ‘intuition’ tells her that the murderer is someone very close to the young woman, which is a weird thing for a scientist to say.
‘I don’t think Yin knew the person who took her,’ I say without taking my eyes off the screen. ‘I don’t think it’s anyone we know.’
‘Me neither,’ says Liv.
When the pathologist folds down the sheet covering Emily, Liv shuts the lid of the laptop completely, with a snap. ‘I don’t care if you can take this, I can’t.’
‘Don’t you know it’s make believe?’ I ask her, but she won’t be moved.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asks, but she already knows I don’t.
Liv squishes into bed with me and won’t leave me alone. She makes me draw on her back with a finger, as if we’re still little kids. I hold one of Mum’s old orange paperbacks in my free hand, trying to read and draw at the same time. Liv’s back ribs poke through her pyjama top.
‘You reading that for school?’ Liv throws her head backwards. You can still see the puckered scar at her hairline, from when a German shepherd bit into her ten-year-old head.
I grunt. I can read and back-scratch at the same time, no problem, but talking is too much.
Half of me is in my lamplit bedroom, but the rest of me is hanging out in the English countryside with this posh family called the Mitfords who have a bazillion daughters, each of them more bizarre than the last. Every time my finger stops, my sister twitches to remind me to keep drawing.
‘Tal, you know I’m always here to help you,’ Liv says, out of nowhere. She flips over to face me. ‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know, but if you ever want to come over to my flat and hang, or just talk. You can call me any time of night, for any reason. I know what Mum and Dad are like.’
I close the book. Liv’s face is currently twenty centimetres away from mine.
‘I’m okay,’ I tell her and I’m not lying and it’s not the truth either.
No one at school has asked me how I’m doing since it happened. Mum and Dad have, but they don’t count. Maybe no one remembers who I used to be, and I did work hard to make it that way. Junior School is distant enough to seem like a dream.
Liv looks younger close up, all her tattoos and piercings and spikiness blur out at the edges. We’ve got identical eyes, and would have the same colour hair if she didn’t dye hers black.
‘Why do you have to make yourself look so bad, Liv? You could be so pretty.’
A wheezing laugh escapes from her, that turns into a racking cough. ‘Crap. I’ve gotta give up the smokes.’
She flips on her back and thumps herself in the chest, which actually makes it worse. ‘You sound like Mum.’
‘Don’t you dare—’ I start, and bash her with my pillow.
When I wake it takes me a few seconds to remember that I’m on the downstairs couch after Liv hogged my bed and snored too loud.
My book is steepled on my chest and something is scraping at the front door.
I sit up. The lounge is awash with moonlight from the back windows. The lawn is empty, peaceful. It sounds like a possum is trying to get into the house, but possums don’t normally use doors.
I shuffle towards the front of the house and nearly walk into the corner of the hall table. There’s a heavy vase on it that I could smash over someone’s head. A person-shaped blob hovers behind the glass panels on the front door. The security door has been opened. A pink hand slaps against the frosted glass, fingers spread.
I hold my breath and wait. My senses are so alert I could hear a mouse’s footstep. A key scrapes in the lock, the door clicks and swings open. Dad sways on the doormat. He straightens as soon as he sees me, but forgets to stop the screen door banging when he enters. You can tell how messy he is by how far his tie has wandered around his neck.
‘Thought I’d lost my keys.’ He holds them up, then drops them. I can smell the booze vapours from three metres away.
‘Where have you been, Dad?’ He pushes past me. It was only a few days ago that he and Mum had a massive fight about him coming home at all hours, every day of the week. It’s always work, or mates, or work mates.
‘Gary,’ he mumbles.
Figures.
Big Man About Town Gary, Head of the School Board Gary, Golf Gary. Sarah’s dad, Gary.
‘Gary—not too good,’ Dad says and continues unevenly through the house. He’s not looking crash hot himself. He stopped drinking for years, but now he’s back on it, and I don’t know what that means.
After he’s gone upstairs I do a full circuit, checking the locks on all the doors and windows.
The house feels empty when Liv finally leaves on Saturday afternoon. She’s good at leaving spaces emptier than they were. The pantry hangs open, its contents ravaged, and there are dirty dishes piled up in the sink that no one can be bothered putting in the dishwasher.
Dad is playing golf, leaving Mum bored and desperate to interact, so I duck upstairs, saying I’ve got homework to do. It’s not a lie, I do have homework, but I’ve got no intention of doing it.
I lock my bedroom door and light my candles. My phone is going off, everyone trying to get me to say what we’re doing tonight. I put it on silent. The smell of liquefying wax relaxes me.
Standing on tiptoes, I can barely reach the storage shelf at the top of my wardrobe. A garbage bag of shoes I’ve grown out of falls first. My fingers latch onto a handle.
The green leather suitcase is a time machine.
I almost threw it out when I moved from my old bedroom to this one, but something made me keep it. I slide both clasps to the side, and the case springs open.
There’s a lot of junk inside, photos and badges and broken necklaces, my old school diary and bits of paper that contain a forgotten world. Forgotten people. Notes passed in class, invitations to birthday parties.
Here’s a photo of me and Yin, in matching t-shirts with our arms linked, goofy grins. Ten years old, major dorks and joined at the hip, as we had been every year of Junior School. Yin’s thick black hair kicks up at the ends and I’m in the first year of braces. We’re on a summer camping trip with the Mitchells; I remember Yin still wasn’t sure about her new stepdad.
It hurts to see her baby face. All the breath leaves my body.
You know who I could always rely on to tell me the truth, to warn me before I went too far? Yin.
She’d tell me to stop eating cupcakes or I’d spew, she’d turn the volume down before I got in trouble, yelled at me to stop climbing that tree, told me when I needed to apologise.
I try to see something ominous in the photo, dark shadows or figures in the trees or mysterious streaks of light, something to show that things were going to go very wrong for one of these girls, but there’s nothing. We might be the happiest kids in the world. Dirt smudges on our cheeks and twigs in our hair.
I dump the contents of the case onto the bed.
A photo of our graduating Grade Six class, ribbons from school athletics days, a certificate to say I’m allowed to write in ink. And then there are other things.
Plastic ‘gemstones’ imbued with magic powers. Silk flowers in colours that show which clan we belong to. A rubber rabbit from a farm animal set that travelled to earth from the moon. Yin’s mum used to tell her stories about the moon rabbit coming down to earth so we wrote it into our stories. The exercise book we scribbled our secret language in, and the written history of our lands, our spells.
At the bottom, the greatest treasure, the worn piece of paper that we’d spent hours on. We always fought over who got to keep it at their house. I had the stronger will, even then.
A map of our home kingdom and the rival kingdoms surrounding it. Drawn lovingly in gel pens and Derwent pencils.
Wingdonia.
Oh, so childish.
I haven’t seen it for years, and it’s surprisingly detailed. The mountain ranges come back, the waterfalls and valleys, villages and ports. Wingdonia was shaped like a boot; it kicked the neighbouring kingdom of Plentificent off into the Aerie Ocean.
Yin had the best ideas about the geography, because of the dozens of fantasy novels she’d read, but I had the best ideas about the people, the families and the politics.
There were four clans, each with their own back story and special powers.
Have I been homesick all these years for a place that doesn’t exist?
Yin and I were travelling warrior queens of the Opal clan, fairy immortals imbued with magic, but masquerading as flesh-and-blood humans. We’d built our world from scratch, painstakingly, over the years. Etching the lines deep and adding sprinkles of glitter. There’d been times when Wingdonia had seemed more real than reality.
But the kingdom crashed, war broke out and the game ended. It didn’t make it through the transition to high school, and neither did our friendship.
Everything goes back into the suitcase again, except for the map, which I fold up into a small rectangle and slide into the hidden compartment in my purse, wedging it up against a condom that Liv gave me.
I go to the mirror and look at my dry eyes, trying to see beyond myself, underneath to where the ten-year-old might still live, but there’s nothing there. I try to picture Yin standing behind my shoulder, but I can’t conjure her.
Why did I push her away? I can’t remember now.
I have a huge red pimple welling up on my chin and a few suspect bumps on my cheek, and it’s typical that I had good skin all week but now I’m breaking out for the weekend.
I unscrew the jar of expensive clay mask that Mum’s allergic to and paint thick lines across my face with the plastic spatula, tough battle lines like a rugby player, and then I don’t stop, I paint my whole face out until it’s nothing but crackly pink mud and I erase all my thoughts with it until I have a blank blank brain.