We finish the day with PE, and Ms Vo organises for me to borrow clothes from lost property. One of the admin staff sorts through what’s available, but by the time we’ve found things that fit and I’ve run down to the oval, the tunnel ball teams have already been chosen.

It feels weird being in other people’s clothes, as if anyone at any second might come up to me and say, ‘Hey, that’s my shirt,’ and I’ll look like I stole it. It’s only made worse by turning up to the oval with my school uniform in a plastic bag with ‘Suzanne Grae’ on it. I drop the embarrassing bag on the sideline. Everyone else has an official sports bag, in the official place, the change room nearby.

A spot has been kept for me on Max’s team, with Ben and Harry. There are three teams of eight, and ours looks the dorkiest. Seven dorks and one alien in charity clothes.

Lachlan Parkes is bouncing a ball as if it’s a basketball and his friends, Josh and Ethan, are shouldering him and pushing in to tackle him.

He pushes back, breaks through between them and jumps in the air, commentating while he fakes a shot. ‘He shoots! He scores!’

I pick up our ball from the ground and bounce it once. I can’t keep silent in PE. I’m about to challenge the others on my team to try to take it from me when Ms Vo claps her hands and says, ‘Okay, everybody. Time to focus. Start forming your lines please.’

We’re even dorky at forming our line. I have to do a lot to get it straight. How do they not know that a bent line is death in tunnel ball?

Ms Vo blows the whistle to start. Next to us, Lachlan’s team works smoothly. He gets the ball moving and then turns to the others, clapping and shouting, ‘Go! Go! Go!’

They’re already comfortably ahead when Max’s elbow bumps his knee and he drops the ball. It rolls out to the side and, when he tries to pick it up, he stumbles and kicks it further away. That’s all it takes to make us a dismal third.

That’s the worst it gets, but it doesn’t get much better. I’m on the team that doesn’t win and doesn’t expect to. I keep telling myself it’s only tunnel ball. It’s only PE. And next time I can bring my own clothes in my own sports bag, change in the right place and stand in a different spot when teams are picked.

On the way to the change rooms, Ben nudges Max in the arm and says, ‘So, how’s your dad going with the new quad bike? When do we get to start racing?’

‘Racing?’ I want to hear more. Away from the miserable failure of tunnel ball, things are sounding a lot less dorky all of a sudden. ‘You’ve got quad bikes?’

‘Yeah,’ Max says. ‘Dad likes to fix stuff, so he got a couple second hand, one of them just last week. It still needs a bit of work. He borrowed a bulldozer and made a track in the bush out the back of our place. It’ll be good when we have two though, not just one.’

‘I think one’d still be pretty good.’ I’ve never been on a quad bike. Maybe cool does work differently in Australia. ‘How fast do you get to go?’

‘Pretty fast.’ He smiles. ‘Depends who’s driving. Pretty fast if it’s me.’

‘Sounds like a challenge,’ Ben says.

‘Yeah.’ Max pulls his hat off as we walk into the change room. ‘Maybe it will be.’

‘Hey, Herschelle,’ Harry says, just as I’m about to push Max for some more details. ‘My dad said people in South Africa have flamethrowers fitted under their cars. You know, to fire up if there’s a carjacking. Did you get to do that? He said they can give a warning blast, or a serious burn or fatal incineration.’

I shake my head. There’s no way that’s real.

I’m about to tell them it’s not true when Ben says, ‘Hey, I’ve got my phone in my sports bag. I’ll google it.’

‘It’s called the Blaster.’ Harry sounds pretty confident.

Ben types in ‘blaster flamethrower’. I want there to be nothing there. They want it to be true. They’re imagining South Africa, my country, with all of us driving round in armoured cars, scorching people.

But it’s real. It has a Wikipedia entry. It was invented in the late 1990s and it failed not because it was illegal but because it was too expensive. But obviously word got out, and it’s now part of how some Australians think about us.

‘Look.’ I point further down on the entry. ‘They only ever sold a few hundred, and none for years. So don’t go thinking we’ve all got flamethrowers because of that, because we don’t.’

‘Yeah,’ Harry says, sounding disappointed. ‘Fair enough. It’s like that idea that you’ve all got these massive walls around your houses with barbed wire on them.’

I picture the barbed wire coiling along the wall near my Cape Town bedroom window. I think about the security guard and the locked gates. I think about the reason we left.

I’ll talk about that one day, maybe. Not today.

‘There are lots of things Australians do that probably seem weird in other places,’ I say.

I want to tell them Australia is at least as weird as South Africa. And everywhere is weird if you’re from somewhere else. But I don’t want to be a tour guide to South African weirdness. So instead I change the subject.