Every day I wonder why there is barbed wire at the top of the school fence. Was it actually a real prison in the past? Or was the wire a more recent decision? Did a kid jump the fence and get hit by a car? Or, more likely for Banarang, did a kid jump the fence, steal a car and hit someone?

The fence is just for looks, though—there are more holes in it than my dad’s old Bintang singlet. Plenty of students ferret through it every day to go to Tezza’s Milk Bar and smuggle back the lollies they could have bought at the canteen for the same price.

Miss Hayden’s maths class in fourth period is the usual cacophony of anarchy. She’s trying to teach us about parabolas but no one cares. Jimmy and Tyson are having a rap battle in our corner; Chris and Patto are engaged in the penis crescendo game to the point where they are straight-up screaming ‘PENISSSS!’ while their buddy Jayden films it; Aaleyah is watching Miss Hayden intently with genuine scholarly confusion; and Jimmy’s ex, Sophie, is snapping dozens of close-ups of her lips puckered out.

Next to her is Naya. Sophie accosted her when she arrived with Jimmy this morning. She said she had nominated herself to be Naya’s guide to the school and her first friend.

I wonder what Naya thinks of this mayhem. It used to bug me, but I’m not bothered anymore because I’m no longer a high-performing student. I failed my last test because I rounded all of my answers up to the nearest number divisible by three.

The lunch bell rings and the whole class evaporates, while Miss Hayden continues doodling numbers on the whiteboard.

The guys and I head to the cold blue benches in the quad by the Madden Wing. The corrugated roof traps what little precious warm air there is, along with the perfume of banana peel and bin juice from the canteen garbage bags. The four of us have a long graffiti-stained bench each. Leon is to my right, Tyson is opposite me and Jimmy is on my left. It’s a good system.

Tyson bites into a pale sausage roll and pastry flakes flutter to the ground. His family have a deep distrust of any food that isn’t processed, sterilised and packaged in plastic. It’s another reason why I like him.

After finishing his lunch, his face softens into sated folds, like a Shar Pei getting a head rub. Life is easy for Tyse and full of little victories. I’m jealous of him; everyone should be.

‘So,’ I say to Jimmy, ‘what happened with Naya in the end?’

‘Wigga, please. I was gone off that five minutes after meeting her. Me and Soph are back on again.’

‘Yeah, I knew that. I meant—’

‘I’ma still give you that sixty clams, though, cos it ain’t your fault the night ended early. Actually it kinda was—giving Shitty the key and that—but it meant I got to listen to people fucking, and that shit’s hot.’

‘Good as!’ Tyson says. ‘Does that mean Shitty’s rooted a hundred chicks now? He was on ninety-something last week.’

So it’s confirmed. Naya is just another one of Shitty’s belt notches.

‘Nah bruh. I meant the couple in the room next door. She was a screamer. Damn. I paced my wank so I nutted at the same time as her too.’

‘What was Shitty doing?’ I ask.

‘Ha! He had the key to the room I got for you guys, remember? I thought once he worked out that no one was in the room, he’d split. So I went into that room to watch some pornogs by my lones before the rents got in from the airport. But when I open the door, there’s Shitty, knocked out, sleeping on my bed like some Goldilocks motherfucker.’

I feel strange. Relieved, I think. I must be happy because Shitty didn’t get what he wanted. Or maybe it’s because I’m getting sixty bucks.

Jimmy pulls a pen and a leather-bound notebook out of his pocket. He’s always got that book on him. It’s the one thing he takes everywhere, besides the crappy black plastic watch his brother gave him for his thirteenth birthday, which is permanently stuck on 16:20.

‘At least it means I can focus on what matters,’ Jimmy says. ‘I gotta start writing our next hit. We going global this time.’

He scribbles in the notebook rapidly, like he’s just worked out the theory of gravity and needs to get it down before he forgets.

I’ve never tried writing a full verse, though kids often say I should. They just assume I could do it because I’m good at English, and that’s enough for me. There’s no point finding out for real.

I have made up a couple of lines here and there, though. Like last year we made a song that became a bit of a hit. Jimmy wanted an anthem about his love for black girls and he had the chorus ‘Chocolate/Chocolate/I love Chocolate’, so he asked me to make the music and help out with lyrics. He still hasn’t worked out that the refrain I came up with (‘Don’t take it as racism or misogyny/I just don’t like white girls cos they look like me’) isn’t much of a rap boast.

The song, not to mention Leon’s video for it (with miniaturised girls twerking around Jimmy’s face), was a flop, but then Sophie shared it. She’s got twelve thousand followers on Instagram and it spread like crazy.

Two weeks later, when it all finally died down, Jimmy counted up the total views. It was almost a million. Maybe he embellished a bit, but everyone at school had seen it, so he became a legend for a second.

His only disappointment was that Sophie didn’t mention his social accounts in the video, so it didn’t grow ‘Brand Jimmy’. I still don’t think he’s forgiven Sophie for that. That’s why he believes his real ‘moment’ (or ‘the climax of my life movie’, as he calls it) is still to come. He hopes he’ll make it properly big, but we’ve done about five songs since then and none of them have taken off.

Tyson has had his moment already. Last year, one of his brothers kicked his teeth out when they were having a backyard mixed-martial-arts match. His dad, Kev, was refereeing but had drunk too many Bundy and Cokes, so he did the responsible thing and called my dad to pick Tyse up. When we took him to hospital, he was still grinning with bloody gums. They gave him false teeth and I thought he would be bullied but he became a school celebrity for a month. Kids from every year level would come up to our seats at lunch and ask him to pop his teeth out. He loved it.

‘I got a heater!’ Jimmy shouts. ‘We gotta take this straight to the Lab, Bonesy.’

The Lab is his bedroom.

‘BMT would be proud of these bars. Let me get a beat.’ He plays a drum track on his phone’s loudspeaker and starts yelping over the top. ‘Uh yah, yahp. I like my hoes like my olive oil/extra virgin/If you need a hymen removed/shawty, I’m your surgeon/Your doctor of love—’

‘That’s heinous.’ Naya glides through the gap in the benches and sits down next to Leon. ‘Hi again, boys.’

‘Ugh,’ Jimmy groans. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Someone called the tone police. I came as quick as I could.’

‘Boys, I forgot to tell you. Naya don’t like good music cos she’s a feminist.’

‘What’s a feminist?’ Tyse asks.

‘It’s like a chick who blames all of her mental problems on dudes,’ Jimmy explains. ‘But not even on specific dudes, just, like, the idea of dudes. It’s fucked up. And it’s ironic, cos feminists usually look like dudes themselves.’

‘But Naya doesn’t look like a dude.’

‘Aww, thanks Tyse,’ Naya says. ‘James has given you a horribly inaccurate definition of a feminist, but he has ably demonstrated why we exist. Unfortunately, he’s not the only entitled male with no respect for women.’

‘Me?’ He scoffs. ‘I treat all bitches with respect. You’re the one with the problem. You only like guys who’ll be your lap dog.’

Naya sighs. ‘I’m not taking the bait, Jimmy.’

They’ve known each other all of thirty-six hours but they’ve become warring siblings already.

‘Anyway,’ she says and turns my way. ‘Bones, I noticed your cap is kinda dirty. I thought you had OCD?’

She grins and her eyes glint. It’s unnatural. She must have too much eye fluid or something. It’s probably a health issue. I should stop staring. I should say something. Actually, I’m offended. I think. Right? My cap isn’t dirty.

My mind freezes. My tongue freezes.

‘It’s a special cap,’ Leon says. ‘It’s his uncle’s. He used to wear it all the time before he died. Bones doesn’t need to wash it because it’s always clean.’

‘Oh.’ Naya’s face falls. ‘I’m sorry, I was kidding. There shouldn’t be any shame in having anxiety disorders, though. It’s good to talk about them.’

Anxiety? OCD, maybe. Anxiety, nah.

‘Anyway, sorry. The cap matches your eyes. And the blue looks great in contrast with your hair. I still think I’d look better in it, though.’

She smiles warmly and I feel a cold shiver up my spine. It’s a new sensation. I’ll have to get it checked out next time I see my GP, Dr Ciantar. It might be a central nervous system issue. I’ll add it to my list of body complaints when I get home.

‘Naya!’ Sophie skips up to us. ‘You disappeared!’

‘Oh, I thought we’d finished the tour.’ Naya forces a gritted smile. ‘Thanks so much for showing me around.’

‘I was just going to the little girls room, silly.’ Sophie flaps her hand in forgiveness. Her chestnut eyes bulge—she looks like a hungry squirrel. ‘You’ve got to meet my squad. Let’s go!’

Naya squeezes her lips together. ‘Okay, Sophie.’ She gets up and gives me a weary look. I know exactly how she’s feeling. ‘Catch you guys soon.’

She walks out, Sophie nattering away at her side. My eyes trail Naya’s footsteps. I watch her calves bulge and constrict.

‘Oy, Snitch,’ Shitty shouts. ‘You’re dreaming, mate.’

He strolls towards us with his two goons. Shitty lost most of his crew when they went up a year, but his main boys are my dear brother, Travis Carter (who did make it to Year Eleven), and their Year Ten recruit, Raj Rafeek.

Raj is famous for baring his bodybuilder chest at parties. Trav told me that when Raj was two months into his ‘gains’ last year, he had to go to the hospital to get his stomach flushed because the doctors said he had the equivalent of twenty-one meals clogged up in there. He hadn’t been eating any fibre, just protein shakes and steaks.

All of them play football for the Banarang Bushrangers Under-18s, as well as the school team. I played last year too, and I set up almost every goal Shitty scored. I had to quit when I realised that a wet, leather football is a perfect incubator for disease.

They look like a cartoon teen gang right now in their three-pointed flying V formation. Shitty’s at the tip, leading with the kind of swaggering walk that Jimmy aspires to have but can never pull off. It’s languid and natural. He cocks his head back and puffs his chest out.

‘She’d never get with a Bronx Bogan,’ he says.

He calls us ‘Bronx Bogans’ because Leon, Tyson and I live near a housing commission that was nicknamed ‘The Bronx’. I told Shitty once that the Bronx was in New York, not Banarang, and he said that New York must have copied it from us. This is what I have to deal with. These are the people who think they’re superior to me. And Trav stands there and lets him say it all.

‘She’s a high-class chick, that one,’ Shitty says. ‘High class in bed, too.’ He pulls his T-shirt up to expose his leather belt. It looks like it’s been devoured by termites, there are so many holes in it. ‘That’s ninety-six now.’

‘But Jimmy says you slept by yourself in the other room,’ Tyson shouts.

Trav and Raj try to swallow their laughs.

Shitty snarls. ‘What the fuck you talking about, you fat cunt?’

‘Shit, sorry, Shitty!’ Jimmy says. ‘He doesn’t mean it. He’s confused.’

‘Too fuckin’ right he is.’ All of Shitty’s words seem to skip his mouth and funnel out through his nose. It’s a grating country-kid accent.

‘Anyway, moving on,’ Jimmy says. ‘I was wondering if Caleb got back to you about the synthetics? I need them—I mean, I’d like them by next Friday.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Shitty waves him away. ‘It’s fine. One-twenty for them ones, it goes through me first.’

Jimmy limply extends three fifty-dollar notes and Shitty snatches them.

‘Can I get some change there, Shits?’

‘Sorry, Jim, I don’t keep change. Just call it a commish.’

Jimmy winces and scratches at his hairline cut-in. ‘Yeah, okay.’

Shitty and Jimmy’s relatively amicable relationship annoys me and pisses Leon off, but we understand that Jimmy has to be loved by everyone—even complete dogs.

‘Oy, ranga,’ Shitty says to me. ‘Trav told us you were being a dick this morning. Is that true?’ His eyes jam shut then bulge open.

I don’t even look at him. Any chance he can get, Shitty wants to fight. All he wants is for me to fight back once so he can really hurt me.

I say nothing.

‘Oy, Snap this,’ Shitty tells Raj and hands him his phone. He steps into our bench circle, heading for me.

‘Oy, Snitch, look at me,’ he says in a fake considerate voice. ‘I’m just trying to talk to ya.’

I look up, and our eyes meet for a millisecond. Raj is chuckling and Trav is looking away. He won’t stop Shitty but he won’t watch, either.

Shitty hunches his head down and hovers just above my cap brim. I feel the heat of his body and breath. I close my mouth and tilt my head down so my chin is touching my chest.

‘Fuck off, Shitty!’ Leon yells.

Shitty’s feet swivel around towards him. ‘You just don’t learn, do ya mate? I’ve got no problems ending an endangered species. So shut ya mouth.’

His feet swivel back.

What’s he going to do to me this time? A couple of months ago, he stuffed a sandwich bag into my mouth. That was bad. Another day, on my way to the lockers before school, he pulled me down from behind by my backpack into a puddle—I had to go home and take several showers, but at least I missed out on a day at Banarang High.

I don’t want to leave school right now, though. Home isn’t any better. Dad just wants to talk about my feelings all the time.

I try to think of a comeback that doesn’t suck but also won’t intensify the situation.

‘Well?’ he rumbles. ‘Why were you being a dick?’

‘Umm,’ I mutter. ‘I am…what I eat?’

Silence. I don’t know what I was thinking. It sounded funny in my head. I thought it would lighten the mood. Bad move.

My head inches up. Shitty looks like he’s just sipped on a glass of urine.

‘Jesus, what the fuck? You’re such a weird cunt, Red Nut.’

Leon scratches at his knees anxiously. Jimmy drops his forehead on his fist. Trav shakes his head. At least the tension has evaporated.

‘Fuck me, Snitch,’ Shitty says. ‘I mean, I know you’re special, but fuckin’ hell that was just some proper homo bullshit. Next level. Look, I’m gonna cut you some slap today because that girl has clearly got you a bit head-fucked. Real life chicks do that to virgins.’

Shitty tells Jimmy that he’ll get his ‘package’ when his supply man gets back to Banarang tomorrow night. Then he and the sorority boys file out of the quad and into the canteen.

Cut me some slap? He means ‘slack’. How can he be a boss when he’s so dumb? He has to repeat Year Ten! That is not a boss move. And how can he be popular when so many people hate him? He’s good at footy. So what. He has a motorbike he rides illegally all the time. Who cares. I’m getting agitated. Then I remember—none of this matters. I recite the mantra under my breath.

You win some, you lose most. You mostly lose.

You win some, you lose most. You mostly lose.

‘Bruh!’ Jimmy whines. ‘You gotta remember that you’re reppin the Banarang Bloods. That’s all of us here. Like, we thought you was unsexual, asexual, a ho-maphrodite or whatever. But if you wanna be gay too, that’s comfy—I ain’t a hater, you know I still fucks with Frank Ocean—but please don’t be turnin’ the Bloods into some batty boy crew. That is not how we livin’. We gotta keep our status.’

I get his point. It’s self-preservation. In the animal kingdom of Banarang High, we’re not yet the lowest caste. The gamers are. They’re even paler than me. They petitioned the canteen to stock Red Bull so they could have overnight LAN parties in the IT lab. We can’t be below them.

‘I mean,’ Jimmy says, ‘I was about to tell Shitty to fuck off, for sure, but then you came through with that—’

‘You weren’t gonna do anything,’ Leon says. ‘Anyway, we know Shitty’s on the shard. He’s dangerous. Plus his mum ran away and his dad’s a drunk, so maybe we should cut him some slap.’

‘But Bonesy’s dad’s a drunk, too,’ Tyson says.

‘No, he’s not,’ I snap. ‘He’s a…tin-can philosopher. Plus, he barely drinks anymore. His only vice is the vape.’

‘Yeah, your dad’s a serial vape-ist,’ Jimmy says then clicks his fingers over and over. Tyse loses it.

‘Oh that’s quality, Jimmy!’

They don’t get it. It’s hard for Dad. He told me he’s a member of the most hated social group of the moment: the straight white middle-aged male. The world made fun of the emos, then the yuppies, then the hipsters, and now guys like my dad can’t catch a break.

If anyone deserves to be cut some slack, it’s Dad. Not Shitty—he brings it on himself.