Harper’s twelfth summer was strange.
She was safe at home in the city while bushfires scorched the country. Instead of watching the news, which looked made-up, she lazed in the old paddling pool and read novels, which felt real. Meanwhile, her parents, Liz and Larry, took turns to work their hospital shifts or hang out with her—often asleep. They were nurses on a children’s ward. After long shifts they brought home noodles or pizzas, and sometimes stories of kids who couldn’t breathe properly because the fires had polluted the air.
Any time it got too smoky in the garden—or there was an unfamiliar bug in the paddling pool—Harper read her books in the bath.
Her best friends were on holidays far away: Cleo on a camper-van trip to Queensland, Ro in Mumbai with his grandparents. The next time she’d see them would be the first day of their last year at Riverlark. In the six weeks of the holidays she’d grown three centimetres, cut her hair to just above her shoulders, had her ears pierced and bought her first bra. It sounded like a lot, but summer had been long and mostly full of waiting.
Whenever her parents dragged her to the supermarket and they bumped into someone they knew, there’d be a comment like Someone’s ready for high school. And then smiles all round, including Harper’s, while privately she’d think, Hardly. She was tall but still needed her parents to do all the talking in shops, and when she saw teenagers in the street she looked at the ground. Not ready. Things she’d heard about high school put her off.
All she wanted was to grow up and never leave Riverlark.
She had one more year there before everything would change.