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CHRISTOS’S VOLVO wasn’t in their street. Neither was Aubrey’s mother’s Skyline. Sidney parked on the velodrome side and watched the row of townhouses for an indiscernible amount of time.

Shut up! Fuck you! She punched her forehead, hard.

Her phone rang. Unknown Caller on the screen. She left it unanswered as she stepped out of the car but somehow, at the same time, did not step out. She ran, and did not run, across the road to Aubrey’s house. The part of her that ran looked at her and Christos’s front garden next door — Christos had weeded, and the rubbish and recycling bins were lined up neatly by the fence.

There were two pairs of shoes on Aubrey’s doorstep. Sidney used her superpowers to open the door. ‘Hello?’ she called, one foot inside the threshold, one still outside. No reply. She took another step in, holding on to the doorframe. The floor plan was the same as hers, but flipped around, inside out.

A set of three framed, glamour-studio photographs of Aubrey’s mother hung on the living-room wall, and one smaller, moving three-dimensional photo of Aubrey playing in a kindergarten sandpit.

Aubrey’s school bag was on the floor in the lounge room. There was a fit ball and some plastic-coated dumbbells in the corner. Sidney called out again. The computer on the desk came alive as she passed it. Wild horses lit up the screen background.

On the kitchen bench, there were a few fashion magazines, a satchel handbag, and a set of keys. Next to an empty wine bottle was the amber-glass spider, smashed to pieces. Sidney glanced back at the front door, saw Faye’s Fairlane parked across the road, saw herself sitting in the driver’s seat. Voices clicked and crackled rather than spoke.

There was more broken glass, and a small spill of something red on the bottom step. Wine? Closer, it looked like raspberry jam. Sidney stared at the glass and the jammy spill for a long time before stepping over.

The colours she was seeing were making her feel faint. Yellow. Brown.

Red.

Her feet left the ground and she flew up the stairs, slowly, like swimming breaststroke. A breeze caught her, and she was floating, floating away. No, she wasn’t, she held tight to the banister and pulled herself back down, kept going to where she knew the bedrooms would be, flipped around. ‘Bree?’

Red.

She turned the handle on the door to the second bedroom, the mirror image of the ‘nursery’. ‘Aubrey?’ She pushed open the door.

Red. On the pale-grey carpet. On the mobile phone, in its spider cover, charging on the bedside table. On the posters of Taylor Swift stuck to the white wall. On Sidney’s old copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Red on the amber-glass spider.

Red and black. Something burning?

The red drops flickered into flames. Sidney became too heavy to stand, she dropped to her knees. Time unfolded, and she was not in Aubrey’s room, but still in the car. Dean Cola’s car. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have come back here long ago.’

Grass, earth, screaming, broken glass. Skyline and stars. You cry for your mother and I reach across to the passenger’s seat — through blood and flames — and hold your hand. Everything melts into Rothko smears.

‘Sidney!’ Christos was banging on the car’s window. ‘It’s all right. I’m here now.’

‘I want to come with you,’ she whispered to Dean Cola.

She wasn’t sure who got her out of the Fairlane. She was being carried from another time, another place — not Aubrey’s house, not Dean Cola’s car — the neat bedroom at Sandro D’Angelo’s pretty house, looking over Christos’s shoulder. Her big firefighter hero. Saving her, for the first of many times. The white sheet was soaked with blood.

The light had come on. Christos’s left eye was swollen and bruised. He had blood on his shirt and jeans. As he bent down towards her, she saw the rough, callus-like bumps through his hair. Glinda, the goat, had the same bumps where she had been disbudded. Sidney had cowered against the bedhead, screaming when Christos tried to come near her. She wasn’t sure if the screaming was in her head or in reality. She wanted her mother. Over and over, she screamed for her mum, but, again, she wasn’t sure if the screaming was only on the inside.

Christos must have wrapped her in his brown aviator jacket (it was still hanging in her wardrobe when she got home from the hospital six months later).

The party was over, the heavy metal music had stopped, those boys were gone. Petra was gone. Coke was gone.

Other memories from that weekend came like pulsations, like irregular heartbeats — some clear and loud, with blankness in between. Fear and shivers. Jesus and monsters. Voices telling her to try to die. She tried hard to. Christos sitting beside her somewhere — her house? her bed? the sofa? Christos helping her to shower. Blood running from between her legs, and down the drain. Period? Haemorrhage? Christos stroking her hair. Christos feeding her painkillers, or sedatives, maybe sleeping tablets.

Christos telling her he’d warned her about her behaviour, that this was her fault. And then saying he was sorry. I love you, I love you, I love you, he’d said. I’ve always loved you. I’ll take care of you from now on. I won’t let anybody hurt you or scare you ever again. Coke and those blokes left you for dead. Lucky I was there. Lucky. You would have died if I hadn’t been there. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Nobody else will ever want you now, not after … your behaviour. But I do. In a way, it’s not a bad thing. It’s taught you a lesson. And it’s brought us together finally. A secret we’ll keep. (Not the worst secret — that was yet to come.) I promise I won’t tell. Do you promise too? Promise. You’re mine now. I love you, I love you, I love you. Lucky, lucky, lucky.