How to Be Normal
Author: Ange Crawford
Date: 2025-02-01 19:09:43+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Music; Contemporary
Description: Winner of the inaugural Walker Books Manuscript Prize. With themes including coercive control, coming of age, and finding yourself, this debut authentically deals with timely issues with insight, sympathy and well crafted humour. Astrid is about to start her last year at high school. And her first. When her dad loses his job, Astrid’s homeschooling comes to an end. Until now, she has lived within the confines of a tightly controlled, contracted world where there's no room for anything … except following her father’s rules and pretending that everything is normal. As Astrid, and her mum, tentat
Publisher: Walker Books Australia
Rights: Cover illustration © 2025 Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 Fade-in

2 Verse

3 Build

4 Chorus

5 Verse 2

6 Solo

7 Bridge

8 Drop

9 Solo 2

10 Refrain

11 Break

12 Chorus 2

13 Coda

14 Fade-out

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Further help and Information

Copyright

To my family and all the other survivors.

My house hides.

My house is ordinary. This is how it hides. If you walked past it on your way to some other near-identical house in our neighbourhood, you’d probably forget all about it. Sure, the hedges are perfect squares, but they’re not asking you to admire them in all their perpendicular glory. Nor is the neatly paved path here to welcome you.

My house would rather you kept walking.

Even the sparrows avoid us most of the time, preferring the ragged branches and chipped paintwork elsewhere in our suburb. If you noticed anything about my house at all, it might be this.

It’s so still here.

There are no footsteps yet. There are no whispers, no sign that anything is different. On the outside at least.

In the video, a smiling girl my age walks me step-by-step through hairstyle number seven. I grip little clusters of my hair, twisting them over and under each other until they get along. Which is no easy feat.

Hairstyle number seven is perfect: neat, inoffensive, and most important of all, boring. That last part is my secret. Society thinks the worst thing you can be is boring, but that’s ridiculous. I’ve been different my whole life, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Most people have normal, boring lives. I’d like to be most people.

The video girl’s right. My face does look friendlier, more feminine – more like someone else entirely. I try to imagine what my new schoolmates will think when I walk by the lipstick-stained mirrors or poster-covered lockers or whatever else there is in a real high school. I hope they’ll accept me as one of their own – and then they’ll walk right on by.

Open body language will help. I narrow my eyes so I don’t look like a scared doe. Then I roll my shoulders back. I lift my chin. Nope, that makes me look haughty. Chin only moderately raised, then.

I tiptoe towards the empty kitchen, holding my chosen posture as a bit of extra practice. The air is crisp, carrying the citrus notes of cleaning products. It’s unsettling how much this feels like any other morning.

I’m fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, but I race through the tasks of my morning routine, like that will mean my new life begins sooner. I weigh green tea leaves (exactly 2.5 grams) and place them in the teapot next to the bowl with exactly three quarters of a cup of organic muesli. Then I slip through the side door, pulling Mum’s gumboots on and wandering in the garden until I find the day’s newspaper. I unwrap it, throw the heavy boots off, and pad back through to the kitchen bench, smoothing the newspaper out, aligning it with the rest of Dad’s breakfast.

Then I remember there’s one extra task for today. I grab the whiteboard marker and scrub out the lines for Mum and me on our whereabouts board.

ASTRID: Out. School. ETA: 4:15.

ELLEN: Out. Work. ETA: 4:15.

CLIFF: In.

My hand hovers over Dad’s name as I imagine him sinking into the stillness of the house with nothing ahead today except for repainting the mailbox. Maybe he’ll linger awhile, hunched over the classifieds, trying not to think about the life he tried to build here with Mum and me, until money thwarted him, and he finally had to let us go.

We were so happy to go.

The thought makes me sad enough to steal back outside and clip a gardenia for him. I reach for one at the back, where it won’t upset the aesthetics. I place it in a glass of water just far enough away from Dad’s breakfast: it’s imperative that no petal falls into his meal. Especially today.

I fall out of my practised posture, slouching a little, and my elbow brushes against the dish rack. It squeaks.

Oh no. I freeze, listening for a rustle, a footstep, a groan. But the hush has not shattered: Dad hasn’t woken up. I breathe out and tiptoe back to my room.

I slide open my wardrobe door, breathing in the comfort of fabric softener. As I take out the traffic-cone orange uniform skirt and white button-down shirt, I’m already missing the comfy, scruffy homeschooling clothes that fill the rest of my wardrobe.

I close the door on them.

This is it, then. I’ve studied in this room for five whole years, sitting at this desk and staring out this window, not quite seeing the pristine shrubs beyond, but instead dreaming of those teen movies Mum and I have watched in those moments we’ve snatched over the years, movies with hopeful protagonists who arrive at adulthood with everything – and everyone – they need for a normal life. Until a month ago, I never imagined that I’d get another shot at joining them. But now … I can’t help thinking to myself: I’m a real high school student—

I stifle the flutter of excitement in my chest. A very ordinary and boring high school student.

A light tap on my door. From the hallway, Mum whispers, ‘Ready, Astrid?’

She couldn’t give me just another five minutes, argh. My mind flies back through my checklist: hairstyle seven, open body language, second layer of deodorant … spare pair of undies? You can never be too prepared for an unfamiliar environment.

The tapping on my door threatens to exceed the allowable volume. Mum stage-whispers this time: ‘I’ll be waiting outside with the bins.’

Oh no. Bin day.

Outside on our street, the household garbage bins are overflowing. Each bin day, the crows come out to feast, dragging out things I’m sure our neighbours would prefer remain hidden.

We’re the only family who coordinates our Monday mornings around making judgemental, white middle-class eye contact with the sanitation workers to ensure that they leave our pavements clean and bins empty. It’s what we deserve, Dad says, given the effort we put into being low waste.

When I see Mum in her corporate wear for the first time, she’s stomping on an errant juice packet that blew onto the footpath outside. It’s flatter than it needs to be by the time she drops it into our recycling bin. She slams the lid, brushes her hands off on her pants, then winces. She must have forgotten the pristine layers of sheeny polyester, the way they are supposed to remain completely untainted by life outside the office – a notion as weird to her as my orange uniform is to me, I guess. But when I wonder if she is missing her housewife clothes, I can’t imagine that.

There’s no sign of the rubbish truck, so we wait, arms crossed in matching discomfort.

‘He said we don’t have to pick up rubbish that blows outside our house anymore,’ I whisper.

She rolls her eyes at me. That’s enough for me to get the picture. We could have risked believing Dad and dealt with the consequences, but no. Never with Mum.

So now I’m feeling very orange.

And late for class.

Mum swerves into a random cul-de-sac and turns the car off, leaving the keys jangling in time with the indignant beeps of the car’s inbuilt keys-in-ignition alarm. Sprawling rendered houses line up on either side of the street, their languid driveways stretching out towards us.

It’s a carbon copy of our street, just named after a different Australian native flower. There’s never been a reason to consider turning here. Especially not today. I blink at Mum.

‘Sorry, honey, I just remembered.’ She leans over me, scrambling to open the glove box and pull out a little bag with bright-pink stripes and a plastic zip. It’s so nonbiodegradable that it’s the last thing I’d expect her to own, so I just keep staring. ‘Makeup,’ she says. ‘It’s kind of expected at the firm.’

The autumn morning sun beats down on the car, melting us as we breathe our shallow breaths. A single bead of sweat forms under one of my arms. I panic about it, so of course, it multiplies.

Meanwhile, Mum gets to work doing all these things I’ve never seen before, leaving us in a suffocating cloud of powder. Her GPS keeps recalculating the minutes left on our journey and they’re stretching out, the streets changing from yellow to red as the traffic builds. My breaths get shallower. I only have fifteen minutes left to get to class. Late students get in trouble.

I’ve crossed my arms without realising. The last thing I want is for Mum to decide to discuss that before we head off again. So, I do something that’s usually reserved for Dad-related conflict: I put up my walls. This was Mum’s idea originally. When you’re behind your walls, you don’t let things get to you. You just observe them from a distance.

This works well enough that I can focus on Mum again. She struggles with applying the mascara, leaving black marks on the side of her face. The tissue shakes as she dabs at the smudges on her pale skin.

‘You look nice,’ I say hopelessly.

She half-smiles, a crease forming in the foundation along a familiar fault line. It’s like she’s just caught sight of me, her pencilled eyes drifting to the school logo emblazoned on my blouse pocket, then to hairstyle seven. Just as I’m thinking maybe I should reach out and pat her shoulder, she turns away, stuffing all the makeup back in the bag and dropping it in my lap. Well, some things never change.

I waste no time cramming the bag back into the glove box as Mum turns the car on. ‘Wait, won’t he find it in there?’ I ask, before I can help it. It’s not like Mum to be this careless.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘When was the last time he cleaned the car?’

I button my lips. Vacuum-cleaner memories, air-freshener memories, chamois memories clamour their way over my emotional wall, and in those memories the car is on the driveway. Mum and I are on the driveway. We are standing there, watching Nick’s car receding into the distance. It is just another Saturday morning, but he is gone. It is just another Saturday morning, so Mum hands me the sponge. The hush falls over us. It is just another Saturday morning, so we are cleaning again, again, again.

I can’t. Not now. I squash it all down back there, like the rubbish on our street. It all goes silent.

That’s when Mum steps on it, driving back onto the main street. She checks behind her in her habitual way, as though she’s just broken the law by painting her face.

Twelve minutes to go.

When we near the school, the students are gathered in twos and threes, talking, texting, slapping each other on the back. I spot a little throng of older girls, probably other Year 12s, who make their orange skirts look cool. They’re carrying tote bags instead of schoolbags, and their shoes are bright and definitely outside the uniform policy. I look away before they notice me, my hand closing over the strap of my standard-issue schoolbag. I wonder if I might end up friends with them. Then I bristle and squash those feelings. Unlikely.

Mum rolls the car forward in miniscule increments, as though she doesn’t want to fully come to a stop.

‘I think it’s okay for me to get out here,’ I say. ‘Good luck for your first day.’

‘Good luck, you,’ she says, wrapping me in a hug that I hope doesn’t make me smell like the morning’s garbage. She clears her throat like she wants to say something else, but then she doesn’t. It’s time to do this.

I untangle myself from her curly hair, let go and open the door. My heavy new school shoes anchor me to the pavement as I’m met with a rush of chatter, shrieks, and squeals from all directions.

I push the car door closed without looking back at Mum. For the first time, it occurs to me that people from my past – people like Carla from netball – could be enrolled here. Even though our lives undoubtedly moved in different directions since we were twelve, we’re still in the same grade. She’d tell everyone about me. That would ruin everything.

I shuffle towards the bus shelter to get my bearings, protected from most onlookers. The lip-liner ad that shields me tells me to Be Bold. I groan. Helpful.

I search for Mum, but she’s already edged away, her indicator flashing. I imagine thin black lines running down her cheeks and I wonder what it feels like to see your youngest kid off for her first day of school when that kid’s already seventeen and six months from graduating.

This is it, then. This is the part where I’m supposed to walk in through the school gate, shoulders rolled back and head held (moderately) high, making confident yet non-committal eye contact with my peers. But it’s hard to hold my head up.

Each step is heavy. I study the uneven pavement. Wild grasses shoot through each crack, thriving impossibly in the concrete. A pair of younger students run past, leaving a breeze in their wake that carries the rings of their laughter.

Everything’s unsteady. My breathing’s too fast. I’ll never make it to the office like this.

I seek out a bathroom, pushing past another giggling cluster of students. Heart racing, I dash into one of the many defaced cubicles. The door won’t lock. I pull and pull, but its alignment is wrong, and the latch dangles fruitlessly in front of its holder, squeaking in protest with every attempt.

So I rush into the next cubicle. It smells disgusting – someone has blocked it up with a heap of toilet paper and the water is threatening to overflow everywhere – but the door locks. I just stand there. Even though it reeks in here, I force myself to take deep breaths. I untwist my crossed arms, which got a bit too tight around my chest. My ears ring.

The walls are covered with drawings of assorted hairy body parts and some surprisingly good bright-green marker-pen outlines of anime characters. But there’s more.

Scrawled slurs on all sides scream out at me. They glare at me until I shut my eyes, fighting back the thought that maybe Dad’s right: social media is breaking everyone’s brains and making them hate.

I can’t do this. I want to run all the way home and get under the covers where everything is tidy and civilised. That thought horrifies me enough to almost propel me straight back out into the fray: If home is the only place I can belong, I stand no chance of a normal life.

I just have to find the office and get to class before I’m late. I’ve already lost precious time. If the school calls Dad, this could all be over before it even begins.

I take a deep breath. My shaking hand hovers over the lock.

Footsteps echo. I hear the girls talking before their shoes appear outside my cubicle.

They are in front of the mirror. My exit is blocked. I sigh and lean against the wall. Then I realise it’s somehow damp. I cringe.

‘So he’s liked all your stuff again.’ Her voice is bold and deep, presumed owner of black lace-up boots.

‘Yeah.’ Her voice is meek and soft, presumed owner of mass-produced plastic-filled white running shoes.

‘And he still hasn’t said hi to you.’

‘I know.’ The tap runs.

‘I’m telling you, you have to talk to him.’

‘What if he doesn’t want—’

‘Who else even responded to your sad food pics?’

‘You did.’

‘I had to, though. It was my duty …’

A sharp ring. I gasp. (Only afterwards do I realise I gasped out loud.)

The girls both giggle. To my horror, there’s a knock on my door. ‘If the bell freaks you out, you’re high enough.’ More laughter.

I hold my breath. My face burns at my complete failure to blend in even while hidden. Thankfully, their footsteps recede.

When I emerge and breathe the sweetness of the outdoor air, I lower my eyes back to the ground, scanning for those lace-up boots and white sneakers. But most of the students have already disappeared into classrooms, leaving me out of place and out of time.

The weatherworn sign says OFFICE in sombre black letters. I think of how in teen comedies no one wants to get sent to the office, where a frowning principal with greying hair and a mean streak chastises you and gives you detention. It must be 9:05 by now. Maybe this is already punishable by detention.

I push open the office door and am immersed in yet another crowd. The late students bunch up here, talking over one another. I hover behind them as they file out, one by one. There’s no sign they’re getting detention just yet. But now it’s 9:07. 9:08. I fold and unfold the note that declares who I am and why I’m here.

Then it’s just me and the receptionist. The polite yet confident introductory speech I’ve rehearsed eludes me, so I offer him the note with a squished smile that’s probably more of a frown. He takes it, calls me by the wrong name, then corrects me when I finally ask to see the deputy principal, Maryam Ebrahim.

‘Ms Ebrahim.’

I flush. ‘Oh, oh, I’m so sorry …’

But he’s already taking a call, lips pursed.

I shuffle backwards to the solemn green plastic chairs in the corner and choose the one furthest from everyone. I know, from our orientation visit last week, that the waiting area for parents and prospective students features comfortable leather chairs that you can sink right into while you admire the school honour board or all the sporting trophies. Here, it just smells musty and unfair. According to Dad, high school teaches people how to get kicked around by the capitalist ruling class. I have to say, so far, he’s not wrong.

While I sit there virtually shaking, a girl my age strides in, nods at the receptionist and calls him Aaron, and then waltzes right past and into the administration offices. I’m struck by the silver piercings shining out of her nose and ears, the matching shine of her silver glasses, and her short, bleached hair. She is so obviously normal, but so … herself. This – this is who I want to be.

So, a minute later, when she walks past again with a yellow slip of paper in her hand and a band-aid covering the nose ring, I give her a smile that I hope also looks effortless. She doesn’t smile back, but she winks as she throws the door open and stalks out. For that second, I am her co-conspirator against the broken rule: one pair of studs or sleepers only. It’s a ridiculous rule anyway. At least two people working in this office have earrings that are definitely not in line with this code.

Ms Ebrahim, neat and in her sixties, invites me to sit in her office. She’s not quite looking at me as I shuffle in after her, still holding my breath. I choose one of the two black leather chairs facing her vast wooden desk.

She sits at the computer, clicks around, then goes to her little printer. My eyes dart over to the tray, dreading the yellow paper slip. I clear my throat. ‘S – sorry.’

‘What was that, Astrid?’ she asks, unwrapping a new ream of printer paper, picking at the corner of the packaging with a painted fingernail. ‘You’ll have to speak up a bit more around here, I’m afraid.’

‘Sorry. Sorry I’m late.’ I sink further into the chair, making myself as small as possible.

‘Oh. Well, don’t make a habit out of it.’ Ms Ebrahim slides the printout across to me.

It’s white. Not detention-coloured. I breathe out.

‘Your timetable,’ she says, then she plonks a book on top of it. ‘Diary, map.’

‘Oh.’ I’m too stressed to look at them.

‘Did you have any questions for me?’ She orients her body towards me as she says this, but her eyes travel towards the door.

I have so very many questions. Something … like maybe … advice on how a newcomer with five years of distance education experience can achieve social and academic success in a state high school environment. ‘Um, no, thank you.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ she presses.

‘Yes, um, just … thank you.’

Okay, so I’m not channelling the silver girl. Yet.

After ten minutes with my face glued to the map, I arrive outside a nondescript block near the edge of the school. It’s dead quiet in the courtyard beside the classrooms, with nearby trees casting uneven shadows, their scraggy tips scraping like claws against the roofs and windows. If it were dark, this scene would look haunted.

I check the timetable again. It’s definitely here. The ‘DRA’ in the subject code and the theatrical curtains in the windows have crystallised my fears: This is a drama class. I’ve never done a second of drama; I wouldn’t qualify to be here, even if I weren’t mortified by the whole idea of having everyone gawp at you while you cry on command.

The long, unsteady path behind me snakes back up to the administration building. Somehow, it has grown even more arduous since I wandered down here. I glance at the ominous performing arts building ahead. Before I can decide which is the worst option, the drama classroom door bursts open and an Asian girl with a perfect messy bun emerges in a half-run.

‘Hey,’ she calls out, coming to a halt, and I blink at her as I remember I’m visible. ‘Are you the new girl?’

She wanders over to where I’m standing frozen. Her belongings are stowed in a cream-coloured tote bag casually slung over one shoulder. I spot a bunch of stickers on her laptop – they could be band stickers, something I actually know about. I try to work out what they are, but she shrugs it onto her shoulder, and it sinks out of sight.

‘No,’ I say, squeezing the diary until I’ve imprinted the ring binder into my palm. ‘Well, I mean, yes, but …’

She clasps her hands together like she’s planned something devious. ‘You should hurry, then. You don’t wanna have to walk in once the play’s already started.’

This last sentence jars the cogs in my brain into gear. ‘Yeah, of course.’ Somehow, I’ve said that.

‘Gotta run. I’m Cathy, by the way. Nice to meet you, bye,’ she calls over her shoulder all at once, disappearing in a flash of pink socks.

The door looms ahead.

I resurrect my rehearsed posture and stride into the darkened theatre, doing my best impression of the silver girl. But gravity is heavier here, so I pull down the seat closest to the door, sinking with relief into the almost-darkness.

The rest of the seats tower above me. No one in them moves or speaks. Okay, so it wasn’t the perfect entrance I rehearsed at home, but it’s done, and maybe no one even saw it.

The curtains open. The stage is dark. An unseen clock strikes. I almost jump out of my seat.

The light rises enough to illuminate a middle-aged blonde woman, clutching a dressing gown around her gaunt shoulders. She paces. Each footstep reverberates through me.

She addresses an older, disembodied voice that she calls Mother. Their words are rhythmic, strange, distorted in the cheap microphones.

She’s lonely, sleepless, constrained. That’s all I can understand.

I, too, am constrained.

A thin sliver of light appears. Cathy is silhouetted in the door. She props her bag against the wall and slides into the chair right next to me, giving me a silent wave. I stifle my smile in the shadows, turning back to the stage with a studied seriousness.

I settle into the glow of this new potential connection, letting the performance wash over me and almost forgetting my disorientation. Then I hear a muffled sniffle. A sideways glance reveals tears welled in Cathy’s eyes, which she wipes discreetly when the light is at its lowest: She’s so moved by the play she’s crying.

I, of course, will pretend I didn’t see this. But I also wish I could understand.

Right as the performance ends, the bell rings. I jump again. Cathy notices, but she just smiles and shrugs at me. A swarm of chatter swells behind us.

‘Hey, you already know what I’m going to say,’ comes the unmistakable authority of a teacher’s voice. A middle-aged olive-skinned woman in a bright green shirt stands in front of the class, her perfect posture and impressive lung capacity making her the obvious candidate for drama teacher. ‘Wait where you are, thanks.’

The students obey, falling into compliant silence. I hazard a glance behind me. They’re all strangers – no sign of Carla, so at least there’s that.

‘Let’s give a round of applause to our visitors from Calamity Theatre,’ she continues.

The actors emerge to wave at the applauding students. There’s the gaunt lady, now taller and healthier looking in her black theatre clothes. Beside her, squeezing her arm like they’re really mother and daughter, is the actor who must have played the disembodied voice, microphone still in hand. This older lady wears loose, casual clothing, like she’s been out shopping for organic produce. So much smaller, lighter than the voice that just made Cathy cry.

I look away.

Once the actors disappear behind the curtain again, the teacher lets the tide of babbling students go. The rows of chairs rumble with the stampede, and I dodge an elbow and a foot, but I’m stuck to the spot. A boy and a girl stare at me as they cross the room. The girl’s wearing black lace-up boots. She looks directly in my eyes, like she longs to ask me a million questions, but when the boy doesn’t slow down, she keeps walking – I’m not interesting enough to speak to. Or not normal enough. I can’t tell the difference.

As the door edges shut, I force myself to breathe again, a little dizzy. To my surprise, Cathy hasn’t left. Neither has the teacher.

‘Astrid Waters, is it?’ the teacher asks me, like she’s just registered my existence.

I give a single nod, trying to gather my strength to tell her about the unfortunate administrative mistake that resulted in my underwhelming presence.

‘Welcome. I’m Ms Torres. Not a bad first day, right?’

Actually …

All I can do is smile.

She smiles back, soft brown eyes crinkling. ‘It’s all right if you haven’t covered Samuel Beckett at your old school. It’s just a different way of speaking. You’ll pick it up.’

She nods at Cathy like it was her in charge all along. Then she walks off to join the theatre people, who are chatting in the far corner of the room, looking just as uncomfortable in a high school as me.

To my utter confusion, Cathy follows me outside. It never even occurred to me that she might stick around, that someone like her would want to be seen with someone like me. I have no idea where we’re going, but we’re going there together …

‘Pst,’ she says.

I turn and blink at her. She’s gesturing to her skirt.

‘Hey,’ she says, when I don’t get it. ‘You need to change.’

I grab on to my skirt, pulling the side of it towards me until I see the scattering of bloody dots. Out of all the things I crammed into my schoolbag, not one of them was a period product. So much for those supposedly comprehensive online how-to-start-high-school guides.

‘I’ve got spares,’ she says, leading me to another unkempt – but vacant – bathroom.

I slink into the first stall. Despite another unwilling whine, the door locks this time.

Cathy passes me a pad over the stall door. ‘So, which school were you at before?’

Something about her directness cracks me open. ‘Well, I was homeschooled until a few hours ago.’

‘Whoah, are you serious?’ comes her reply.

I regret everything. ‘I mean—’

‘So, did you just learn everything from whatever your parents told you?’

‘What? No.’

She laughs. ‘I figured. Just playing.’

I try to laugh back, but it comes out as a single ‘hah’.

‘Aww, no, I’m jealous, actually,’ she says. ‘I’d love to be homeschooled, no joke.’

My cheeks turn hot. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘So, why did you end up here?’

Finally, a question I prepared for. ‘My mum was my home tutor, and she got offered this maternity leave contract at a really great law firm, and Dad’s not working at the moment, so …’

‘Ah, yay for your mum, but dang for you.’ A pair of sport shorts appears above the stall door. ‘You can borrow these. I don’t want to go to sport this arvo, anyway.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t have sport today.’

Silence. Confused silence, probably.

I make myself speak again. ‘Umm, won’t I get in trouble?’

She laughs again, deeper this time. I imagine the cheap metal sinks rattling with her mirth. I want to sink into the floor. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘It’s a hot day. No one’s gonna care if you wear shorts.’

Defeated, I drag the shorts into the stall and pull them on over my spare underwear. The shorts are too short and too tight, but it’s too late to back down now, so I fold up my skirt and undies and stuff them into my bag, forcing the zip shut.

I emerge to find Cathy leaning against the wall, typing an essay on her neon-encased phone. Phones are supposed to be banned during school hours. But, apparently, none of the school handbook rules have an effect on Cathy. Meanwhile, my hands feel super empty.

‘Thanks,’ I say to my shoes.

‘Don’t be so embarrassed. It’s a normal part of life.’ She shrugs, pocketing the phone and bending to retie her pink shoelace. ‘I have painkillers, too, if you need. My cramps are the worst.’

‘Oh,’ I manage, plunging my hands into cold water and willing the message to travel to my cheeks. ‘I’m fine. I never even feel mine. It basically just gushes out of me.’ Um, what?

‘How are you so lucky?’ she says. ‘Well, at least do yourself a favour and avoid cold foods for a few days – that’s my pro tip. Do you wanna get morning tea together? I can tell you what’s good at the tuckshop.’

Echoes of all the things I just admitted spin through my mind. I can’t carry those outside. I can’t. ‘Sorry, I have to go back to the office and sort out some enrolment stuff.’

There’s a beat of silence. I can’t look at her.

‘Cool, well, come find me later if you like,’ she says at last. She’s already back typing on her phone as she wanders out, calling over her shoulder, ‘And you’ll have to give me back those shorts.’

I drift through the school grounds. It could be five years ago, the last time I was wandering a schoolyard alone. The students, simply older, huddle in their groups, still immersed in the smells of sugary yoghurt, body spray and supermarket bread. Just like before. And just like during those half-hearted extracurriculars I tried in my first year of homeschool, no one talks to me. I tell myself that this is what I wanted. I am blending into the background, just like a normal teenager. But it feels more like rejection.

Teachers patrol the bustling benches near the basketball courts, picking up rubbish with those long grabbing tools, stopping now and then to apprehend a student doing the wrong thing. The yellow slips of paper make another appearance during a yelling match. I wince at the sight of them. The shorts squeeze tighter.

Everything is so loud, especially my heartbeat. All I want to do is get away. Back towards the school gate, the crowd thins. I reach the almost abandoned food and nutrition classrooms, with their strange commercial-like kitchens glaring out at me like the set of a budget daytime cooking show. The appliances emit a weird electronic hum that seems to repel the other students. I am finally alone.

I sink down to the grass, despite the shorts crushing my stomach, and rest my back against the sunlit brick wall. My mind punishes me by replaying all the cringy things I spilled out to Cathy. Gushes. God.

In my schoolbag, I find the little wrapped sandwiches that Mum packed me. I gently undo the even folds in the beeswax wrap with a pang of sadness. Just last week, I was assembling my lunch on a fresh plate warm from the dishwasher. Mum put on one of her podcasts and we played at arguing with the interviewees about climate policy and labour rights. I was determined not to miss this, but I do.

I take a soft bite of the jam sandwich, the purple sourness sticking to the sides of my mouth. From the distance, disembodied sounds of laughter bounce around me, reminding me I’m here. I am a (normal?) high school student. And I can salvage this day. I have to.

My new maths classroom is a rectangular room haunted by sweat, ink and that ubiquitous teenage boy deodorant. When I reach it at the end of morning tea – late but not too late – I think again of the silver girl and I stride inside, ignoring the whispered who’s thats. I claim the only unoccupied desk and immediately busy myself leafing through the worksheets I find there. Nonchalant. No big deal. Normal.

‘You must be Astrid,’ the teacher says, peering at me from over his clipboard with the round, dark owl eyes of someone who never sleeps well. ‘I’m Mr Vincent. Come to the front for a bit.’

I obey, praying he won’t notice my uniform violation. Thinking of the silver girl, I rest my hand on my hip and do my best to look bored and definitely not like the kind of person who spills gross personal details to the stranger who saved them from period stains.

‘Everyone, this is Astrid,’ Mr Vincent announces. ‘She is joining us from her distance education school. Make her feel welcome, all right?’

Every single person in the room stares at me. Their gaze feels like a magnifying glass, and I am an unfortunate ant.

Mr Vincent leans towards me and murmurs, ‘Make sure you wear the correct uniform tomorrow.’

It’s too much. My hand falls off my hip, and I forget how to use my knees. I clamber back to my desk before things can get any worse.

‘Okay, we need to get you an extra desk,’ Mr Vincent proclaims.

I take a second to register what he just said. He’s already assessing a pile of junk in the corner, while the students whisper like this is the most exciting event of the year. My face burns. Meanwhile, in walks the silver girl; she stands right behind me, her olive-skinned hand on the back of my chair. It’s only then that I realise that my worksheets have a name printed on them in neat purple block letters: Leila Martinez.

‘Hello again,’ Leila says.

I swivel around. She’s half-laughing, her shoulders vibrating with mirth, her hand still poised behind me.

‘Please stay there. I hate maths,’ she says, and the whispering turns to laughter.

There’s a pathetic part of me that wants to comply, just in case it will undo some of the social damage. Instead, I stand up and drag my bag away from her like some submissive animal in a nature documentary.

Leila flops into her chair and gives me another conspiratorial wink. I’m caught in the glare of this gesture I don’t understand. Meanwhile, like they’ve received permission, the whole class bursts into conversation, leaving me forgotten and hovering in the space between desks.

I edge further and further backwards until I reach the wall, where I freeze against the faded posters about coding video games and going to space. Every time I glance in Leila’s direction, she’s looking back at me. My hands sweat again. I put up my emotional wall and try to block this all out. But I can’t stop meeting her eyes.

In this time, Mr Vincent has said nothing, but he’s pushed an ancient desk and chair mercifully to the back of the class, beside a quiet boy who hasn’t looked up from his exercise book this whole time, the name Connor Thompson scrawled unevenly across his worksheets.

I catch Connor’s eye, offering a tentative smile. When he grins back, the extent of my relief embarrasses me.

The bell rings. Students file off. Leila is first out of the door. I gaze after her, wondering what on earth I was supposed to make of the way she just treated me. At least, I guess, she’s already forgotten me.

Everyone around me leaves in pairs or groups. No one is alone. No one except me.

In desperation, I turn to Connor. He’s already finished packing his stuff and is reaching for an instrument case – a trumpet, probably. A bunch of other sporty-looking boys pass by him, and he mumbles things about football training at them as they leave. Now he’s the last person in here except for me.

‘Um, where do you usually go for lunch?’ I ask before I can change my mind.

He regards me like I’m from a different planet, which, to be fair, I basically am. ‘The tuckshop?’ He almost spells the phrase out, like he’s worried I won’t understand. Also, fair enough.

I clamour for any ideas about how to get an invitation to join him (or anyone) at the tuckshop, but he’s already leaving and I’m at risk of another break filled with aimless wandering, so I duck out after him.

I follow a careful distance behind him and his trumpet as they weave their way to a dilapidated concrete brick classroom vibrating with the even, smooth rhythms of drum and bass. He disappears inside. I stay outside, loitering around a corner, so no one will think I’m stalking the musical jock from maths class.

In this negative space, I hold a debate with myself. The music block is the only place I can process what’s happening to me. But I don’t know if I’m allowed to just walk in. The yellow slips loom large in my memory.

‘Astrid, hey!’

It’s Cathy, leaning on the door, beaming at me.

There’s a second of silence, which I scramble to fill before she can disappear again. I clear my throat and ask, ‘What are you up to?’

‘Gotta make a bubbler stop,’ she says, gesturing towards the rusty water fountains I’ve been hesitant to use. She rushes over to them and back in an orange-and-white blur.

‘Well, are you coming in?’ she asks, wiping water off her chin.

She holds the door open for me. Inside, we are sealed away from the shouts and laughter of the lunching students. It smells like resin, and the noticeboard has rainbow paper instead of white for all the announcements: neon green, bright pink, detention yellow.

I don’t know if I should keep following Cathy, but I can’t help it. She’s the only person who seems to see me, and I already pushed her away once. My mind hums with a hopeless brainstorm of all the things I could say to keep her around, but all my ideas get tangled up with memories of our bathroom exchange. There’s no way she would want to know me. She already knows too much.

Before I even realise, we’re stopping near a tiny room with some a cappella voices catapulting themselves at a high note.

‘This is me,’ she says, vanishing inside.

‘Bye,’ I say to the closed door. So, that’s it, then.

I swallow the lump in my throat and wander to the end of the hallway. Beyond another worn door is a cool, tiny room that smells of new computers. There’s a bunch of signs saying not to eat or drink here, printed on stark white paper that signals their seriousness. The computers – two of them – are newer and shinier than any I’ve used before, and they run with a rapid professional hum. I’m drawn to them. I can’t help it.

I close the door and approach the headphones coiled on the desk before I can change my mind. They’re too big, sliding around on my head and no doubt ruining hairstyle number seven, but I feel better already. These roomy things remind me of when I first started homeschooling and Nick and I would sometimes tag along to Dad’s work before it closed down. Nick never got it but I’d go right for the big headphones. Dad would play me something by Miles Davis or The Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton, and I’d close my eyes and hold my hands over the headphones, so the sound would seem bigger and more complex, at least in my imagination.

Then, not too long later, I had my own headphones at home, and my beloved music software – Ableton – with its colourful yet patient little bars counting out the silent beats I might one day fill. At first I could do nothing other than scroll endlessly through the library of default sounds, pianos / drums / bass guitars, unable to close the painful distance between myself and all those musicians so able to express themselves through this medium. I’m no performer, and every button I pressed in those first experimental weeks took me further away from those unnameable complexities I felt in Dad’s record store. But I never even considered stopping. Then I found the tutorials – the confident yet accessible voices of sound designers and musicians sharing their workflows on the internet. There was a pathway, a process, and if I followed it, maybe one day I could speak through this medium, too. In so many of my teenage days, it’s been these voices I’ve heard the most, apart from my family’s, though they don’t know that. It was synthesis that drew me in the most, beginning from the near-blank canvas of a basic waveform – smooth, or jagged, or square – which would sound like little more than a dial tone from an old landline phone, but which held potential to become almost anything. Sometimes, though rarely, I hear something in these synth sounds as I warp and chop and filter them – something that somehow echoes how I feel inside. Even when this isn’t the case, the headphones keep everything else out, all the things beyond this musical world, for which there is no process, no pathway, no sense of potential, and sometime no sense at all.

I need this feeling now, on this strange and lonely day. I sit up straight, hands hovering over the pristine white keyboard and elegantly curved mouse. Maybe I shouldn’t be here, but I physically can’t leave. I might as well enjoy it. So I move the mouse, revealing a screen with the ugly orange school logo in the background and a prompt for a login. No one’s given me a login. Even the computers have locked me out.

Grabbing the headphones off the desk, I slide down to the floor and pull my laptop out instead. All the sounds of today are swirling in my mind, all the laughter, all the chaos, all the whistles and bells and alarms and ringtones. Deeper than words, this is where the music lives. Music, or something like it.

This is how I cope: I pour myself into Ableton, the closest thing I have to solid ground. It waits for me on my laptop as ever, those colourful little boxes that tell me, despite how vast this all feels, it can be contained. I click through sample after sample, searching for the sound that will give shape to the murkiness inside my own mind. Today sounds like something wavering with anticipation; a dark sense of something building. And there it is. A long, amorphous, impossible-to-place ambient sound. I choose it. A little turquoise box appears, containing all this confusion into a space the same size as all the other blank ones, only this one is now coloured with my experience. I fill bars and bars of time with this sound, a single note that could go on forever, as long as I keep holding on to the feeling. I hold on.

And then, all the layers. The other emotions beneath the wavering. These feelings, which I could never name, will not be found in lists of default sounds. Instead, I open my favourite synthesis plug-in and start shaping a new sound, something that might resemble my state of mind. Today sounds like distortion (an apple-green box) / Today sounds like metallic ringing (a sky-blue box) / Today sounds like arrhythmic beats (a forest-green box).

There are too many layers. None of this noise makes sense just yet. Neither do I.

A knock startles me. Cathy pops her head in and waves. She talks to me before I have time to remove my headphones, making herself at home on the chair above me.

‘Love that this is where you hang out.’ I catch the end of her sentence. ‘You seem wholesome and uncorrupted,’ she declares.

She takes out a bag of chips, opens it, and crunches loudly.

‘Thanks?’ I might not know much, but I do know that ‘wholesome’ is a synonym for ‘naïve’.

‘Anyway, so I thought I’d come and see how your first day is going.’ Little crumbs appear over her shirt and on the floor. I glance at the sign declaring that food is not permitted. In defiance, a wave of salt-and-vinegar tang envelops us both.

She turns her attention to my screen.

‘So, what are you working on?’ she asks, offering me the chip bag as she slides down to the floor next to me.

I shake my head as the obvious bright white sign commands. In that moment of distraction, she’s turned my laptop towards her with enough conviction to pull the headphones out of the jack. The looping discordant beats blare out at full volume. All the layers. Out in the open.

She blinks. I scramble to the laptop, hammering the mute button and slamming the lid shut.

‘What was that?’ she asks.

No one has ever listened to these strange sounds. They are supposed to be mine alone. I fight back the tears.

‘Aww, come on, don’t be embarrassed,’ she says. ‘I meant I think it’s good.’

I swallow. ‘What?’

‘Experimental stuff is the best – oh my god, so I just had an idea. Do you know our talent quest is coming up? I’m a singer. Would you be keen to do a collab?’

‘Really?’ The word catches in my throat. Deep uneasiness roils in my stomach. But Cathy has seen me – heard me – and a tiny part of me wants to cling on to her, to have a companion in this wild and frightening place, to maybe even have a friend. If this is what it takes …

‘Yeah, it’s a bit late, but I can twist some arms,’ she’s saying now, all business. ‘If you like, I mean,’ she adds.

I manage to smile and nod.

‘Let me put my number in your phone and we’ll work it out.’

‘Actually, I don’t have a phone.’

‘Huh?’ She regards me with something like concern or even pity. She doesn’t dwell on it, though, grabbing my new school diary and writing her name and number on today’s page in neat, bubbly letters.

All afternoon, I have to consciously resist the urge to open my diary and check that Cathy’s number is still there.

I stand outside my final classroom of the day, clutching my bag, watching other students disappear into buses. The school empties and sits desolate within only a few minutes. Now it’s just a few concrete buildings, some neglected turf and some cheap metal fencing. I can’t believe I was so afraid of it.

It’s still forty-five minutes too early for Mum to arrive, so I sit on that yellowing grass and stew. I’ve agreed to join a talent quest. A talent quest. Even if I had some kind of talent (?!), the questing aspect would be impossible. For all his love of music, Dad would never approve of me doing rehearsals with some random student he’s never met, on top of being back at school. But I want to know Cathy. I don’t want to let go of this chance, impossible as it might be.

Impossible. A knot twists my stomach. I can’t stay still anymore. I drag myself along the school footpaths, wandering around and around the silent blocks. Inside one of them, the fluorescent lights are still on but the silence persists. The library. My breath catches: beside the window, hunched over a desk, is the silver girl, Leila, in the very last place I would expect to see her, surrounded by a cluster of unusually serious students – all heads down, brows furrowed, earbuds in. I walk away before they can notice me.

But then I hesitate, drawn for some reason to the library entrance. I slip inside, hovering far away from Leila and her group. There, on a table by the door, is the riskiest, unlikeliest solution to my problem, in the form of a flyer with a default Microsoft Word font. I peel the top one off, fold it into a neat little square, and slide it into my blouse pocket, where it sits against my racing heart, daring me to do this.

Homework club. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until 5:30. All welcome.

I can only describe the mood at dinner as tense. Change has always been hard for Dad – even if it’s his call, like this decision to bolster his inheritance money with enough for my parents to keep this big, empty house. And then there’s Mum. She’s been buzzing with poorly disguised angst ever since this afternoon, when she hid first the makeup bag and then her new work mobile phone (!) in the ceiling slats of our garden shed – possibly the riskiest thing I’ve ever seen her do. Right now, this big, empty house is filled with emotion. And there’s no room for me in it. Let alone homework club.

My eyes are heavy with exhaustion. While I microwave the plates of food, Dad asks me questions about my teachers’ values and the school’s routine and it’s hard to pay attention. The adrenaline kicks back in when I spot the tension in his shoulders.

Something could go wrong.

Normally I’d reassure Dad – everything’s fine, school’s great and I’m thrilled to be there – and I’d wait for a sign that he’s relaxing. But, today, after all his repeated I miss yous, that also seems like the wrong answer. Instead, I let him think I miss home. It’s not really a lie. Plus, it seems to help.

Until he says, ‘If you’re unhappy, we can still pull you out.’

That’s when I realise I might have done too well.

‘This is exactly what I was worried about,’ Dad continues, as Mum brings his food over and shoots me a look that says, change the subject. ‘It’s going to be hard for you.’

I make a show out of a slow nod, but the walls go up inside. The last thing I need is to think about how hard it already is. ‘How was your day, Dad?’

He pauses with the fork poised over the plate. ‘Awful without you.’

Mum’s eyes dart between us as I pad over to the table with my food. The flyer in my pyjama pocket presses into me as I sit down, accusing me of the lie I haven’t yet told.

Dad spits the roast potato back onto his plate. ‘Lukewarm.’

This one word is enough to prompt Mum into action. She grabs his plate and whisks it back to the microwave, which dings in merry obliviousness. I grit my teeth; I was distracted when I heated the food.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Mum says. ‘The fridge has been frosty. I don’t know …’

‘One day in and we’re already here.’ Dad is almost whispering, drumming his fingers on the dining table. I shovel potato into my mouth. ‘You’re already sucked in.’

‘It’s not like that, Cliffy.’

‘This job won’t change anything; you said that to me. Do you even remember?’

Mum’s turning pale. She opens the microwave before it can ding again, prodding the food with a fork to test it.

‘Now look at you.’ Dad’s voice is louder now. ‘Parading around with the tight pants.’

Mum places a hand on the waistband of her new corporate pants. Her heart visibly sinks. ‘These are the ones we picked out together …’

‘Don’t follow that example, Astrid,’ Dad says to me, freezing Mum out as she returns with the steaming dinner. He reaches a hand out for my hair, caressing it. ‘New hairstyle, hey?’

I nod. The best thing is to comply. I can almost hear Nick yelling at me for being a little suck-up. Whole lot of good his attitude did.

Then Dad plunges his fork into a potato again. This time, when he bites into it, he cries out, ‘For Christ’s sake, Helen, is there something clinically wrong with you?’

Helen, Ellen from hell, is the kind of putdown we all recognise here, but looks perfectly harmless from the outside, like the square hedges. Mum flinches and rushes back over to the table. But it’s much too late.

There’s nothing else I can do, either. I rush through my food silently before slipping off to the study nook under the cover of homework.

Dinner sits in my stomach like a rock. I wish I could curl up in bed right away, so I wouldn’t have to hear what’s going on in the kitchen, and I wouldn’t have to think about how Mum’s hurried footsteps echo like the gaunt woman’s on the stage.

I resolve again and again that I will always eat lukewarm vegetables when they’re prepared by someone I love.

In the study nook late that night, the soft blue glow of the computer screen separates us. Cathy – full name: Catherine Lin – grins back at me from the social media search results, where she sits in the arms of a boy with torn jeans and heat-styled hair. Her body language is open and friendly, like she was caught saying something nice. I smile at her, but the smile freezes on my face. Those nice words weren’t for me.

None of this is for me. I don’t get to escape like this, like Nick did, into this world of parties and dating and whatever else it is that normal people do. I don’t get to forget about this place, about the lukewarm vegetables and the whereabouts noticeboard and all the fallout from Dad’s moods. I don’t get to date boys with torn jeans. I don’t get to join talent quests. In the wake of tonight’s episode, even the homework club ruse feels too dangerous. This place is still stopping me from being normal.

I click through my open tabs. Cathy broadcasts her music fandom across her socials. This is a language I speak: classics like Massive Attack and Portishead, pop artists like Beyonce and Billie Eilish. Digging deeper, I find some weird bands I’ve never heard of. By the time I have ten SoundCloud tabs open, I’m uncertain whether I actually like any of these bands or am just comfortable imagining I do. The distinction between what I really like and what I can appear to like is not always clear to me. Sometimes I worry that this is pretty clear evidence I am a broken person: I can arrange myself in far too many ways.

I sigh, delete my history, and switch the family internet tracker back on before my parents can realise what I’m up to. My secret ability to turn off this software can grant me only a brief moment of undignified social media stalking. That and the search results for a particularly embarrassing research topic: How to make a new friend. All these articles claim you should start by finding people who are like you. I’m not sure if I’m any closer to knowing if I’m anything like Cathy.

I can arrange myself in far too many ways.

Back in the music room, my mind drifts outside with the swaying trees. It’s only day three. Everything is still impossible, but at least I’ve had the courage to remove drama class from my timetable. Plus, now I even know some classmates’ names. There’s Lily, the girl with the novelty superhero bag and all the answers in history class; Zafar, the surfy-looking guy who will tell anyone who’ll listen about his poetry YouTube channel; Sergio, who seems to treat all of high school as an opportunity to take notes for his Dungeons & Dragons storyline … Then there’s me, hiding out in the school’s recording studio, quizzing myself on my fellow students like a totally normal person.

I’m trying not to think about Cathy. Since that first day, I haven’t seen her. I keep kind of hoping she’ll show up again here, but she doesn’t. Not that I’d know what to say to her if she did. Which is also why I haven’t called her yet.

On the studio computer, which now grudgingly grants me access, I pick a plug-in program at random and open a spectrum analyser, a tool that tells you about frequencies in your sound, plotting them on a logarithmic graph. No, I don’t really know what any of that means.

That’s never stopped me before. I search for a square wave: one of the most basic sounds you can play on a synth. Holding down a key, I stare at the waveform that wavers in jagged lines on the spectrum analyser. I press the headphones closer to my ears, imagining that might somehow help me hear all those ragged frequencies, the stray ones I didn’t imagine when I chose to experiment with such a basic, focused sound. This is what music is to me – this quiet exploration of the things I might one day be capable of sensing if I can somehow learn to listen better, to the world and to myself. It’s so personal, so private, so hard to imagine sharing with anyone else.

I work up the courage to tell Cathy that night. First, I prepare everything: chores and homework done, Mum and Dad wrapped in matching blankets in the living room, lines written about the many competing obligations of Year 12 and the impossibility of committing to a school talent quest in these trying (but completely ordinary) circumstances.

But then I get her voicemail.

‘Umm, hey, it’s, um, Astrid? Astrid from school, I guess?’ Then I say the numbers of our home phone number like a dictation. It’s only after I hang up that I realise I’ve also said it all in one breath and have to resist the urge to call back and leave a second message, just in case I wasn’t clear.

At least that’s done. I sink into the armchair next to our phone in case she’s about to call me back. She’s always on her phone. She must have seen the message pop up. I pull the throw rug over my legs and wait.

The silence stretches out instead. Sinking further and further into the chair, I’m enveloped in memories of the sounds she heard leaking from my tinny laptop speakers, and all the fear and anger and confusion she might have perceived in them. This must be why she hasn’t called. I race to my room, throw open my laptop, and delete the session.

I don’t see her at all the next day. But, the next night, she calls me back. I tiptoe away from the murmuring dinner party scene. Dad and Rob won’t miss me. As usual, they’re deep in their philosophising, Dad regaling Rob with a well-worn story about the people who would rock up at his record store with boxes of a deceased relative’s most precious collection, interested only in how much cash they would get.

In the kitchen, a smiling Mum passes me the phone, and my hands are already sweaty as I try to steal away from her for a moment of semi-privacy in my parents’ room. For once, I’m thankful for Rob’s existence. Dad can’t eavesdrop when we have a guest (and Rob is basically the only guest we ever have).

‘Sorry I took a while,’ Cathy says. Her voice is soft over the phone, and I can only just hear her over the wind and rain outside. ‘I haven’t called a landline in forever.’

‘Ah, it’s no stress.’ I try my best to keep my response casual, but a lump is rising in my throat again. ‘How was the rest of your week, anyway?’

‘Meh,’ she says. ‘Just busy at night. My long-distance boyfriend is always calling.’

‘That sounds romantic.’

‘It’s not.’

‘Oh,’ I say, surprised at her directness. I don’t feel like I can ask what this means, so instead I ask, ‘Where is he?’

‘LA now.’ She sighs down the phone like this line of conversation bores her. ‘Hey, so remember what I said about the talent quest?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, still caught up in everything she’s told me. ‘Oh, ummm …’

‘Yeah, so maybe we could meet up after school sometime next week if you’re free? We could figure out a song. I was serious that I like what you were working on. I can sing something weird and abstract to go with it.’ All her thoughts bounce out at once while I sprawl on the minimalist charcoal bedspread, staring at the air-conditioning vent like it’ll tell me what to do. ‘Are you there?’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘This rain is really loud.’

‘This is when texting comes in handy,’ she laughs. ‘I was saying … you still wanna do a song, right?’

I close my eyes. ‘I do.’

It’s the third week in a row that this chocolate cake is on our list for baking night, and Mum’s busy extolling its virtues as a snack made from pumpkin and almond flour and other Dad-approved ingredients, and yet, a permissible way for her to eat her very favourite food. I’m happy for her and all, but my mind is too busy calculating an appropriate segue into the subject of secret homework club sessions that are really secret rehearsals. In the meantime, I keep chopping the carrots for the soup because, you know, we’re kind of on the clock here.

‘This was easier when your dad was at work,’ Mum whispers. Even though Dad is spending the dusk playing guitar in the living room, it still feels like we’re being watched. Six months ago, Dad came home much too early with red-rimmed eyes, dropping his shoulder bag on our welcome mat as he explained that, despite all his help and all the regular customers like Rob, the record store would still have to close. Since then, he has rarely gone further from home than the community garden.

‘He had lunch with me again,’ Mum sighs, beating the eggs like she’s in the Olympics for it.

‘That’s so annoying,’ I reply automatically. I scrape the carrot bits into the bubbling soup, dodging the hot water splashing up.

Mum grabs a sponge and goes over the errant water droplets, but she can’t seem to help groaning a little. Her fatigue must be catching up with her. ‘How was your first week, anyway?’ she asks. ‘You’ve barely told me anything.’

‘Okay, I guess.’ I lick some of the pumpkin/chocolate mix, even though it tastes pretty suspect raw, delaying the moment when I start lying. ‘Sometimes I don’t really get what’s going on.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m worried I’m behind.’ A deep breath. ‘I think I need to go to homework club.’

Mum freezes mid-slice. ‘Homework club?’ Her eyes dart to the whereabouts noticeboard, which watches over us, repeating home, home, home.

I lower my voice to a whisper. ‘It’s okay. It runs right after school. I won’t need a note or anything. We won’t have to tell him. I thought … I thought I could go along on Fridays while you do the grocery run and then you can grab me on the way home.’ Seeing the look on her face, I add, ‘Just for a little while. Sometimes. Until I catch up.’

Mum’s nostrils flare, but she nods. ‘If you promise to be at the gate the moment it ends. The moment.’

‘Promise,’ I say hoarsely. I crush the garlic with more force than necessary.

Mum turns her back to me, taking the foil off the roast and shuffling things around, so there’s room for the cake. ‘I can’t believe people actually like cooking shows,’ she says. Which is her way of telling me that my secret is safe with her.

‘You know, I wish I could never cook again. I’d happily eat that space food stuff.’ Which is my way of telling her I’m grateful. And sorry.

She rolls her eyes. ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

I look at her fatigued face while she’s busy with the zucchinis, those familiar creases deepening with this new secret. Guilt ties a deep knot in my stomach. ‘Mum, what would you do if you didn’t have to do all this stuff?’

‘I’d spend the day with you,’ she says without a beat.

‘Ugh, don’t be like that.’ This is the genetic origin of my cringe factor.

‘What?’ She’s smiling, though. ‘Am I uncool now?’

‘Come on, Mum, if you had a day off, you’d watch Question Time, wouldn’t you?’

She laughs. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘You need a hobby, Mum.’

‘It is my hobby, you know. Maybe if I’d finished my law degree …’

There’s something else she wants to say then. But we both smell the burning. Old dreams forgotten, Mum dashes to the oven and I follow on her heels. We silently work together to drag out the roast beef, which has become ever so slightly blackened on top: unacceptable. I rush for the carving knife and fork, holding the roast still while Mum slices the burnt bits off as smoothly as she can, throwing them in the sink and cursing under her breath.

All the while, we keep an ear out for Dad’s guitar music. It doesn’t stop. We flip the mangled roast. Its underside is unharmed. We sneak out the back way to bury the evidence under layers of detritus in the garbage bin where he won’t find them. Then we sneak back in to wave tea towels in the air.

The smoke alarms don’t go off. Dad keeps playing.

We breathe out in the kitchen’s silence.

Hours later, I’m sitting between the lavender plant and Mum’s succulent, laptop on the study desk, warm slippers on and a cup of green tea beside me in a dusky mug, contemplating university websites. This is a recipe for comfort, and despite everything else that’s happened this week, it’s kind of working. Even though I have no idea how university will go, I like the thought that, this time next year, I’ll have a reason to drive away from here every day, far enough away to be a different person, at least until the sun goes down.

I flick mindlessly to my school email, open on another tab. It’s still weird having an actual email address. I take a minute to process the name that has just appeared in my new inbox. My organs squeeze together. I cast a furtive glance around. The study’s not a private room, but for now, I’m alone.

Trembling, I restart the computer in safe mode, take down the parental tracker, and then head back to my profile, squishing the school email browser into the smallest window imaginable. The email’s still there, with its subject line – helloooooo sister! – echoing like a ghost.

mum gave me your email
whether u answer me or not i think u should know
shes going to take u and leave him
for real this time
she doesnt want to tell u yet but id wanna kno if i were u
pls be a tough cookie
pls be good to her
if you wanna write back u kno id love that
either way just want you to know
theres a whole world and future out there
hang in there not long now

IT GETS BETTER

N x

I minimise the window, then bury my face in the teacup, gulping a scalding mouthful that causes tears to prick my eyes. In these words, I can’t help hearing Nick in his chaotic way – each unfinished thought fired off while the next one’s already churning in his mind. In these words, I’m hearing him whispering reassurances when I insisted on sleeping on his floor that night long ago, when we last thought Mum would leave Dad. I was thirteen. Nick told me all about the normal life we’d have beyond this house, where we’d eat cheesy crackers in our rooms and stay up until midnight and watch all the trendy shows. I believed him with all my heart. It didn’t happen. Instead, three years later, Nick was the one who left, heading for that world without me.

When the door closed behind him, it closed on my future, too. But he wasn’t thinking about me – or the fact that, once he left, we would no longer have a way to talk.

I can’t believe him again now.

The very next day, Friday, I walk with Cathy to her house for our first rehearsal. Nausea follows me. But with each step, this transgression gets easier. I might never get to explore the whole world, but perhaps I can get to know this one person.

It’s only a short trip from the school to Cathy’s house. I memorise the streets as though my life depends on it. (It does, metaphorically.) The brick houses assemble themselves neatly beside each other. Fences reach out to meet each other, changing only slightly in colour and style. Dogs are walked and children picked up and carried home. Then we are outside her house. A wedge of disorganised shrubs stretches out across the concrete pathway, leading up to a blue door. Cathy unlocks it.

Then I’m in her vast music room, which takes up most of the space at the back of her house. Her brand-new Korg keyboard looms before me, acting as a stand for my laptop. (I can’t play keys.) Above us, there’s a little wooden frame with a picture of Cathy sitting in this same room singing, while a beaming boy with heat-styled hair plays bass. (I can’t play bass either.)

I have one hour and ten minutes left here. I can’t play the sounds for her either.

Cathy warms up for singing before I work up the courage to tell her.

‘What do you mean you deleted it?’ Without a change in her expression, she drags over the piano chair, inviting me to sit next to her. I perch myself a careful distance from her, so we’re not touching. She closes the distance straight away, mindlessly tapping at the unpowered keys in front of us. ‘If it’s coming from the heart,’ she breathes dramatically, ‘you’ll remember it always.’

‘But I don’t remember it.’ Panic sets in.

To my surprise, she laughs. ‘Yeah, okay, fair. That was a cringe thing to say. So, does this mean you don’t wanna do the talent quest?’

‘No, no, no … It’s just … I’m working on a better one.’ I’m babbling again, desperate.

‘Yeah, cool,’ she says.

I wish I was confident, like the boy in the photo with his great posture and obvious musicianship. Then I’d be honest and tell her I don’t write for audiences.

‘I made that,’ she says, following my gaze. ‘You like it?’

‘What’s that?’ I clamour out of my feelings.

‘The frame. I made that at school. I do woodworking.’

‘Oh, that’s cool,’ I say.

‘Thanks.’ She smiles. ‘Well, anyway, I’m wrecked from school. Wanna play a game?’

In today’s obvious news: video games have changed since I last played them at least five years ago. We’re sitting on bean bags in Cathy’s bedroom, among her trophies and jewellery boxes and her unsorted laundry pile. Cathy effortlessly navigates jumps and dialogues and gun fights, swearing all the while. She keeps asking me if I want a turn, so I keep saying I’d rather watch, but she gets a bit confused or maybe even hurt that I’m just sitting here, so I take the controller. It won’t stop pushing the character to go forward, so we barrel ahead and careen into a wall.

As I face the wall, trying my hardest to spin the character in a different direction but spinning the camera and getting dizzy instead, in walks a pale, freckled woman with an array of sugary snacks. I hadn’t even realised anyone else was home. Headphones dangle around her neck, emanating tinny Top 40 melodies, and she’s wearing yoga pants. I blink at her.

She taps Cathy on the arm, sliding the treats between us. ‘Hello! Help yourselves,’ she says.

‘Mum, I said to give us space,’ Cathy interjects. Oh, of course, this is her mum. So much for ‘wholesome’ – I’m more on the ignorant side of naïve.

Ugh.

I can’t help but take a red lolly (the number one artificial colour banned in my household) and I pop it in my mouth. It tastes like perfume. ‘Wow, thanks, Mrs Lin,’ I say, overcompensating. ‘Oh, and um, thanks for having me.’

‘Oh, it’s no trouble at all, sweetie. And please call me Louise.’

‘Okay, bye Mum,’ says Cathy loudly. I try not to read this as a bad sign, but my pulse rises to my throat.

When I turn back to Cathy, she’s laughing. ‘You should have seen your face,’ she says. ‘You had no idea my mum would be white, did you?’

I bury my face in my hands, wishing I could delete this afternoon from existence.

‘It happens all the time,’ she says, with a mirthful shrug.

She giggles for another eternity, then scoots over to the door, pushing it shut with a bang that makes me jump. ‘Okay,’ she announces. ‘I just realised I should tell you the deal straight up, if you’re gonna come over and hang out. My mum has anxiety. Panic attacks. She hasn’t had an episode for a really long time, but I always tell my friends about it, in case something happens, and you wonder what’s going on.’

My character keeps running forward into nowhere. I can’t process all these words.

‘That sucks.’ The lolly aftertaste has soured, and I run my tongue along my teeth, imagining the damage. Wait, she said friends, even though all I’ve done this afternoon is demonstrate my ignorance on all topics.

‘I’ve been worried lately.’ Cathy pauses, her eyes flicking to the photos on the wall, where a much younger Cathy, often in costumes or at performances, is routinely flanked by her enthusiastic parents. ‘You saw that, right? She’s being weird.’

‘So weird,’ I say, my brain still trapped in mortification and weird and friends.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you don’t play games?’ she demands.

‘I play games all the time.’ I don’t know why I say this.

‘Seriously, I’m curious.’ She stares at me.

My head spins. A tiny part of me really wants to tell her the truth about life at home, but I can’t. After they’re said, words are out of your control, and everything’s already out of control.

‘It’s your parents, right?’ she asks. ‘They are super strict, right? Is that why you were homeschooled?’

Trapped, I nod. I’m squeezing one of the tiny beans in the beanbag until I feel an imprint where my nail was. ‘Sort of … I sort of …’ I sort of lied to them so I could be here and in thirty minutes I will have to run back to school and pretend I was just in a homework club. The truth nearly floods out of me again. But I stop it.

She sighs. ‘You know, I think all parents are afraid of their kids growing up and living lives that don’t involve them so much.’

‘Well, I seriously can’t wait for the rest of my life to start.’ My heart races as this statement leaves me and I can’t ever take it back. But it feels … good. ‘Being seventeen is maddening.’

‘I know,’ she says, sinking back into the beanbag. ‘Anyway, I’ll teach you how to play.’

That night, I’m under my floral blankets, wrapped up and wide awake and smelling of body wash. Nick’s email fills up the space in my mind. A whole world and future out there. I know it can’t be true, but it’s haunting me. All those impossibilities. Even though there’s been a solid half an hour since the last sound of movement, I make myself count to one hundred as one last check. The stillness persists.

I crawl to the foot of the bed and, tapping the mute key just in case, open my laptop. I turn it away from the door, making sure that the light patterns from its screen don’t reach the hallway. Sliding down onto my belly, I jam my headphones on and start fishing around for the charger. Usually it’s beside my bed, but it’s not.

Before I can change my mind, I’m tiptoeing out of my bedroom. In the total darkness, I let my eyes adapt. The home security system is on at night, to protect us from whoever would bother driving out here to steal old records, but there’s a path around them Nick and I figured out years ago.

The blinking red lights on the sensors separate me and the study nook. As long as they keep this same pattern of blinking, we’re good. I creep around them, freezing every so often to check the lights like I’m in a bad spy movie with a laser-dodging scene. My bare feet absorb the chill in the tiles. Time is collapsing in the weird pre-dawn, and I half-expect to have to sneak past Nick on his own after-dark mission, like I often did all those years ago.

I snatch the charger and steal back into my room, away from those thoughts. I load up an empty Ableton session and plonk down a basic beat. Click / click / click / click. The looping, monotonous kick drowns out my rushing thoughts. Thump / thump / thump / thump. This is my private, wordless world. Or it was, before I went and staked my only friendship on it.

Choosing a vocal-like synth sound, I try to capture this purple pre-dawn in the airy notes. Of course, it slips away from me, but I follow it anyway, channelling this feeling of being alive, almost an adult, in this suburban stillness; this feeling of knowing there’s a friend out there, in a near-identical house just down the road, perhaps lying awake in her own silent world, thinking these same thoughts.

I seriously can’t wait for the rest of my life to start.

I reach out for her in the only way I know how, imitating the torrent of rain down the phone line, channelling how hard it was to hear her and be heard, turning down the synth pads so there’s space for her voice. I’m so afraid of what she will hear in this. So afraid, so excited.

I seriously can’t wait.

The morning light and the decision startle me.

Clasping the thumb drive in a tight fist, I lean against the wall outside the music block. The choir rehearsal melds with the competing funk bass lines of Takeshi and Sergio. Somehow, there’s a harmony to all this chaos. The choral voices are beautiful in their synchrony, and despite the contrasting genres and tempos, the bass notes agree with them, like acquaintances nodding at each other. I’d love to be in a choir, or to play bass, or the triangle, to have some kind of defined role in this place. But I can’t even sing in tune.

Other students drift past me and I notice all the little ways they want to stand out: the bright neon hair-ties, the asymmetrical haircut, the pants lowered enough to reveal the bold branded jocks. I guess fitting in and standing out are kind of the same thing when you’re a teenager.

Across the footpath, a bunch of younger students are spraying deodorant and trying to turn it into some kind of blowtorch using a lighter. My chest tightens and I wince every time I see the flame; yep, everyone wants to stand out, even if it means singed eyebrows.

But no one dies and the bell rings and the choir singing stops, roaring into excited chatter. Within the same instant, students pour out of the room and onto the footpath where I’m loitering – an orange sea of babbling about composition assignments and the most popular shows streaming online.

She’s there, right in the middle of a bunch of friends I’ve never seen before, farewelling yet another teacher who seems to revere her. Cathy and her friends all seem larger than life – taller, leaner, more symmetrical than I’ll ever be. They all seem joyous in some uncomplicated way that I’ve only really ever seen in music videos. I’m sure I can’t do it. I let them walk right past me.

Then I am doing it.

‘Hey, Cathy,’ I call out.

She and her friends turn around in a single gesture, as though they’re some kind of interconnected organism. One of them is Lily from history class – the one with all the answers.

‘Hey,’ Cathy says, with the slightest look to the right and left at her friends, as though she’s embarrassed I’ve accosted them.

I offer the thumb drive to her, trying to be casual, but worrying that even this conspicuous lack of cloud drive usage compounds my awkwardness. ‘I finished the new track last night, in case you wanna check it out.’

‘Ah, cool,’ she says, grabbing it unceremoniously. ‘This is Priya and Lily, by the way, and this is Astrid. She makes techno and stuff.’

‘Hey,’ I say, hopefully bathing in the approving looks from the athletic Priya and the bright-eyed Lily, and in the idea of myself as someone who writes techno (and stuff).

‘You’re the new girl from homeschool, right?’ asks Priya, like I’m a scientific curiosity.

I’m not so keen on being the girl from homeschool indefinitely.

‘I would hate that,’ Priya continues. ‘Weren’t you bored stuck at home all the time?’

‘Ummm …’ Yeah, I wish.

‘Astrid and I are gonna turn this baby into a track for talent quest,’ Cathy says, throwing the thumb drive in the air and catching it. ‘Techno.’

My ears burn.

Lily frowns at Cathy, her whole body animating into a question mark. ‘Didn’t the auditions already happen?’

‘Ms Torres agreed it’s cool ‘cause I’m helping out the new girl. What’s the problem?’ Cathy has a defensive tone underneath this comment that I’m not understanding. ‘If you want to, I mean,’ she adds to me, prodding me just enough for the burning to spread from my ears to my cheeks.

I manage to nod. In this millisecond, Priya and Lily have turned inwards. Lily leans in and says something that makes Priya giggle. As she does this, Lily glances sideways at me. I want to disappear into the pavement.

‘So that’s a yes, right?’ Cathy prompts.

I’m lost in the sting of Lily’s arched eyebrow.

‘For talent quest?’ Cathy presses.

I nod again, fighting gravity.

That’s enough for Cathy. ‘Yay! I’ll sign us up for an audition.’

Audition.

They leave me standing there, in a deep chasm, watching Cathy’s hand casually swinging that little thumb drive. All my most fragile feelings.

When we walk into the music room for the audition the next day, Ms Torres is farewelling the other late additions – Takeshi, Sergio, and a pair of younger girls, all in matching sunglasses. Cathy high-fives them as they exit. Another teacher I’ve never seen before sits in the corner, crunching his salad sandwich and getting crumbs all over what I’m guessing is his score sheet. He doesn’t introduce himself, but I’m about to share this deep part of myself with him. It feels so wrong.

I don’t know what to do, so I glance at Cathy. She’s taking up space, her hands already grasping the microphone like it’s hers. She bounces on her feet like an athlete warming up, obviously not caring that random students can see her antics through the vast windows. I am nothing like this. I definitely shouldn’t be here.

‘Are you ready?’ Cathy asks.

My hand shakes over my laptop, even though my job for right now is just to hit play on my pre-recorded track. I can’t decide whether I am more afraid of success or failure, and the contradiction has completely overloaded my brain.

Ms Torres passes me an auxiliary cable, and I force myself to connect it steadily, like I’ve done it a million times. She sits down next to the other teacher. They both frown, first at each other and then at their audition assessment notes. ‘Take it away, folks,’ the other teacher says through a bite of his sandwich.

They’re not even going to really listen, I tell myself. Just do it. You have to.

My shaking finger connects with the spacebar and the track starts. Those notes I wrote in that pre-dawn escape through the amps, reaching out for Cathy with all the rawness I felt when I was alone. Now it’s in the walls, the floor, the world beyond me.

I can’t take it back.

I didn’t give Cathy any words to sing, and she didn’t write any, which I’m relieved about for a reason I can’t explain. The sounds come from somewhere deep inside her, but she’s airy like the synth, her body still, with one hand dangling by her side like she’s waiting for a bus. I stand there, eyes darting from her frozen figure to the teachers watching her, their expressions filled first with surprise, and then with admiration that I know is not directed at me. I am invisible to them, but Cathy … Cathy hears me. From here in the background, I feel her reaching back to me with her beautiful voice, holding all the emotions I felt that night alone in my room, layering them with her own. She holds her last note well beyond the fade-out. I am held there with her.

‘So, what do you think?’ Cathy demands of the teachers. The change in her manner jars me.

Ms Torres begins, ‘Well, you are a bit late …’

The other teacher rolls his eyes. ‘Of course you’re in.’

I picture all the other auditions she’s passed that underpinned that of course. But Cathy whoops and rushes over like it’s all because of me, and she hugs me before I can question whether such behaviour is even allowable in front of an audition panel. Somewhere in my chest, the shock turns to joy. I squeeze her right back.

When we break away, the teachers’ gaze has finally reached my corner of the room, and they’re smiling at us. I think it’s the first time they’ve both really looked at me. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

‘All right, folks,’ Ms Torres says, a smile still in her voice as she flings sheets of paper in our direction. ‘Here are your permission slips for the show. Get them in quick. The deadline was supposed to be yesterday.’

Permission slips. The empty parental signature line stares up at me like an accusation.

The nameless teacher wanders off, leaving a trail of his sandwich crumbs behind. I’m still frozen to the spot, flushed, holding the permission slip away from me like it might explode. Around me, Ms Torres takes apart our little audition setup. I watch as she deftly wraps the cables into perfect circles.

Then she fills my spare hand with a microphone stand. It’s heavier than I expect, and I almost drop it.

‘Hold this. We’ll take it back down the hall,’ she says, already disappearing back into the storeroom. Colourful bits of electric tape catch my eye, breaking up the sleek blackness of the equipment. Everything here’s a little worn.

‘How’s Matt?’ Ms Torres reappears and addresses Cathy as she picks up her schoolbag.

‘He’s fine,’ calls Cathy as she passes. ‘Maths: can’t afford to be late again!’

‘Later, Morticia,’ answers Ms Torres.

I blink at Cathy’s departing silhouette.

‘Addams Family – last year’s production,’ Ms Torres says.

‘Huh, I can picture it.’ Really, I’m just relieved to get someone’s reference.

I follow Ms Torres down the hallway, breathing in the soggy ham sandwich smell of the classroom. Nausea nibbles at my stomach. But the microphone stand’s too long: if I lose focus, I’d definitely collect a student or an instrument or some other unseen obstacle. So, I thrust it out in front of me, like I’m holding a radioactive weapon, as I edge past a crowd of brass band members with their sizeable music cases.

‘Thanks, Astrid.’ The weight is released. Ms Torres grabs the stand like it’s nothing, swinging it through a narrow classroom door without slowing at all.

I loiter outside the room, the permission slip pressed into the palm of my hand. Ms Torres pops back out, and I follow her as she leaves the music block, blinking at the brightness of the midday world outside.

There has to be a way.

She stops walking when she realises I’m still there. ‘Everything all right?’ she asks.

‘Umm,’ I say. My mind races. Just how compulsory and urgent is this compulsory and urgent form? ‘Ummm … So … Do you usually do all the backstage stuff?’ I try to mould myself into the shape she might like best.

‘Oh,’ she laughs. ‘If you’re interested in learning more, our tech crew has a shortage for school assemblies, if you don’t mind a bit of boring stuff.’

‘I’d love that,’ I babble.

Like this will somehow help me.

At lunch, I hover on the cracked concrete pathway, in that negative space between the music block and the distant wall that has sheltered me whenever the studio’s occupied. I step backwards until I’m standing on the lawn, heels of my heavy school shoes sinking in the muddy soil and anchoring me here.

Students push past as they rush off to join their little clusters.

‘Hey, you!’ Cathy exclaims. She’s rushing towards me, a wooden pencil case in hand.

I remember the handmade photo frame in her house. ‘Did you make that?’

She looks pleased. ‘I did! Thanks for noticing! Oh, hey.’ She plonks her bag onto the grass right here, mining for something. From its depths, she extracts a little plastic packet with what looks like rice crackers inside. ‘Okay, can I ruin your life?’

‘Sure.’ I mean …

‘You’ve never had these before, right?’ She brandishes a packet at me, with its yellow writing I cannot read and a rather jubilant-looking cartoon boy. ‘They’re Taiwanese rice crackers and I swear it will divide your life into the moment before you eat it and the moment after.’

‘Sounds ominous.’ I open one and take a tentative bite. It’s an intense processed carbohydrate experience. ‘Oh my god,’ I say with my mouth full of the second cracker. ‘What is this magic?’

‘I know.’ She grabs a hefty handful of the little packets and offers them to me. ‘I’m so sorry for what I’ve done.’

I fill my pockets with them, making a mental note to eat them all before going home. The contraband mixture of highly processed food and individual plastic wrapping would be a serious transgression in my household. I take out another one right there, breaking it into two satisfying bites.

‘Okay, thanks …’ I take a step back, still torn between the studio and the wall.

‘Come sit with us.’ Cathy grabs my forearm and pulls me into a huddle congregating outside the music block, with Priya and Lily among them. No one objects as I insert myself into the group.

A tiny space appears among them, and I step into it.

Guilt drives me to the library and homework club that Friday. I’m not meaning to brag, but I’m not behind. I’m miles ahead – academically, anyway. When you’re homeschooled by your law nerd mum and every outing requires Dad approval, there’s not a lot of room for anything but study. But my deception must be watertight. These homework club attendees must witness me here – just in case.

So, two-and-a-half hours of homework time morphs into two-and-a-half hours of free time – otherwise known as panic time. I scan my surroundings, trying not to think about the permission slip. Some resourceful past occupants of this chair have turned to the pointy ends of their compasses, or some other sharp object, and carved declarations of love and hate for various initials into this desk’s surface, so it can never be free of its past. I sigh at the destruction, leaning back slightly in the chair, until I realise it’s also kind of broken and I have to straighten up before I fall off.

I need to blend in, so I turn to my history homework. I work through the exercises about interpreting the pottery of Ancient Persia and try to avoid eye contact with Leila, who is sitting again in the chair by the window, structuring an English essay with the teacher in a hushed voice.

I wouldn’t forge a parent’s signature. I wouldn’t.

‘Astrid, hi!’ Connor whispers to me.

I only realise he’s sitting next to me now, even though we’ve been here for half an hour. I flush. ‘Uh, hi, uh, sorry.’ I glare again at the permission slip, which taunts me from the pages of my history notebook. ‘History is killing me.’

‘No way. You’re smart. I’m sure you’ve got this,’ he says at full volume. Josh, the boy next to him, elbows him with a laugh.

Ms Strange, the supervising teacher for today’s group, shoots a withering glance in our direction. From beside her, Leila follows the gaze, a mirthful smile spreading across her face as her dark eyes meet mine, and I lower my head to my exercise book, heat travelling up and down my body.

Nothing makes sense, except for homework.

I write until my hand cramps. The wind rattles the windows, and the library feels a second away from fracturing along its many spidery cracks.

By 5pm, Leila and I are the only two students left. In between unsubtle glances at the library clock, Ms Strange’s gaze is fixed firmly on me, no doubt confused as to why someone would diligently endure homework club through right to the very conclusion, while also completely avoiding the teacher assigned to offer assistance. Every time I look at Leila, she’s looking at me, too. I am visible. I am transparent. I flush again, deeper this time, and re-read the Ancient Persia passage for the third, fourth, fifth time. After all that, it’s only 5:05. But at least I’m not at home.

‘Hey, homeschool girl.’ Leila has appeared in front of my desk, plunging into the empty seat facing me.

‘Um, hey?’ I look to Ms Strange for help, but in the past five minutes, it seems she’s given up on the clock-watching and the me-watching and plunged into a dog-eared James Patterson novel.

‘Why are you still here?’ Leila leans forward across the table on her arms. ‘You clearly don’t need to be.’

‘How do you know?’ My heartbeat quickens.

She snatches the history notebook from under me. ‘“This red ceramic vessel clearly has an animal form, representing a birdlike creature. Although we don’t have any information about exactly what this creature represented to the original users of the vessel, it’s obvious from the design …”’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Just what I expected. You’re a giant nerd.’

I swallow, afraid that giant nerdiness disqualifies you from homework club.

Her dark eyes lock onto me. ‘Do you like homework that much?’ She breaks eye contact, and I follow her gaze to the geometrical patterns she’s drawn on her left wrist. ‘I’m not asking to be mean. It’s just …’

‘Those are nice,’ I say at the same time.

She sits up straighter, removes her wrist from view. ‘This? Just a sign that I am terminally bored.’ She purses her lips, but I think maybe the corners of her eyes are smiling a little.

‘Do you draw?’ It’s a silly question. Of course she draws. She has drawn on herself. Ugh.

‘Sort of,’ she says. ‘Um, mainly on the computer. I … I’m here because I changed my mind about uni. I want to go … become an animator.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

She shakes her head. ‘You don’t know me.’

But I want to. ‘Why are you worried about it? You clearly—’

‘You need to pass English and maths to get into the course. Minimum. I mean, what if a whole heap of people apply this year because they watched that fucking movie and they suddenly want to do the thing I’ve always loved and then they push up the entry score and I … I didn’t think I needed to …’ Something flickers in her even as – or because – Ms Strange raises her eyebrows at us, and she continues at a higher volume. ‘School is full of pointless things and wrong things and apparently you need to memorise the history of all the violent shit white men have done throughout history and genuinely believe everything can be objectively measured and analysed and understand fucking triangles to get into a course about drawing. It’s cooked.’

I want to keep this conversation going, but I don’t know anything, and all the swearing is hitting me with an almost physical force. I try to meet Leila’s eyes again, but her whole body has closed itself to me, everything restless. Some invisible line has been crossed. ‘That sounds—’

She shrugs, pushes her chair back, away from me.

Please stay. ‘I could tutor you.’

‘Oh, umm …’ She has her back to me now.

‘It’s okay if you don’t want to. I just thought …’

Something closes in her. She empties everything off her desk without answering. But, as she slings her bag over her shoulder, she turns back to me, that unreadable expression still flickering across her features. ‘Lunchtime next Friday?’

Even though I don’t speak to her, Leila is present in every day that next week. She passes me on the path to class, she ignores me in maths, she laughs with her friends outside the music room. Each moment feels significant, even though she doesn’t look at me. In each moment, I’m feeling her gaze on me again. In each moment, I’m wishing I could understand her unreadable expression.

I count down the days until Friday.

At lunchtime, as promised, I sink into the back corner of the library, waiting for her. I can almost imagine her pacing around, scoping out the perfect spot to conceal this clandestine exchange from her cool friends. There’s no way anyone with her social standing would want to be seen during school hours voluntarily spending time with the likes of me. But it works for me too. Libraries are a neutral zone.

Leila strides into my hideout, her electric blue handbag slung over her shoulder, much too empty to have the day’s books in it. From here, it’s clear that she’s taken up the hem of her school skirt herself, and up close the streaks in her hair are uneven, like she’s bleached them at home. The nose ring is still present – this time with no band-aid.

‘What’s up, homeschool girl?’ she says, her voice projecting through the stacks.

‘Hi,’ I whisper, hoping to remind her about where we are.

She sits dramatically, throwing her English exercise book onto the desk between us and pushing her glasses onto her face. ‘I’m screwed,’ she announces.

Everyone else in the library definitely hates us.

‘Why is that?’ I whisper back.

‘Can you just tell me how to write an essay?’ She takes a puff from an inhaler, letting it out with an audible sigh.

‘Of course,’ I say, in what I hope is a confident tone. I want to take us back to that space from homework club, where she was really looking at me, but it feels like that never existed. ‘Have you thought any more about …?’

She’s still not looking at me. She spots my chunky schoolbag plonked on the carpet beside us. ‘Oh my god, how do you lug that around all day?’

I feel small, even though I’m the one who knows how to write an essay. ‘What’s wrong with my bag?’

She laughs but doesn’t volunteer an answer. A lump rises in my throat as I think about Mum and me carefully picking out the bag at the shops – how we agreed it was just the right size, that it would hold everything I needed, that its sky-blue colour would contrast nicely with the horrendous uniform. I slide my chair a little farther from Leila.

With the distance between us wider, she relaxes into the space, as though she’s relieved we’re further apart. This hurts, too. She turns to the photocopied novel excerpt in her exercise book, doodling more geometrical patterns in a margin. I take in the silhouette of her altered uniform, the hues of her bleached hair, and yes, her handbag is beautiful, too. I swallow the lump in my throat. ‘I don’t understand how.’ It’s a whisper.

‘What?’ She’s tracing concentric circles, pen and eyes not lifting.

‘How do you just know what to do?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you, remember?’ She keeps tracing the circles.

‘No, I mean, how do you know how to be …’ I can’t understand why this is so hard. ‘I mean, you are … I mean …’ I mean, I wish I was like you. I mean, I like you. I mean …

She softens, finally lifting her gaze to me. The circles keep repeating. ‘You can read about it on social media, but really, umm, it’s just something you know.’

‘It’s not something I know.’

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Maybe you’re the one who should be paying me for lessons.’

I don’t know what to make of these comments, and the growing distance between us, but the slight smile reappears on her lips.

‘Okay, I have a deal for you.’ She leans forward until I’m breathing in her musky rose perfume. It’s so warm.

‘Will you give me a discount if I explain this to you?’ She gestures dramatically at my bag and the surrounding belongings. ‘All this … this is my area of expertise.’

So, we huddle – both awkward – at this rundown desk. She learns about effective paragraphing, taking notes in the neatest handwriting I have ever seen. Then we put away the books and start deconstructing my style (or lack thereof). She gets halfway through a long list of grunge fashion recommendations before I stop her, heart hammering in my ears.

‘There’s something else you could teach me,’ I say. ‘I mean, something I’d like to learn. I mean …’

‘What’s that?’ A smirk flickers on her face.

I almost lose my nerve, but she’s the only person who could help me now. ‘When you hand in a permission slip, does the school, um, check with your parents about it?’

Leila raises her eyebrows at me. ‘Are you in the business of deceiving your parents, Astrid? What makes you think that’s something I would know about?’

I flush. ‘I don’t … I’m not …’

‘I’ll just say this: If you hand in a form with a credible parental signature, they will let you into any excursion or school activity.’

‘Okay,’ I whisper.

‘Also, you know, the normal thing to do is to fudge letters from your parents to get out of school activities, not into them.’ She digs into her handbag and retrieves a crumpled $20 note. ‘Hope this much is okay. Figured I earned back a little by being your accessory.’

I grasp the note: My first legitimate income. Our hands brush, and she withdraws quickly, throwing her laptop into her handbag. I scramble down to my schoolbag, stuffing the money loosely inside and contemplating climbing right in after it. By the time I recover, Leila has already bolted for the door, and I’m left dazed in a thick cloud of her rose perfume and an unnameable feeling even more overwhelming.

I’ve always been pretending. There was Carla, who thought I had a favourite takeaway restaurant and a Netflix subscription. There were the online chat friends who got me through those early years of homeschooling, who thought I was an eighteen-year-old DJ (cringe), until I told Nick about it, thinking he’d understand, and he instead went right to Mum about it. Now there are my parents, and Cathy, and Leila – all parts of this new deception. I’m still sitting in the library, my hand hovering over the permission slip, wondering whether I’m really prepared to take this step. I couldn’t call it pretending anymore if I did this.

I would officially become a liar.

That afternoon, I’m back at Cathy’s for our first serious rehearsal. I’m still leaning on the doorframe, wrestling with my heavy school shoes, when she returns from the hallway and declares, ‘Halt! We can’t go any further.’

‘Huh?’ I almost overbalance.

‘We’re out of snacks.’ She sticks her elbow on the entryway table to support herself, pulling her shoes back on.

‘Oh, that’s fine. I’m not hungry, anyway.’ A pit forms in my stomach. If we go near the supermarket, where Mum would be at this very moment, my cover could be blown.

‘Good for you. I am.’ She drags her jacket out from underneath a pile of mail, ignoring the envelopes fluttering to the floor. ‘Come on, before I die from a lack of carbs.’

‘I didn’t bring any money.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m shouting, obviously. What’s up with you?’

‘Just tired from school,’ I mumble. I jam my school shoes back on, tying up the laces more tightly than I mean to.

She smiles, kicking the front door shut.

I bound after her, wondering how long I’ll be able to follow her before it all falls apart.

‘Is it that you’re stressed out about the talent quest qualifier?’ Cathy asks.

‘I don’t know.’ Another lie. I shove my hands in my pockets, even though they’re too small for this.

We head downhill. There’s a chalk drawing on the street from some kids playing hopscotch. We step over it.

‘Come on,’ Cathy says. ‘You can’t be this edgy and not know what’s wrong.’

‘Edgy?’

‘It’s your whole vibe. Did I say something to upset you?’

‘What? No.’ My heart quickens.

She studies me, and I worry she’s seen right through me.

‘You’re right. It’s the performance,’ I say quickly. I tell myself it’s not a lie. It’s the performance I’m doing right now. It’s all the performances keeping my life together.

‘I thought so.’ She believes me. ‘You just need to prepare.’

‘How?’

‘You could make up a stage persona.’

‘A what?’

‘A stage persona, you know, like a different self that you become on stage.’

I study her. ‘Do you do that?’

She shrugs, her eyes following a ginger cat sneaking through a garden. ‘It’s more of a shy person thing. Chrissy Amphlett did it, if you know who she is.’

‘Oh.’ I don’t. But I think I know all about having a persona.

‘I’ll forgive you.’ Cathy sees through me every time. ‘As for me, I am my stage persona, I guess. Don’t read too much into that.’

An image of her frozen posture in the audition surfaces and bothers me. ‘It’s good to be authentic,’ I say carefully, even as I do the opposite, keeping this conversation focused on the things I should be afraid of, rather than the things I really fear in this moment.

‘My grandad was super into jazz, and I used to sing with him and stuff,’ she says. ‘And I just kept going after that until suddenly it’s now and it’s like my whole deal.’

I’m tempted to ask more about her grandad, since it’s the first time he’s come up, and I’m not sure I entirely get the connection between what we were just talking about and this story. But, despite Cathy’s apparent lack of a filter, it feels somehow too personal.

‘Hey, about the song,’ she says, her gaze finally returning to me. ‘We better come up with some lyrics. I’m not gonna sing la-la-la again at the actual show.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I kind of like that.’

‘You like that?’ She says this like it’s a revelation, which makes me blush.

‘Yeah, I think the abstract vocals are kind of cool. Don’t you think it’s kind of about how things are unformed, kind of like you’re giving voice to things that are beyond words?’ I say it like it’s occurring to me on the spot – this deep, secret, almost lifelong part of me.

‘Unformed, huh? You should talk to my dad. You sound like one of his poems.’

‘Haha, oh no, but I don’t know anything about poetry,’ I say to the footpath.

‘Me neither, but who cares. I like it. La-la it is then.’

I hold my breath as we approach the supermarket, but when I start moving towards it, eyes darting around for a sign of our Prius, Cathy drags me back to the footpath. I stare at her but am too relieved to say a word. We keep walking until we finally reach a nondescript old mall on a bustling intersection, which my parents would routinely drive past on their quest for organic groceries.

‘Okay, are you ready?’ Cathy asks, marching us into the busy Asian supermarket, crammed with bright food packets and squeaky trolleys and pop music from the ’90s. She’s brighter, no sign of the insecurity that followed us on the footpath.

‘Ready for what?’ Still reeling from relief, I look around at the gigantic bags of rice, the boxes of oranges and lemons, the aisles of spices. Nothing appears snack-like.

‘You’ve never been here before, huh?’ She claps her hands together in that gesture that means something wicked is on her mind.

I shake my head, hoping she doesn’t ask me to elaborate. Dad would have words about the imported goods and their carbon footprints, the processing, the additives … I wouldn’t even know where to start with explaining that. All I can think about is the fact that neither of my parents would possibly be here. I am safe … for now.

‘You poor thing! Okay, well, just know, once you do this, you’ll always know.’ She raises her eyebrows, like she’s weighing the ethics of what she’s about to do.

‘Know what?’ I ask.

She grabs my arm and steers me into a narrow aisle packed with rows and rows of snacks. ‘Welcome,’ she says, gesturing at the rainbow of packages. I wouldn’t even know where to start. My treat experience is limited to homemade alternatives and the occasional clandestine packet of plain potato chips.

The cartoon rice-cracker boy leaps out at me. Oh yeah, I did expand my treat experience. I zero in on what I hope is a reasonable-sized packet, taking it down with a tentative look at Cathy.

‘Obviously,’ she says. ‘But that’s just the start. What else would you like to try?’

The array of snacks is overstimulating. I take too long to scan the aisle, irritating a passing customer, who pushes past us to grab something, like it should all be obvious.

Cathy laughs at my ongoing confusion. ‘Okay, that’s a common reaction. What kind of treats do you like?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say to another cartoon boy, this one with steam coming out of his ears.

‘Do you like spicy food?’ She runs her hand down a line-up of packets swollen with air – a cacophony of chilli, prawns, and fire graphics in amongst a mass of green.

‘Sort of? What is this?’

‘Seaweed snacks,’ Cathy proclaims, grabbing a bunch of packets, including the steaming cartoon boy.

‘Ummm …’

‘They’re not that hot, I swear.’

I’m not sure I believe that.

Cathy’s already moved on. ‘Okay, next?’

The temptation of the sweet section is much too strong. I’m drawn to a stack of long, thin biscuits. ‘Are these chocolate?’

‘Sort of,’ Cathy says. ‘I try not to keep them in the house because I can never stop eating them.’

‘Sounds dangerous.’ One of the biscuit packs is elegant green. ‘Wait, is this matcha?’

She nods mischievously, grabbing two packets. ‘Everyone loves those.’

‘Okay, here’s some chocolate for you, then.’ She grabs a box of chocolate-filled biscuits from the same aisle, an approving panda cartoon beaming out at us. My mouth waters at the sight of the chocolate sauce pictured on the box, which is definitely not made from pumpkin.

At this point, we’ve collected an uncomfortable number of packets. We reach the checkout, joining a long queue.

Cathy smiles over at the frowning shop worker at another checkout. ‘Hi, Aunty Liu!’

‘Ah, hi, Cathy,’ the worker replies, her frown smoothing out.

I’m torn between continuing to stand there and saying something polite, but thankfully the shop worker doesn’t stay still very long, calling for the next customer without officially ending the conversation with Cathy. ‘I didn’t know you had an aunt,’ I say.

‘What?’ Cathy asks. ‘Oh, haha, no, we just call aunties aunty. We’re not related, but I’ve seen her here since I was a kid.’

‘Oh.’ I still don’t understand. I feel like I deserve to be ejected out of here through a trapdoor, but nothing happens.

As soon as we’re out of the shop, Cathy digs into the bag of treats, drawing out one of the seaweed snacks and opening it for us. In a cloud of chilli powder, we dive in, each green rectangle a perfect vehicle for the spicy seasoning.

She lied. They’re totally hot.

I cough and she looks at me like she’s worried it’s all too much for me. But I come to my senses and take another mouthful.

‘It’s good pain,’ I say.

And it is. The chilli snacks keep me grounded for the entire walk back. With this much stimulation, I can’t pay too much attention to anything else. I can’t worry for too long that one of the cars might be Mum, that one of the pedestrians might be Dad.

Tears form in the corners of my eyes. It’s good pain.

At 5:32, I arrive, breathless, at the school pickup zone, just as Mum pulls up. As I climb in, all sweat and nerves, Leila drifts past on her bike, holding my gaze just long enough to let me know she’s seen right through me.

On Monday, I am officially one of Ms Torres’ assembly set-up assistants. This means, along with Takeshi (who is somewhere else in his mind the whole time) and Veronika (who is clearly infatuated with Takeshi – something he’s oblivious to), I’m now in charge of the big, crappy speakers that broadcast administrative complaints and detailed cricket news to a thousand bored students. After Friday’s rehearsal, and now this, everything feels purposeful – and false.

Today, the string quartet have won some kind of prize and will perform. When Ms Torres approaches me, she’s already frazzled about this added pressure. Plus, I have already destroyed part of our hearing range with two episodes of horrible feedback. So, when she starts talking, it takes a while for me to register that this is not what she’s on about. ‘Astrid, I still don’t have your form for talent quest.’

My heart sinks. So, this is it.

‘Sorry,’ I manage, desperately searching for something I can do that would enable me to look away, to pretend for one more day that this is not happening to me, that I am just like everyone else.

She sighs. ‘Would it be easier if I put it on the portal?’ The portal. The parent portal.

‘No!’ I reel from the intensity of my own response. ‘No, I have it. I just … keep forgetting it at home.’

‘Okay, well, listen: If you don’t get it returned by this time next week, I’m going to have to pull you and Cathy off the list. I’m sure you don’t want that.’

‘Sorry,’ I say hopelessly, but she’s already walked away.

I force myself to finish my work, to perform each task with studied nonchalance. Once I finish shakily taping all the cables to the floor, I sneak off to sit with the other senior students and wait for everyone else to file in. For a minute or ten, my mind takes the shape of the blank signature line on the permission slip. Then I realise one cable I was supposed to secure is snaking loose through the crowd.

New beads of sweat gather under my arms and in my palms, despite the chill in the hall. The crowd has swelled around me. Dashing to the front of the hall would be impossible. It’s too late to fix it.

The worst-case scenario plays through my mind: A student comes out carrying a double bass. They trip, their arms flailing, their precious instrument shattering to pieces amidst the gasps of their peers. The bassist goes to hospital. My parents get called. I get suspended. Dad finds everything out—

Ms Torres sticks some tape over the loose cable and then she sits, feet tapping, off to one side of the staff section. If only all my other problems could be so easily erased.

On the rickety school bus on Friday, Cathy points through the downpour at the places she went on her first date with her boyfriend, Matt; tried vodka for the first time; and went running in the rain. I listen as though I’m silently comparing notes with my own wild stories – as though my past is not as immaculate and featureless as my house, as though my mind is not racing with the fear that this rain will wash away the pretence that’s keeping me safe. I force myself to stop looking outside, to lower my head like a convict on their way into the courtroom, on the off-chance that Mum is also in this same traffic, alone on her way to the supermarket we used to frequent together.

On the way out of the bus, I copy the swift movements of the other exiting passengers, tapping Cathy’s spare commuter card on the machine like I’ve done it a million times. We rush through the rain to her front door. She’s laughing. Today, I can’t.

On beanbags on the floor of her bedroom, Cathy poses for a series of selfies for an unseen Matt (which I dodge when she comes my way, fearing anything that could immortalise my many transgressions). Instead I keep myself busy with a tutorial for a new synth plug-in I’ve just installed in Ableton. That plug-in, too, is open, waiting, with its little default symbols – those little waveforms. In their simplest form, all they do is go up and down, over and over again, creating the unseen movements of the speakers, back / forward / back / forward, pushing sound out into this space until I make it stop. I am in control here. Even on a day like today.

All the little colourful blocks are waiting for us. Outside, the downpour intensifies.

Cathy stretches out from her beanbag, hitting a key and sending a default square-wave note around the darkening room.

‘What does this do?’ She slides closer to me.

‘I don’t know; that’s what the tutorial’s for.’

She clicks the plug-in’s delay settings in a random flurry, tapping a key at the same time so that her changes come out as hasty, uneven blips, each barely forming before the next one sounds. At first, the repeated square-wave notes still sound simple, round like a dial tone, just echoing. But, before long, the sounds she plays are no longer recognisable, all weighty and disconcerting and folding in on themselves. It’s like they’re falling apart as they grow. ‘Cool,’ says Cathy.

When she stops, I open the spectrum analyser, holding the key down again so she can watch the lines that map the chorus of frequencies. ‘Check this out. This is what your sound looks like.’

‘That’s super,’ she says. ‘Can we put it in the song?’

‘Of course.’ I add a tentative note into the grid. It doesn’t quite fit, but I can tell it makes Cathy happy. I’ll fix it later.

There’s a knock at the door. I jump.

‘Yes?’ Cathy sighs. To me, she says, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mention Dad’s already home. You can call him Pete, by the way.’

Cathy’s dad – Pete, I suppose – edges into the room. He’s dressed in office clothes that would be sharp, except his shirt’s untucked, and his laptop is wedged under his arm, defying gravity. ‘Don’t mind me, but I was wondering what on Earth that noise was.’ His tone is calm, but that doesn’t stop the knot in my stomach. I’ve been in trouble for noise too many times.

Cathy rolls her eyes. ‘It’s art, Dad.’

‘Oh, in that case, do enlighten me.’ The laptop slips another inch, and it’s taking all my self-control not to intervene.

Before I can tell her to wait and let us save our progress, Cathy clicks a bunch more settings, distorting her sound into something else entirely. She taps and clicks until I join her, and then we keep going and going until we’re in a chaotic cacophony, concluding randomly with something that sounds like a vintage telephone. ‘See?’ she proclaims, with a theatrical gesture at my screen. ‘Art.’

‘Impressive,’ Cathy’s dad says, his voice carefully neutral. ‘I’ll be cooking dinner.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Cathy calls after him as he closes the door, and there’s no subsequent crash, so the laptop has somehow survived its ordeal.

‘Did you see the look on his face?’ she exclaims. ‘No one’s gonna see this coming.’

My heart squeezes. No one will see this at all, if I can’t get the permission slip signed.

The door opens again. ‘Astrid, I’m sorry,’ Pete says, returning sans-laptop. ‘I’ve been meaning to say, you are so welcome to stay for dinner.’

‘Oh, I really can’t, thank you,’ I say to the floor. ‘I actually – I actually have to get going pretty soon.’

‘Next time,’ Pete says. ‘Why don’t you join us next week?’

I smile and nod, even knowing how impossible this is, so that he walks away, leaving us alone again.

‘You can’t walk back to school in this rain, Astrid,’ Cathy says, crossing her arms and her legs at the same time. ‘Your mum should just come pick you up.’

My heart races. ‘Do you think … Is there any chance Pete could just give me a lift?’

Cathy sighs. ‘Mum has the car. She’s at her dance studio.’

‘Oh.’ I am breathless.

‘Why don’t you just call your mum?’ Cathy insists. ‘You can just use our phone.’

I am out of options. ‘Because she doesn’t know I’m here.’

I think maybe she will let this little truth go, that maybe it will be enough for her. But she slams the laptop shut and stares across the room at me. Her face is unreadable.

‘Why?’ Her usually clear voice has a strange waver in it.

‘You … My dad … You were right. My parents are just really strict. They think … They think I’m in homework club.’

I bury my face in my hands. Thunder crashes. I jump, as though the universe is admonishing me. For the lies or the truth – I can’t even tell. Nothing feels safe.

‘Astrid, you can’t walk back today. Just say you came here to do your homework if you have to.’ Cathy unlocks her phone and pushes it towards me. The clock reads 5:05.

Shaking, I google the name of Mum’s firm, finding the unfamiliar digits of her work mobile phone number beneath an equally unrecognisable portrait of her in those polyester clothes from her first day. Hopefully she hasn’t hidden it for the day yet. Hopefully she pockets it while she does the shopping. A twinge of guilt – I don’t know these little things about my mum anymore, these little details that used to keep us safe when we needed to invent our way out of trouble.

I make myself start the call. With each ring, my breaths get shallower.

‘Ellen Waters speaking.’

‘Mum.’

‘Astrid!’ She sounds like she thinks I’ve been abducted. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine. I just … I went to Cathy’s … my friend’s house. Can you pick me up from here?’

‘I can’t believe you.’ Silence vibrates down the phone line. ‘Send me the address.’

The line cuts off. I can’t breathe.

A hand touches my arm.

‘Listen,’ Cathy says, pulling on my shirt sleeve until I have to stand up. ‘You’re already busted, right? So, let’s live it up until then.’

Ten minutes left.

Piles of clothes, still on their hangers, soak up the little droplets on the bathroom floor, under our bare feet. Above this mess, we stand victorious, silly, giddy, in this limited space. These old dance costumes, discovered in the depths of Cathy’s mum’s closet, were just gifted to us over the phone by a very enthusiastic (and slightly puffed) Louise. It’s better that they’re loved than perfect, she said. It seems like an intense thing to say about a couple of old dresses.

My terror must be completely transparent.

‘You feel better, right?’ Cathy smiles, her fairy-floss pink tulle sparkling in the dull bathroom light. It’s not really a question.

I conceal most of myself behind Cathy, conscious of the extreme purple of the dress, how it barely covers my bum, how it reveals an emerging physical maturity I’d barely noticed. I give my reflection side-eye. ‘Is this what you meant by a stage persona?’

‘Can be the start of one,’ Cathy says with a self-satisfied nod towards her own reflection, striking a couple of poses, her phone light flashing in the mirror. I can’t dodge this time. ‘Can I show Matt?’

I nod. There’s no point in hiding. Cathy’s phone confirms the message is sent before I can second-guess myself. It’s 5:25.

‘Okay, wait, I have something for the finishing touches. This is going to take you right out of yourself!’

She kneels on the clothing pile to open the cupboard under the basin, pulling out laundry detergents, soaps, shampoos, throwing bright silver spray cans on the goopy counter.

‘Left over from swimming carnivals,’ she explains, shoving all the other items back into the cupboard and forcing the door closed.

‘What is this?’ I stare at them. They have ridiculous names like violet vision and fuchsia fantasy.

She laughs. ‘You really haven’t lived, have you? It’s hair colour spray … temporary,’ she adds, seeing the expression cross my face. ‘What colour do you reckon? I’m thinking purple. Or pink and purple. Nah, purple …’

‘Cathy …’

‘It comes out in water,’ she says, like this negates all the fear in the world. She shakes the dented can. ‘That’s why I didn’t use them for swimming. What’s up?’

‘Mum …’ The lump in my throat makes my voice husky.

‘Astrid. Relax.’ She grabs me by the shoulders, shaking me gently. She takes on the faux-ominous tone of a B movie. ‘You cannot bust that which is already busted.’

Despite myself, despite everything, I’m laughing. As though from a great distance, I watch myself as I grab hold of the violet can and run a single bold streak down a lock of my tangled thick hair. Adrenaline and elation run through my veins; the aerosol smell burns into my nostrils.

We emerge five minutes later as though from a psychedelic electro pop music video, smelling of indeterminate dye chemicals, burned hair and moth balls, our eyes heavy with matte black.

So, here’s my stage persona. She doesn’t need to hide. In the neon lens of Cathy’s phone camera, she does whatever she wants.

Until it’s time to go home.

My stomach lurches with each tiny bump in the road. I’m scared to breathe in the hairspray fumes permeating the car. My hair drips purple into my lap, but it refuses to yield the hairspray, which did not budge, despite a hurried shower at Cathy’s.

Mum won’t look at me. This is a whole new level of angry. I clasp my hands together to stop them shaking. The rain was supposed to clear. The hairspray was supposed to come out. This afternoon was supposed to be an escape.

‘What were you thinking?’ she whispers, muting the inappropriately cheery tune on the radio.

‘I … I …’ It’s the wrong time to tell her about the talent quest.

I clutch one of Mum’s baby wipes and wipe the stray violet from my face, wishing myself back in time. ‘Cathy said it came out in the swimming pool.’

‘It better.’ The anger gives her tone an intense tremor, which I’ve never heard before.

In the neighbourhood swimming pool, stripped down to my bra and undies, I dive and dive again, gasping and bleeding a purple trail that whispers up around me like a cloud.

Above me, Mum paces back and forth, furious at this desperate, illicit use of pool chlorine: a substance that’s been banned in our household for almost six years.

The bored university-age lifeguards, the serious speed-training swimmers, the deep-water runners with their kitschy ’90s music – no one says anything about all this. The purple trail – so painfully obvious to me – disperses before anyone else sees it, making me feel like I might be imagining it, even as it’s happening.

There’s a girl here, flailing in her underwear, bleeding purple, but no one says anything about it at all. No one says anything when that same girl tiptoes back to the showers, her hair still streaming the false violet behind her. It’s like nothing ever happened.

My heart thumps under the heat of the shower, which makes me want to turn up the temperature until it stings. The tears come slowly at first, then they’re huge gasps that I stifle in the water. It’s my habit. I’ve always been told to stop crying.

I reach out a shaky hand for the complimentary shampoo and start rubbing it into my scalp until that hurts too, hoping that the tears will not stain my face red and give it all away.

The shampoo dispenser button now hangs limply against its plastic home. Broken. That’s when I realise – these are angry tears.

It’s the wrong thought to have right now. My eyes get hot again and I squeeze them shut and turn the water cold to shock myself out of this spiral. I don’t want to think negative thoughts about my family – especially not my mum. I was naïve to forget what it’s like at home, selfish to think I could just wish myself into some other identity.

I force myself to turn the water off. But the feeling still roars in my ears. I wrap my towel tight around myself and let the little purple droplets sit against my skin. I touch one of them and watch as it bursts, trailing down my reddened arm and disappearing out of sight, until the last of my costume is gone.

It’s 6:05 when we pull up. We steal into the house as silently as possible. My eyes sting, and the purple dress is crumpled in the bottom of my schoolbag. I stalk past the hallway and all the family portraits, where the younger versions of myself beam down at this indignity. I put up my walls, locking them all out.

Mum basically pushes me into the shower, where I am tasked with obliterating all the incriminating smells of foreign body wash, while she faces the consequences of my indiscretions: We are half an hour late arriving home.

The distant blues melody halts. Dad launches instantly into his diatribe. With wrinkled, shaking fingers, I turn the shower on as hard as I can, drowning out all the horrible words that I have brought into being.

On the floor sits the purple dress, with tiny patches of violet hairspray staining the shoulders. It’s imperfect now, but I won’t be washing it out. These feelings, these colours, are holding on, even if they are unseen. These little waves of colour, like the sound waves on my screen, strike a secret discordant note in my beige and white home. I love them. It’s better to be loved than perfect.

At the other end of this frigid weekend, in the silence of Dad’s continuing rage, Mum throws the thistle in my direction, and I snatch it with the garden glove before the wind can. The roots struggle in the freezing Sunday afternoon wind, inspiring a misplaced pang of sympathy. I suppress this ridiculous romanticism with peppery memories of barefoot summers spent plucking the little needles out of various extremities. I stuff the little plant deep into the overflowing bucket, where it’s swallowed by a million of its cousins.

Then I sigh, recalling a cranky Nick from years ago, brandishing one of these. ‘Want some weed?’ he’d say. The joke was that I’d be too strait-laced to laugh. So I’d be sure to laugh every time, just to stick it to him.

Now he’s too far away from us to crack any more jokes. In that email, which still haunts me, he implied I could do the same next year. But I absolutely can’t picture it. As usual, he’s only thinking about himself. All my realities keep me tied to this place, on this same schedule that started the day we moved in here. Even once Mum’s work contract expires, she’ll still have to cook, do her yoga routine, pull the weeds, accompany the garbage bins. This means I will still be doing this all next year, too. And the year after that. And the year after that. If I leave, too, this will all fall apart. I would never do that to Mum. Not like he did.

Which is why I have to tell her the truth.

Mum crouches ahead of me now, her back turned. She knows the names of all these little stray seedlings, but in pesticide-free garden maintenance, she kills without mercy. Today, though, her trowel sinks into the dirt so far it threatens to uproot the turf as well. Which is my fault.

‘Mum,’ I begin. You cannot bust that which is already busted. Guess we’ll find out.

‘What’s done is done,’ she says, plunging the trowel into an ill-fated paspalum cluster. ‘I don’t want to dissect it with you.’

‘I need to tell you … Cathy and I signed up for the talent quest. That’s what the hair was for.’

She freezes.

‘I won’t do the hair thing. Dad will love it. It’s a music thing.’ I know I’m whining like I’m five. I can’t help it.

‘Astrid.’

‘Cathy really likes me. Her family even invited me for dinner next week. I thought maybe we could just tell—’

‘Dinner too? Do you want a repeat of the netball girls?’

It’s a sharp phrase to me, no matter how gently it’s said. ‘I do all these things for you,’ I say. ‘Can’t you do this one thing for me?’

‘Don’t start,’ she whispers. ‘You lied to me. You cut class.’

‘Homework club.’

‘You dyed your hair.’

‘Temporarily.’

‘You know perfectly well it’s not me that has the problem with all this. If it was just me—’

‘But it’s not. And it never will be.’ I snatch the bucket of thistles and storm away, trailing sharpness behind me.

Thirty minutes later, she’s signed my permission slip. You cannot bust that which is already busted. Guess Mum is aware of that age-old wisdom as well. Despite myself, I’m just glad that I don’t have to lie anymore. For now.

After days of freezing Mum out for our late arrival, Dad’s waiting for us at home on Tuesday, standing in the front yard, his bare feet nestled in the newly clipped lawn, and he might even be a little sunburnt. Pulling up, Mum gasps to see him there waiting for us, her reflexive fear quickly covered by a smile and a wave.

For her, there are flowers and a new jazz album. For me, he has brought out some band shirts from his collection, proclaiming that they will now fit me, even though I haven’t really changed in size for years now. Without looking, I take them, and I thank him and, still standing out there in the yard, he tells Mum all about his day, and about how her phalaenopsis orchid has never looked healthier, and about how Mum should take the night off from cooking. The late afternoon sun is making my eyes water.

The scene takes place from a distance, even while it’s happening. Candles are lit all around the restaurant, in a sleepy scene of dining suburban couples and families, and in the middle is the white middle-class family sitting upright around the table by the window, chosen carefully by the father. Unlike everyone else, no phones distract this family. Instead, they smile across at each other, through the Australian native flowers sitting on the table, in a makeshift vase that the server makes out of one of those silver ice containers that are usually used for champagne. But this family doesn’t drink. No one in this family is dressed up, either. They look so natural together, in a coincidentally matching ensemble of those most common colours of white, black and denim blue, like a family portrait. The father compliments the chef, who sends surprise chocolate mousse while the two women are in the bathroom.

The mother glows as she describes the daughter’s blossoming friendship, her dinner invitation, the ease with which she’s adapted to high school life. The father smiles at this and makes a toast to the daughter’s talent quest entry. Then they all reach for their dessert plates at the same time. The family is so connected, so close, much to the envy of those around them, who must wonder what it would take to achieve such domestic perfection.

If only they knew.

With Dad’s approval, dinner at Cathy’s becomes an official activity, with its own entry on the whereabouts board. Knowing that he knows, knowing that he’ll soon be here to pick me up, knowing that I’ve invited him into this space, a shadow falls over the bright liveliness of Cathy’s house. A shadow only I can see.

Uneasy, I hover around Pete in the kitchen. He summoned Cathy and me here, but it’s not clear why. He’s steaming some frozen dumplings and refuses to let me touch anything. Meanwhile, he’s washing a bunch of green vegetables, big droplets of water gliding down the kitchen cupboards. The shadow falls on each of these drops as they fall to the floor. A wet footprint. A lived-in kitchen. Imperfections only I can see.

I hate that I’m seeing things this way. I want to be subsumed in this normality. I want to belong here, to walk in the puddles, to wipe my hands on my shirt, to dip a fork into the dumpling sauce and taste it without permission. But I can’t do any of those things. I am glued to the spot, in the shadow.

Cathy ambles out, wandering past her dad to get to the pantry. ‘You didn’t have to come out here,’ she says to me. ‘Dad’s showing off. If you watch, you’re encouraging him.’

Pete sighs at Cathy, and I worry that he’s about to get stuck into her, but he crushes some garlic instead. Cathy plonks herself on a kitchen chair and looks bored. I wish I could be bored.

‘I’m here to help, if you like,’ I say, in my most polite house-guest voice. That’s when I realise Pete’s left the heat on. The empty pan must be about a million degrees. If something burns, it will linger. Dad will smell it, even if I can prevent him from coming inside. The shadow darkens.

Instinctively, I dial the heat down to off, and turn back to Pete, ready to communicate this emergency.

Pete rushes past me, switching the heat back up well above halfway. ‘No, no, it’s got to be hot,’ he says, in an urgent tone that makes my heart race. ‘Rè guō liáng yóu!’

‘He’s saying the pan has to be hot, and the oil has to be cool,’ translates Cathy in a flat voice, scrolling through her phone. ‘Don’t mess with his process.’

‘Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry,’ I say, edging my way away from him, in case I’ve ruined everything.

But when I look back at Pete, he’s smiling at me like he’s spied an opportunity. ‘I’ll teach you, Astrid. Cooking is all about timing, texture and temperature. Watch.’

He pours a little oil into the pan. I brace myself for it to go everywhere, but it somehow doesn’t. ‘See? It’s fine.’

Everything here is safer than I thought. Nothing burns. But still the shadow remains.

‘No, please, sit down,’ Louise insists, as I hover around the steaming plates of dumplings a short time later. It’s been too long since I had dinner with anyone’s parents. The protocols disappeared from my memory long ago, even though this shadow never did.

I sidle over to the dining table, where Cathy is already buried in her phone, paying no attention to the plate of vegetables in front of her. Unease has deepened in my stomach, and the thought of eating makes me nauseous. It’s already 6:45. At 7:15, Dad will arrive. I can’t let him in here. I should have thought this through. I should have never …

‘Pete and I are so glad you could make it, Astrid,’ Louise says, extracting Pete from his phone.

I smile, first at Louise, then at Pete. I can do this part: Impressing adults is my specialty. So, I clear my throat. ‘All the food looks amazing.’

Pete shrugs. ‘Mostly it was frozen.’

‘But it looks so good,’ I gush. It does. If I was here, really here, I would have such fun.

Cathy rolls her eyes. ‘I told you not to encourage him.’

I take a large, performative bite, and it burns my mouth, loosening the tears from my eyes. Cathy flings a tissue in my direction. I wish I could cry into it. Instead, I concentrate on eating as quickly as I can.

‘So, are you auditioning at the conservatorium, too, Astrid?’ asks Louise. It’s like they keep repeating my name, so they remember it. I wonder how many friends have sat at this dining table.

‘Ugh, don’t bring that up. I’m dying.’ Cathy groans, talking through a mouthful of food like her mum. She turns to me, as though she’s frustrated at having to fill this gap in my understanding of her and her life. ‘I have to pick my audition pieces, but I haven’t had time,’ she says flatly. ‘Too busy dealing with my woodworking teacher, who is a huge sexist asshole.’

I flinch at the swear word, which wedges itself into my mind. Under this shadow, everything feels stronger, harsher. I shove another dumpling in my mouth, even though it’s a bit too big, and I drool the juice everywhere.

A smile bursts onto Cathy’s face as she hands me another tissue. ‘You don’t swear, hey?’

The walls have gone up, so I don’t flinch again, but she laughs nefariously, her eyebrows raised. ‘Oh, we’re gonna have to change that,’ she says.

Her parents are smiling, too, despite themselves. I don’t know where to look.

‘You can tell her to stop, you know,’ Pete says to me. ‘She has been known to go a bit far.’

‘I’m just doing her a favour.’ An evil grin spreads across Cathy’s face. ‘Who wants to go through life without a word like c—?’

‘Catherine!’ Louise snaps, but she’s guffawing as she does it. Pete facepalms, but his shoulders are vibrating with his laughter.

I understand nothing about this family.

Dad will understand even less.

As dinner winds down, my eyes keep travelling to the kitchen clock. It’s 7:13. Everyone else is still eating and talking, but I have withdrawn into myself. There has to be a way out of here. There has to be a way to make it normal for me to grab my bag and go wait outside, or at least in the hallway. There has to be a way to protect this, to protect them. Please.

‘Thanks for dinner,’ I say, standing up and feigning a relaxed stretch. I know it looks staged and awkward. It’s just the best I can do right now. I put my plate and glass in the sink, stepping over the little droplets. All these imperfections. ‘I really enjoyed it, but I’d better be going,’ I babble. ‘Dad will be in a hurry when he arrives, and you know, I …’

They start to say things all at once, but I can’t hear any of them. I walk right past them, grab my schoolbag from the hallway. ‘Thank you!’ I call out. Then I let myself out the front door, closing it behind me. It was rude. It was wrong. But it was the only way. Breathing in the sickly-sweet night jasmine from the neighbour’s garden, I hold back the urge to throw up. Here, in the darkness, the shadow recedes. I never should have been here. I never should have brought this here.

Cathy catches up to me, opening the door, but at the same moment, our Prius appears on the street. I lock eyes with Cathy for fraction of a second, shaking my head in the kind of sombre warning that would normally only be transmitted within my family, before pushing her away with an awkward smile and bolting to the car. I only turn to wave when I’m safely inside – and she is safely kept away from us and all the things that might come next. She waves back, a little tentative, and I worry that she now knows everything, that she has seen the shadow. New tears sting my eyes.

‘Unbelievable.’ Dad’s voice beside me.

It’s only then that I can tune into him at all. Even though he was there all along.

‘They just left you on the street like you’re some kind of garbage.’

I draw in a sharp breath. I didn’t think of that. There’s always something. ‘I only just …’

‘I can’t believe your mother left you with such irresponsible people.’

‘Dad, it really wasn’t …’

He squeezes my shoulder. ‘You know your friend is welcome at our place any time. Give her a break.’

An invitation for Cathy. Only her parents are blacklisted. This is as close to a victory as I could have ever hoped for. I cough up the required syllables. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

Even though I know she must wonder what happened at dinner, and things will need to be repaired, I can’t risk another clandestine trip to Cathy’s when there’s already been two blow-ups because of my recent deceptions. The only thing that feels riskier to me is the idea of inviting her to my place, where Dad would no doubt form more judgements than I could ever protect her from. So, the next Friday, we keep the rehearsal to lunchtime. I tell her that after school I’m trapped in homework club. I can tell she doesn’t believe me, but I am trapped in homework club, hiding from all the lies. This hiding was all I could do to pretend my way through the week, after everything.

The supervising teacher today, Mr Kinley – the sandwich-eating teacher from talent quest – doesn’t seem to care what we do in homework club, as long as we don’t bother him. So, within five minutes of her (late) arrival, Leila plunges into her bag, revealing a battered box of free donuts from her shop. (And she does call it her shop – even though my internet research revealed an image of her in a cherry beret celebrating her first day as their newest casual employee.)

‘They look like they’re a pride thing, but they’re not,’ she announces to the group, sliding the box of donuts across the defaced table, where it’s met with a sea of eager hands. ‘They make these rainbow donuts, advertise them with rainbow labels, the whole works, anything but actually take any kind of stand. The head office wants all the credit for being progressive, and boy do they love to congratulate themselves, but they don’t want to do any of the work.’

That last bit somehow feels like a private aside to me, but I can’t think of anything to say.

‘Not like me,’ she proclaims to the room. ‘I’m pansexual and I’m here to work.’

The cogs turn too late. I answer, ‘Me too.’

The corner of her mouth twitches. ‘You’re pansexual or you’re here to work?’

‘What? Oh, I meant—’

‘Haha, I know what you meant.’ She pushes me playfully. ‘Seriously, take one. It would kill me if I ate them all.’

She retrieves the donut box from Mr Kinley, who has not only made no move to protest, but is also digging into one. My trembling hand hovers over the box, assessing the neat row of rainbow donuts with their illicit bright toppings and sugar dust. I take the donut in the corner, its icing smooshed into the cardboard. It’s so sweet that it erases all other thoughts. Except the one asking what being pansexual might entail.

Leila’s eyes are still fixed on me. She touches me on the arm again, gentler this time. ‘Did you buy a new bag?’

‘I’ve decided I’m keeping my bag. I like it.’ I’m surprised at myself, to be honest.

She applauds. I glance at Mr Kinley, but he’s deep in his donut and clearly does not care. It’s like it’s just me and Leila in this room.

‘Woo, you’re learning from me after all,’ Leila says through a colourful mouthful.

I blink at her.

‘Style quiz or no, you can’t let anyone else tell you who you are. You have to figure that out for yourself,’ she says, licking the icing off her fingers. I can’t stop looking at her, but she’s oblivious. ‘Haha, oh man, if I didn’t hate school, maybe I’d be a good teacher.’

‘You are a good teacher,’ I say.

She plays with her ear piercing, her eyes focused on the worn-out rows of books beyond us. ‘Just not a good learner,’ she mumbles. She pulls her glasses off and slumps down to her laptop. ‘Can’t you tell I’m procrastinating? I hate Wuthering Heights. That’s why I didn’t finish it.’

I knew she didn’t finish it. ‘I know it’s long—’

‘It’s not about that, okay?’ she snaps. ‘I hate it because Heathcliff is so toxic.’

It’s one of my favourite books of all time, but whatever. ‘Why don’t you just say that in your assignment, then?’

‘Because I don’t want to read it to find the quotes,’ she groans.

She turns her back on me then, the beginning of her English assignment appearing in a pink faux typewriter font in time with her computer’s unmuted messenger chimes.

I stuff what’s left of the donut in my mouth, but the sweetness starts to make me feel ill. When I take my fingers away, I notice the little smudges of pink, blue and red, which cling to me despite the weak efforts of a disintegrating serviette. The evidence must be all over my lips. So, I run out to the closest bathroom and wash my mouth out, until the food dye stops circling the grimy drain. I scowl across at my clean reflection, thinking of all the other students in the library, icing lining the corners of their mouths. They never seem to think about the stains they carry.

Back in the library later that afternoon, an unnameable energy thrums through me. The unknown word, pansexual, has lodged in my mind. I look over at Leila as she works, thinking of the little moments she’s revealed herself to me, the way that’s been followed over and over by these closed silences, so I have no idea where I stand. I hope/I think/I believe/I fear/I wish that the answer might exist somewhere near the definition of this word. Pansexual. Or a word like it.

Next to me, Connor slurps a sickly sports drink as he squints at his maths textbook. Then he props up his bored face on his arm, slow-blinking like he’s about to fall asleep. His scruffy hair brushes against me. I flush, veins coursing with irrational anger.

He startles awake. ‘Shit, sorry,’ he says, when he sees the look on my face.

‘It’s okay,’ I say coldly. Then I feel bad. ‘You’ve got this, Connor.’ I manage what I hope is an encouraging smile, and to my surprise, a red tinge lights up his neck and ears.

From across the room, Leila looks over her laptop, regarding us one at a time. Something in her gaze traps me where I am. She stands up and walks away. My breath catches.

An idea forms in my mind. I don’t let it fully turn into words. I just let myself stay and look, answering a question I have not asked myself yet. Connor has buried his face in a book. His lips look soft, and there’s that tiny puffy bit of hair on his chin, the suggestion of a future beard or goatee. If I kissed him, that would brush up against my face. I feel nothing. I feel less than nothing.

This was not the right idea. I don’t know if this means anything anyway. Connor meets my eyes before I look away, and in his confused expression, I see all my performing reflected back at me plainly, and am ashamed.

Leila has disappeared into the stacks, and, as though my body has been taken from me entirely, I follow her. She startles when I appear, dropping her phone onto the dingy carpet between us. The little social media snippets keep scrolling without her input, transmitting ghostly suggestions of kittens and roller skates to the ceiling. Leila kicks her phone back towards her, avoiding even the slightest movement towards me.

‘What’s happening, homeschool girl?’ she asks, wiping her phone screen on her skirt.

I didn’t think this far. I didn’t think at all.

Blue icing stains the side of her lips. If I kissed her …

I tear my eyes away from her, gazing instead through the window at the sporty types running laps of the oval. ‘Um, well, let me know if you want another tutoring session.’

‘You too.’ Without looking, she grabs a book from the shelf and disappears, leaving me in this narrow space, surrounded by words.

After dinner that night, Mum’s stuffing clothes into the washing machine, one hand still on the mop. She squashes the clothes in without turning around, and I loiter behind her. In so many of my memories, she doesn’t quite take form, because she’s always blurred in motion. I make myself still so that I can remember her this time, even as the dampness of the floor soaks into my socks and I realise that there’s no room for me to ask this unformed question, and that she might not know how to help me anyway. She’s only ever been with Dad.

Much later on, concealed in the study nook, I turn to the internet. My hands hover over the keyboard. I’m here for the word pansexual. I want to know this word. I want to know Leila. I want to name these feelings. If I kissed her …

But before I know it, I’m screaming that other, stronger, unnameable feeling out into the browser:

Why am I so afraid of ending up like my parents?

Why am I scared that I’m falling in love?

What if I don’t know how to love at all?

I wipe the tears off the keyboard as my eyes dart from result to result.

you already know your parents’ flaws, so you know better …

love makes you vulnerable …

trauma can be the cause …

you might have been physically or emotionally abused …

Night panics aren’t new to me, but this is the worst one yet. Every time I close my eyes, images crowd in from the news – murders of women and families who were physically or emotionally abused, read out with the cold professionalism of news announcers. It’s all frightening enough to tear the walls down, no matter how hard I try to keep them up.

I wrap myself in my blanket. I remind myself that I know about these crimes because of Dad. Dad is the one who reads the news and declares that the world is a messed-up place, and that it’s his mission to keep our home safe. He disdains people who beat their kids. It’s not fair to him to think this. It’s not fair to blame him for everything. None of this is fair.

But I am haunted by these words – the answers to the last question I asked the search engine – the frightened little fragment – signs of emotional abuse.

isolation – shame – guilt – fear – control

Several sleepless hours later, I slide to the end of the bed, peeling back the curtain just enough to stare up at the stars outside. Mum and Dad named me for these stars, transmitting their messages from the past, their astral light meeting us only years or millennia later. Maybe some of them aren’t even there anymore. But I will always be here.

theres a whole world and future out there

Nick’s words haunt me again, coming from a world that might exist for him, but will never exist for me: a place where impossible things happen. My stomach twinges, and I throw open my laptop, deleting his email for good. This is where it started – all these feelings that have no place here in the permanent stillness of this big, near-empty house. I open my browser history and check again and again that it’s cleaned of tonight’s research.

she doesnt want to tell u yet but id wanna kno if i were u

Bundling my knees up to my chest, I think of Mum. I think of her secrets: her nonbiodegradable makeup bag, her work phone hidden in the garden shed …

The garden shed.

More words from my research return to me unbidden. If you are experiencing domestic violence, whether or not you’re considering leaving the relationship, it’s important to have a safety plan […] Have an emergency bag packed with all the essentials.

If she has one, if she knows …

Barely able to breathe, I tiptoe through the house, dodging the vigilant red eyes of the security system. With sweaty hands, I detach the front door key from its place on the keyring by the door. It comes free with a tiny metallic click. I freeze, waiting. When the silence persists, I turn the lock until it gives, twisting the door handle in twenty tiny steps.

Frigid dew seeps through my socks as I stumble through the darkened yard, sliding into the garden shed. I dislodge the slats in the roof, where I know Mum has hidden her work phone, here where Dad will never look. I press the torch button, momentarily dazzled by its clinical light. Then my hand rests against an unfamiliar linen mass. I pull it down.

It’s a bag, stuffed full of papers, medications, the essentials. An emergency bag.

I grab Mum’s work phone without thinking, scrolling for a number I know I’ll find.

Nick answers on the third ring.

‘Mum?’ His voice is husky, dazed. Different. I try to picture this person who disappeared from my life eighteen months ago. ‘Mum?’ he says again to the silence down the phone line. ‘Did something happen?’

I force myself to break the silence between us. ‘Why did you send me that email?’ I whisper. Nick and I must have exchanged millions of words in our lifetimes. In fact, he might be the person I’ve spoken to the most in my whole life, but it’s harder to ask this one question than I thought it ever could be. The phone connection sits silent until I repeat, ‘Why, Nick?’

‘Astrid?’ It’s so strange to hear him at all, let alone saying my name. Flickers of old memories keep kindling in my mind, but I can’t hold onto any of them. They disappear too far into that silence. That silence that he chose eighteen months ago when he left us here. ‘Astrid?’ he says again, with a note of fear that comes directly from those shared memories – the details might be obscured in this dark shed, but the feelings are as raw as yesterday. ‘Talk to me! What’s going on?’

My legs are shaking from this weird position crammed against the empty flowerpots. ‘Now you want to talk to me.’ My own acid tone is way too familiar in my ears. The way we used to talk to each other in those last few years. When we talked.

‘I’ve been trying to talk to you ever since I left.’ His words are interrupted by the periodic steaming of a coffee machine. He was always awake at night, but he never used to drink coffee. I wonder what else has changed. ‘Mum still hasn’t spoken with you?’

‘No.’ It’s hard to breathe in this airless shed. ‘I don’t even know what you mean, because no one tells me anything.’

There’s a deep breath down the phone line. I think of him with all his oxygen and space. ‘It’s abuse, Astrid.’ That word again. ‘That’s why she’s going to leave. He might not have ever hit you, but the cycle’s the same. There’s the honeymoon, when everything’s super. Then it gets edgy, and you know things are going to explode. And then he buys you stuff to patch it up, like your music software and shit. That’s the cycle—’

‘You’re talking too fast.’

He breathes again, more of that oxygen. I can hear the space around him. All that room he must have, now that he isn’t here. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, each word continuing to spill into the next. ‘It’s just, this is important. This is the way you get free of it all. You have to know what you’re dealing with first, before anything else. But that doesn’t make it easy. I felt like absolute shit the first time I heard that. But it also gave me the key I needed to get out. I wanted to be that person for you. To let you know what you’re actually dealing with.’

‘Well, you’re not.’

‘What?’

I crunch myself up on the floor next to Mum’s overnight bag. ‘You’re not the first. I had to figure this out by myself. Because you’re not here.’ I hold my breath until the tears go away.

‘I’m here,’ he says. ‘You just never – Astrid, I understand why you’re angry at me. I didn’t want to leave you behind, and I always knew it was only temporary, but I know it must have been hard for you to understand, especially because we couldn’t really talk because of how it happened.’

‘I’m not going to absolve you.’

‘I’m not trying to ask you to.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I just want to tell you that things are going to change when you leave.’

My fist tightens around Mum’s overnight bag, and I shove it back into its hiding place. ‘That’s not up to me.’

All I can do is wait for the sunrise. I wrap myself up in my blanket and cradle my laptop. Screaming through my headphones, a discordant chorus of confusion loops until I can no longer hear any of the words trapped in my mind that chased away any possibility of sleep. I’m afraid of everything Nick told me. I’m afraid Mum will take that bag and leave me here. I’m afraid of what’s building inside me. But it’s building anyway.

On Monday at morning tea time, I’m with Cathy on the floor of a tiny rehearsal room, her laptop open to her shortlist of university audition pieces. She’s warming her hands on a cup of instant mac and cheese, thanks to some hot water and cutlery procured (probably illicitly) from somewhere in this school building. I’m just trying to keep my eyes open while I finish adding the automation to our track.

‘I hate them all,’ Cathy says through a goopy mouthful, scowling at her shortlist. ‘If I feed you, will you distract me?’

‘Sounds like a fair trade.’ But I have no idea what to say. I am no longer the version of me she knows. I am no longer familiar to myself, either. I am just so grateful that she has picked this all up where we left off. Even after I left her waving, in confusion, inside that warm house that night. Even after everything that’s happened since, which I fear she can somehow detect in my silences.

She pushes the half-finished cup and the mystery fork in my direction. Mouth watering, I surreptitiously pick off the dried food that’s still stuck to one prong. The creamy synthetic taste is so good, even as it coats my mouth with all these forbidden additives, like chicken salt and MSG. I owe Cathy so much, even for all these little joys. I wish I could reach out to her now. I wish it wasn’t distance that is keeping our friendship alive.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘you owe me a distraction now.’

She’s so restless, so uneasy about her future. I wish I could help her, but my mind, like my own future, feels so blank. Nothing can distract me from that.

‘What’s going on with you?’ She sits up and turns that intense gaze on me. ‘I’ve barely seen you for weeks. And you look awful today!’

I wince.

‘You were weird at dinner,’ she says. ‘Is it your parents again? It was like you didn’t want me to meet them.’

‘It wasn’t like that …’ It was too much to expect her to say nothing about all this, but I still have no idea what to say back. I can’t tell the truth, but I’m tired of lying.

‘To be honest, my mum was a bit worried about you.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I mumble. ‘Honestly, I just … I don’t want to talk at all.’

‘Fine.’ But it’s clearly not fine. Her eyes are watery. She crosses her arms against her thin school jacket and pulls her legs towards her like someone much younger. She looks like she’s protecting herself. I wish she could know I’m protecting her too.

I push the pasta away from me, no longer able to stomach it.

‘I’m so confused,’ she bursts out. ‘Are we friends or not?’

‘What do you mean? Of course we’re friends—’

‘Then why do you never invite me to your place?’

‘It’s my—’

‘Your parents,’ she says. ‘I won’t be weird and invite myself, don’t worry. Anyway, I have to focus.’

She drags her headphones out of her bag, freezing me out with tinny down-tempo melodies. Still on the floor beside her – afraid to move and afraid to stay – the only thing I can do is shrink, just like I did with Carla. I put up my walls and breathe. This hurting feeling – like everything else in my world – is temporary. I’m afraid this friendship is too.

At lunchtime, I wander the far blocks of the schoolyard as I did on that very first day, unable to face anyone, afraid to see myself reflected in the hurting eyes of my friend. With that featureless brick wall to support me, I sink down into my unnameable feelings and the dying grass. I should have realised that my friendship with Cathy would have an expiration date. Normal friends visit one another’s houses. When that happens – if that happens – any illusion she has about me will evaporate. I can’t hurt someone I care about – at least not more than I’ve done already. But either path leads to hurt. She just doesn’t know, can’t understand, growing up as she has in that house full of love and laughter. All I can do is invite her and let her make up her own mind. I lie flat on the ground, immobilised.

What happens next isn’t up to me.

On the afternoon before the talent quest qualifier, as my first term in high school nears its end, Cathy stands with me on the street after school, watching the cars go past. I fill her in with a carefully worded, entirely misleading explanation of my family (which I might have been rehearsing all day). She chews through another piece of pink bubblegum, wrapping it around her tongue and popping it casually. Even when I beg her to pretend that we only signed up for talent quest a few weeks ago, she still stays with me. She doesn’t bring up our fight … if that’s what it was. She doesn’t change her mind about visiting, either, even though I kind of wish she would.

‘So, you’re telling me that your parents are kind of hippie types, but they’re anal about the cleaning, and your whereabouts, and swearing?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’m curious. How does someone love the environment and use antibacterial cleaners for minor spills?’

I’ve never put my family’s contradictions into words. I choose them now, dodging the ones I’d rather not say. ‘Ummm … my dad thinks that the family unit can be a collective that threatens late capitalism, so our institutions put all their effort into trying to break families apart, distracting them with phones and intense careers and stuff so no one really talks to each other anymore. So, even though it looks way conventional from the outside, he kind of sees living in a really clean home in suburbia with his wife and kids – kid – as a new kind of protest.’ Yikes, that was a speech.

She spits the gum out, and I’m hyper-aware that it’s still in her hand. ‘Whoah.’

‘What do you mean, whoah?’

‘I mean, like, a genuine whoah.’ She doesn’t elaborate, but she takes a tissue out of her bag, wrapping the gum in it before sticking it in her pocket. It’s a Cathy kind of effort, and I appreciate it, even though whoever does her laundry later won’t. ‘And what does your mum think?’

‘What?’

‘You said your dad thinks families are a tool against the capitalist machine. What does your mum think?’

‘Oh, she agrees.’

Cathy sits in the back of the car, sharing her earbuds, while Mum self-consciously asks about what subjects she’s taking at school and how her singing (in the most general sense imaginable) is going. Nothing feels real anymore. Neither my mum nor my friend seem to notice my silence.

When we get home, Cathy wanders down the hallway, smiling at Mum and complimenting her on how neat everything is. She peers at the family photos, pointing me out in each one and calling me a cute, round pumpkin. She jokes about the way she kills house plants, prodding the pots closest to her. I drift behind her, disoriented, as she walks right up to Dad and introduces herself, hands behind her back like a primary school student giving a presentation. She drops the fictional abridged timeline of the talent quest within the first sixty seconds, and my heart leaps to my mouth at this amateurish execution. But Dad – Dad is smiling at her, genuinely, with his eyes. He calls her the famous Cathy, and I can tell she likes this despite herself, her polite smile broadening into a grin that mirrors his. Within two minutes, she’s asking about his philosophy and he’s inviting us all to the kitchen for tea and Mum’s squeezing my shoulder and pushing me subtly forward into this situation that I’ve created.

Mum makes us tacos for dinner – from scratch, of course – and asks Cathy repeatedly if she eats each ingredient, even though she assures Mum that she’s never met a food she didn’t like. The flurry of activity from the kitchen makes me very aware that Mum’s worried about how tonight will go, and this worry jumps from her to me. I try to get up to help her with the cooking, but she refuses so strongly that I’m left frozen at the dining table.

Dad and Cathy join us at the table then. Cathy sits tall, and I recognise the studied posture from her audition performance. Maybe, on some unconscious level, she knows she’s being watched. Maybe she has a stage persona more than she realises. I drag my elbows off the table and try to pull my eyes away from the middle distance – the deck outside with the inbuilt barbecue that we haven’t used for at least three years, but that we clean every week.

‘So, you’ve been in the musical every year?’ Dad asks, continuing a conversation with Cathy that I was not part of.

She nods modestly, and I know this is a studied modesty. I’ve seen how she is at home.

‘You girls and your music give me hope,’ Dad proclaims. ‘I really hope it’s something you carry for life. We need more people out there expressing themselves, and less people making their money from exploiting others.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Mum retreat into the pantry. This is a dangerous topic if she doesn’t make herself scarce. In Dad’s world, there is only good and evil. It goes without saying which side of the dichotomy lawyers (aspiring and otherwise) fall into.

I reach for a distraction. ‘You know,’ I say to Cathy. ‘Dad used to be in a band.’

‘What? That’s so cool.’

Mum emerges from the pantry to turn on all the lights and fill the table up with all the salads and tortillas and salsas.

‘Just a cover band,’ Dad says. ‘Never could get anything else off the ground. Anyway, you should tell me more about what you’re working on. This one,’ he rubs my arm affectionately, ‘this one hasn’t told me anything!’

Cathy presses her lips together, and I can feel the cogs turning in her mind. ‘I’m a professional, Cliff. You’ll have to buy your ticket if you wanna hear it.’

Dad laughs, maybe a little too loudly. ‘This is a good one,’ he says to me. ‘She knows what’s what.’

Cathy practically glows from the compliment, relaxing enough to talk with her mouth full. From across the table, I can’t stop her. ‘Astrid told me about how you guys are low-waste and low bull … crap.’

At this near miss, Cathy’s eyes dart in my direction, but I lower my gaze to the tomatoes on my plate, chopped in perfect squares. Looking at these tiny bits of her labour, I wonder what Mum thinks about all this, about everything.

‘Hope you don’t think we’re bizarre.’ But Dad’s smiling. Even though his eyes follow her every move, he’s not challenging Cathy. She’s gotten away with two transgressions in a row.

‘Are you serious?’ she says, her pitch and volume dangerously above acceptable levels. ‘That’s not weird. The rest of the world is! I’ve always felt like there’s something wrong, you know, like school is this treadmill where you’re supposed to always be running, but also not going anywhere they don’t want you to.’

The moment her monologue finishes, Cathy’s phone pings in her pocket. She takes it out, scowls at the message, then throws it across the table. Mum and I jump in sync. ‘Ugh, maybe I should break up with my phone like you guys.’

Four transgressions. Or maybe five.

‘I wish I’d done all this at your age,’ Dad says. I can’t believe he’s still just going along with all this. ‘Stay in school, though. And don’t work in a record store.’

Cathy rolls her eyes and groans at Dad with the same ease I saw with her own parents. That studied posture, those careful words – she’s discarded them all.

An irrational wave of anger washes over me. I throw salsa in my mouth, so I don’t do something I’ll regret. This is going so much better than I ever could have expected, and I hate it. It takes all my effort not to match Cathy’s pitch and volume and unleash the consequences, just to prove that everything’s going to go wrong.

It’s the only thing that would make me feel right again.

We sit on the spare mattress on the floor of my room. Mum’s made it up, and it has my old sheet on it, from when I was younger. I secretly miss the worn-out feeling of the washed cotton with its faded flowers, so I keep running my hands along it as we listen to the soft electronica playlist Cathy is making. It reminds me of times long ago, when Carla would be here, and we would pretend we could tell each other’s future, and that our friendship was always in it.

‘You’ve got a nice place,’ Cathy says, stretching out in her flannel pyjamas, her phone positioned above her face. ‘And your folks seem fine.’

I sigh, reaching for another half-lie. ‘It gets tiring checking the ingredients list of every snack you wanna eat. Trust me.’

‘Fair, I guess.’

The conversation ebbs. This new silence between us frightens me. Now that we have survived the night, my new worry is that something was damaged by keeping her away from here. The two halves of my life threaten to split me open.

‘You know,’ she says then. ‘My parents are also weirdly invested in our friendship.’

‘What? Why?’

‘According to them, this is the most I’ve socialised since Matt went overseas,’ she says with an unconvincing shrug. ‘He was kind of my main friend there for a while, if we’re being honest.’

‘What about Priya and Lily?’ I ask.

‘I guess I was kind of busy with all my commitments for a while. We didn’t really see much of each other for a few years. Now, you know, they kind of have their own things going on.’ She looks small in my childhood bedspread, and my heart feels heavy with all the ways I’ve locked her out.

‘I can’t even tell,’ I say, hopelessly.

‘So, your stage persona,’ she says, changing the subject with a forcefulness I recognise. ‘Any thoughts? This is basically your last chance!’

‘My mind is completely blank,’ I reply. ‘How did you get this confident?’

Cathy laughs. ‘I’m not! I’ve just been faking a lot longer than you.’

‘How much longer?’

‘My mum runs a dance studio,’ she says. ‘She knows people, and when I was little, I really wanted to be on TV. So, she got me into a few back-to-school commercials.’

‘Wow, really?’

‘It’s not as glamorous as it sounds.’ She covers her face with her hands, in what I think is the first shy gesture I’ve seen her make. ‘Please promise you’ll never look it up.’

‘Promise.’ That’s going to take some restraint.

‘You know, back then, the other kids gave me a lot of shit … Oh, sorry!’ She giggles, but then stops and looks serious. ‘Is it just your parents, or does swearing actually offend you?’

I bury my face in the pillow. ‘Ugh, no. I am just … inexperienced.’

‘Maybe your stage persona can swear like a sailor. Then it’s not really you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I have an idea.’ Even though she’s facing the other way, I can hear the grin in her words.

‘What?’ I try to sound like I’m not terrified about this.

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ she says.

‘Argh, that’s so mean!’

‘Goodnight!’

Cathy falls asleep quickly, the hushed sounds of The XX still repeating themselves. I stay awake in a puddle of nerves. With everything else that’s been happening, and how alone I’ve felt, it hasn’t felt real that, within twenty-four hours, I will be on that stage.

isolation –

When the album loops back for the second time, I hear my parents re-emerge from the bedroom. I tense up as Dad pulls a packet out of the bin and, with a raised voice, announces that he knew Mum bought bleached flour for making the tortillas, and she may as well have fed us all rat poison. She cries, then, and Dad tells Mum repeatedly that no one outside this house is this disorganised, that she needs psychiatric help.

shame –

I freeze until I catch the sound of Cathy’s even breathing again, thanking everything in the world for the way the music seems to cancel out all the other sounds for her, so that it is only me listening as Dad throws the remaining tortillas into the bin and bangs the front door shut. Because I asked for this.

guilt –

For a second, I think, maybe this is it. Maybe Mum will leave, too, without me.

fear –

But then I hear her footsteps, alone, padding back to her bedroom.

– control

A soft hand touches my arm. I jolt awake and upright, coming face to face with Cathy, still in her pyjamas but looking unfairly fresh-faced.

‘Hey,’ she whispers with a mischievous grin. ‘Morning!’

I blink at her, head spinning from sitting up too fast. The little desk clock across the room comes into view. It’s before 6. Even Mum wouldn’t be awake yet. This is not how I planned to start this important day.

‘Today’s the day!’ She still keeps her voice down, at least.

‘Barely,’ I groan. I roll to the edge of my bed until I plummet off, landing on my butt on the carpet so that I’ll wake up properly. ‘Why are you awake?’

‘We still have work to do. On your confidence, remember?’ she says, pulling back the curtains when I still don’t respond. The sun is struggling over the horizon, casting long shadows over the house and into the room. ‘So, first—’

‘Shh!’ I hiss.

‘Shit, sorry,’ she whispers. ‘First, I wanna say I would never force you to do something, okay?’ She’s still grinning, making this sentence extra ominous.

All I can do is nod. Some might say I was forced to nod.

‘Okay, so I had the very best idea to help you prepare for tonight,’ she says. ‘All you have to do is fake it ’til you make it.’

‘Fake what?’

‘Here’s the deal.’ She plonks onto the floor beside me. ‘I’m going to write some words in my notebook here. I’m gonna whisper them to you, and if you choose, you can repeat them.’

‘I don’t get it.’

She stifles a laugh, whispering in my ear, ‘I’m saying I’m gonna teach you how to swear.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Your parents aren’t gonna hear you.’

It’s not that, or not only that. But I have no idea how to say this to her.

‘Like I said,’ she whispers, opening her English notebook to a crisp new page. ‘No pressure. I’m just gonna sit here and write some words. Maybe you’ll read them. Maybe you’ll scoot to the other side of the room so you can’t hear me, and you’ll pop your headphones on and practise your set for tonight. I’m not making you do anything. What I am doing is giving you a chance to practise being someone else, doing something you’d normally never do. You know, like a stage persona.’

Weighted down, I lie flat on the carpet. I will myself back into bed.

I hear the decisive strokes of her marker pen. Then the word is thrust into my face. From next to me, I feel her cross her legs like a yogi and, almost silently, she mouths, ‘Shit shit shit …’

These tiny words pinch my psyche, awakening something I’d rather not feel. I sit up, folding my legs in close to me. It’s all so unsafe.

Cathy comes back into focus. From a distance, she’d look so serious, every inch of her focused on the repetition of this syllable like it’s a mantra. Despite myself, a snort of laughter escapes me.

‘Excuse me, young lady, I believe you are not regarding the exercise with the appropriate amount of diligence,’ she whispers, throwing me the notebook, a smile spreading across her face. She clears her throat dramatically. ‘Sshhhhhhhh … iiiiiiiii … t!’

The word distorts on her smiling lips. The sounds elongate and run into each other until they no longer hold the sharp weight of the memories I’ve been trying to avoid, missiles hurled across the hallways of my house in the name of long-forgotten things, like bleached flour and other …

‘Sh i t.’ I mouth each sound, one by one. Each phoneme is senseless on its own. Harmless.

Cathy’s lips twitch, but she seizes back the notebook and scrawls the next word. In just a few minutes, we’re whispering profanities to each other with the faux seriousness of a morning meditation. Torn pages are scattered around my room, each screaming out a word that, in any other context, would bring back things I don’t want to remember. Now, instead, I will always have this.

That’s when I see Dad, so silent that I missed his footsteps. From the pristine lawn, he wanders over towards the window, his body oriented away from the scene inside the room, but I know better. I watch his eyes. I see them fall on the words, one at a time, and then on my giggling friend, and then on me. Shadows fall in those familiar places under his eyes. He keeps walking, but from this one look, I know he’s seen everything.

With Cathy waiting in the car, Dad traps Mum and me in the hallway and pours all those words back out at Mum, hitting her with all their sharp edges. I am pinned by them, back against the wall. He disparages Mum’s carelessness, the sight of me standing alone in the dark on the porch of Cathy’s house, the society that creates these characters of the lying, self-centred, manipulative teenager; the neglectful workaholic mother; and lazy, detached father. All because of me. I am frozen, silent. And then Mum bargains for me: first for the talent quest qualifier tonight, then for the finals, if I were to get into them. She’s signed up with Cathy, Mum says. It’s all my fault and it would be wrong for her to miss out. Unbelievable, Dad says. Fine. I’ll watch over her. You couldn’t run a pie stall. Of course I wouldn’t let my daughter sacrifice her brilliant work because you let this happen.

The real reason, of course, is the signed permission slip. If he withdrew it now, someone might ask a question. Someone might wonder whether this house on number nineteen is as perfect as it looks.

So, he lets this – and only this – happen. I hate myself for the relief I feel.

There is only time for one more rehearsal. At lunch, Cathy and Takeshi engage in a tense negotiation over the only free music room until Takeshi reluctantly leaves it to us when Cathy swears on her life to repay him with two rehearsals later. We’d better make it count, I guess.

‘Are you sure that the purple’s out?’ Cathy asks, plonking down next to me on the piano chair and revealing the illicit hairspray cans in her schoolbag.

I nod. ‘I’m telling you; it was a major rash.’

‘You’re serious?’ she asks. ‘I didn’t even know it was possible to be allergic to hairspray.’

‘Well, it is.’

I fix my eyes on the empty sheet music stand in front of me, thinking of the predetermined sequence that we will follow tonight. I will push the buttons on my keyboard, triggering each section of the track. Everyone will hear these notes that say so much about this friendship, and then the song will fade into silence. I will only press twelve buttons in the entire performance. Just yesterday, this fixed sequence would be a comfort to me, but now everything just feels so narrow, so predetermined.

It was all a mistake.

Cathy gets up and hovers around me and my laptop. ‘Come on, let’s do a run-through.’

We stay in the silence for much too long.

‘Just press the key,’ she says, leaning over me like she might press it herself. She could. It’s only a key.

My fingers still won’t cooperate.

Cathy squeezes back beside me then, putting her arm around me. ‘Would you tell me if there’s something wrong?’

‘I’ve just never done this before.’ I’m unable to focus on anything except her warm, steady hand. It’s taking all the strength of my walls not to cry, thinking of how much I’ll miss this closeness, of how much I wish I could tell her what’s really happening, what I’m trying to protect her from.

‘I’ve never done this before either, you know. In case you haven’t noticed, show tunes are my signature move.’ She smiles then, a flicker of mischief flashing in her eyes. ‘Get there early and say those mantras I taught you.’

Never again.

‘Aww, don’t be scared,’ she says, grasping me harder, so I have to look into her eyes.

‘Remember what I told you,’ she says. ‘Fake it ’til you make it.’

But I am still so scared. In just a few hours, unless we somehow win a place in the finals, this song – the last thing that brought us together – will be gone, and our friendship will have nowhere left to live.

All because I didn’t stay quiet.

A wintery stillness descends on the evening of the talent quest qualifier. All the other contestants will be at home, preparing their costumes and their performances. But here, at the back of the school theatre, I’ve spread out with my homework in the semi-darkness, trying to pass the time with maths equations.

Going home felt like the wrong move on such a high-stakes evening, so I told my parents that participants were instructed to stay at school. After everything that’s just happened, that was the right move. But being here again is also more difficult than I thought.

The stage, with its ageing red curtains, casts an imposing presence. The footsteps of the gaunt woman in her dressing gown still echo here. I’m not sure I can go up there at all.

‘Is that you, Astrid?’

I jump a mile before registering Ms Torres’ voice.

‘A helper would be excellent,’ she says.

I throw my homework back into my bag, bending the exercise books in my rush. In amongst all my lies, I almost forgot that I am in her tech crew. I almost forgot that I actually exist.

Ms Torres leads me to the stage, and I stand awkwardly beside her.

‘Thank you, Astrid. Now, see that light?’ she says, gesturing at a cheap little lamp. ‘If you’re back here, never turn that off.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s called a ghost light. It’s a theatre superstition that is exactly what it sounds like. But really, I think it’s just a good health and safety thing.’

She doesn’t give me any time to respond, retreating to the back of the room. ‘All right, stand behind that mic for a minute, will you?’

I stand there, adrift among the tables in the middle of the stage. The spotlights turn on and off. I walk in and out of the light. My footfalls are uneven and heavy on the painted black floor, interrupting the ghostly rhythm in my mind.

‘Okay, can you talk into the mic for me?’ Ms Torres yells down at me.

I look out at all the chairs and my mind empties of all things. Shit, shit, shit.

‘Anything will do. You could tell me what you had for breakfast.’

‘Ummm …’ My small voice fills the room. Something flares inside when the echo reaches me. ‘I hate eating granola for breakfast.’

‘More.’

‘I also hate washing up the dishes before school.’

‘Same,’ she yells out.

‘If I could choose anything, I’d have pancakes. I’d drown them in maple syrup, too, and I’d eat them with canned fruit, not fresh fruit, because I don’t even care—’

‘Nice, but can you move to the other mic now?’

‘I think I prefer this part,’ I confide into the left-hand microphone, as it carries my words out into the world. ‘I mean, what we’re doing now.’

‘Me too,’ Ms Torres smiles.

‘I didn’t realise it was a thing before I came here.’

‘More.’

‘Whenever I went to something, I was always too busy watching the performance to notice how it was put together.’

‘Always been glad it’s a thing. And we’re done.’

I don’t know what to do next, so I sit on one of the empty piano chairs, thinking about what it would be like to stand at that sound desk, wrapped in darkness, but shaping all the sound waves around you.

It’s enough to make me almost forget what’s about to happen.

And then, the students filter in, one by one, until a pink-and-purple Cathy sweeps me up in a hug and asks me why I’m not dressed yet.

When we are called backstage, Cathy grabs my hand, and I can’t tell whose is sweatier, but we are both gross and nervous together, and somehow even giggling a little, as we half-walk, half-run in through the stage door, in our pink and purple dresses. Despite everything, I’m caught up in the thrill, until we reach the darkened backstage, where a harried music teacher hushes us, checks us off his list and leaves us there, alone.

I can’t shake the thought that I’m hiding here with Cathy, keeping her away from the realities on the other side of the curtain.

Cathy drags me to the wings. From the stage, a Shakespearean-style medieval ballad echoes over an audience that shifts audibly in their seats. The girl in the middle of the stage, who’s half-singing in clumsy iambic pentameter, is small out there by herself, casting a long shadow that almost reaches us, a ghostly figure on the horizon. The lights smell metallic from here and a strange feeling surges from the pit of my stomach to the ends of my feet. There’s a sour taste in my mouth, and when I lick my lips, they go dry. I wish I’d been able to accept the makeup that Cathy earnestly offered me an hour ago, so I’d have something to hide behind. My hand tightens around Cathy’s and hers tightens back.

But now the girl in the Hamlet costume brushes past us and we have no choice but to go through with this. Cathy drops my hand and strides ahead of me and out into the light where I can no longer see her, and there are a few cheers of recognition from those in the audience who are no doubt used to seeing her at these things. Only in the wake of this warmth do I enter, my footsteps silenced by the atmosphere as I force my wobbling legs to take me to the table with my laptop set up on it. I look up and see my parents’ faces. Like the disembodied voice I heard on this same stage, they might not be real – the audience has disappeared into the light – but they’re there, still.

A reflexive smile twists my face.

I reach for my laptop, waking it up. The crowd hushes. My finger hovers over the keyboard. The light gets even brighter, swallowing up the shapes of the faces in the crowd. I imagine Ms Torres has done this for me, and although it’s a ridiculous idea, it helps get me through that tiny finger movement that starts the first kick drum pattern, my hands shaking hard as I focus on counting each measure, trying not to think about how even the slightest false move will bring everything crashing down around us.

Cathy’s voice soars into the space we’ve created for her, her hips swaying, her hands caressing the microphone. I don’t know how I ever met someone like her. She’s a star. When I step away tomorrow, the crowd will still cheer for her.

I lose count.

The bars extend out too far, breaking the symmetry we’d so carefully planned. I gasp, drowned out by my music, the pulse eluding me for another critical second.

I can’t even remember whether this loop goes for four or eight bars. If I change too soon, everyone will hear the mistake. But if I hold too long, the song will drag. It’s all so frail, so unsteady. But Cathy stays there with me, her voice smooth and even, repeating her melody like this was all part of the plan.

I find the rhythm again, pushing the song forward, building towards the conclusion that I cannot postpone.

This is the end, then.

My head is nodding. My hips are swaying. I even punch the air like a DJ in a club (and then regret that). All these movements – they are not my own.

This is so familiar …

I am always performing.

The last note hovers in the air, a high A note that I have programmed with a neat little envelope that bends the sound, pushing the waveform down into silence. If I do nothing, that’s what will happen.

But something takes over, even as Cathy relaxes behind the microphone, readying herself for the applause, and before I know what I am doing, I am holding down that same note, a new and live version, unplanned / untimed / unrehearsed, and I am twisting it and distorting it, until it wavers like me, and without words it tells everyone how formless I feel under all these lies and how tired I am of staying silent, and I’m screaming this note at all the people I’ve stayed silent for – at Mum, at Dad, at Nick for all their expectations, at Cathy for making me expose this part of myself to the world – and the applause is already growing over it and drowning it out, and maybe no one out there knows that this wasn’t part of the plan or that it’s happening at all, but for that tiny moment, I take hold and I do not have to be quiet for anyone.

And then it’s over.

‘We killed it.’

Cathy dances around me on the pavement outside the theatre, almost tripping over in her high-heeled shoes. She pauses for a second, takes them off, and throws them aside, pulling me into her dance. I look down at my tightly laced sneakers and her bare feet covered in swirling dust. We’re walking such different paths.

Then we find ourselves crammed into a special performers’ section of the theatre audience, thankfully removed from parents. When the judges head out to the staffroom for deliberation, Cathy turns to me and whispers, ‘Who do you have your money on?’

Still in her old-Hollywood costume, Priya kicks Cathy’s seat from behind. ‘You know you’ve got it,’ she says, with definite bitterness. She kicks my chair for good measure, and then I have a silly grin on my face because they included me in their rivalry.

But something inside is still wavering along with that high A note. My eyes keep crossing the room to where my parents must be sitting. I can never be far from home.

One by one, the talent quest’s musical finalists are called: a rap duo, Takeshi and Sergio’s funk band, Priya. She squeaks as she rises and thunders down to the stage. I smile for her, not allowing myself to imagine there’s any chance that we’ll be next.

Cathy grabs my hand, and I squeeze hers right back. If these are our last moments of friendship, I’ll enjoy them.

Next is the Shakespeare girl. I’m fairly certain I hear the precise sounds of Ms Torres celebrating, but almost no one else seems to react. Or, maybe, the girl is like me, and is new, and less popular, and maybe a little odd. She stands a little to the side of the other finalists, who are all making supportive gestures, but the gap looks like a vast gulf that she could never traverse. I applaud her louder and louder, until Cathy looks at me funny, as though I’m being unfairly sarcastic. It’s too much to explain, so I shrug at her.

Then they call our names.

Cathy has to pry me out of my seat before we rush down the stairs – and she’s still barefoot but it’s too late for us to stop now – and we burst out the doors and around backstage, and then we are through the curtains and back out into the light. This light is so hot and powerful that my eyes water, and I know it’s exposing this moment, this moment when I realise I have another few months ahead of me with Cathy.

My heart beats faster and faster as the other finalists crowd around us, and Cathy shows off her bare feet to a laughing audience in an impromptu tap-dance, and she’s swept up in all the friends and acquaintances, creating a space around me that grows … and then shrinks as the rap guys pull me into their midst, and if you looked from a distance, you couldn’t even tell which one is me, and everyone cheers for the last bunch of finalists, and the one pop song that the school has approved for use rises behind us and the fluorescent lights switch on, releasing us all into the night, and I am just one of the crowd.

But I know, somewhere in that crowd, my parents still wear their matching grins, their clapping hands raised in the theatrical lights long after the other spectators trickle into the chilly night.

The show must go on.

As we burst out into the night air, someone starts singing the pop song that was just playing. Someone else joins in, and then another, and another, and then Cathy, and then me, even though I can’t hold a tune. Plenty of other people can’t either, and it averages out into the right place. The air vibrates with happiness, and here are Cathy and me, right in the middle of it, jumping up and down, still together.

The moment ends with whooping and laughter, and the participants all break into their little groups with partners and friends, and the chatter rises again. The noise and heat warm me, but I am not blushing. Because I belong here – at least for a little while longer.

Performing has given this to me.

My parents appear in a corner of the crowd of teenagers. Both of them have dressed up: Dad with his one pair of pants that aren’t jeans and Mum with her rose gold necklace that mainly comes out on anniversaries. Their hair is long, with fly-aways that catch the light, and their clothing is loose in the breeze. From this blurry distance, they look like those relaxed parents that call their kids free-range.

Cathy waves at them like they’re old friends, and they both wave back like nothing happened. My mind shuts down, plunging into a whirlpool of the words that surrounded us this morning, terrified that this is all about to catch up with me all over again. I stand there frozen as they approach us, the celebratory sounds of my peers muted in my ringing ears.

With pursed lips, Mum gently grabs my smiling dad’s arm, steering him right past us in an act that only I know is brave.

I first notice it the next morning when another student stops and holds the door open for me as I scramble into the maths block. I have to do that awkward half-run to make it through because I wasn’t close enough to the door and I’m all ready to let the apologies come cascading out when I recognise the other student as Aslan from the singing huddle outside the talent quest and I realise that he’s not rolling his eyes or laughing at me – he’s ready to high-five me.

I notice it again at midday when conversation breaks out in legal studies class, and everyone descends into a discussion about electronic artists and musical gear. At first, I’m hesitant to join in, my head still buried in the textbook reading. But then someone asks how I made a song with a laptop. The entire class makes room for me to answer.

But I notice it the most that afternoon when I’m waiting for Mum to pick me up and Leila walks her bike towards me, smiles and calls me creative. She kicks off and speeds down the hill before I can even reply. It’s the first time we’ve spoken since that day in the stacks. And I feel … embraced.

The word creative sticks in my mind on the drive home. I’ve never used it to describe myself before. It’s Dad who’s used it the most to describe me, like when he put on a Sufjan Stevens record and made me tea and we sat together in the kitchen, and he told me I was on a hard path in life. That was the morning after my primary school graduation, when they’d all been whispering about me, when Dad pulled us out of school.

Creative people often face social rejection, he said that day, but there’s nothing wrong with being eccentric. I had to ask him what it meant to be eccentric, and he cradled his tea in his hands, a daydreamy look in his eyes as he described the exciting life I might have, if only I could find people who would accept me. That was the day I resolved to be the opposite of eccentric – to be boring, to be normal.

But now I’ve found a friend who accepts me and all the strange sounds that fill my mind. It’s only Dad doing the rejection.

In the middle of the winter holidays, Dad does three laps of the mall carpark before a suitable space clears up. He reverses in between two SUVs, which overshadow our little sedan.

‘They run out of things to buy, so then they buy bigger versions of what they already have,’ he mutters, digging around behind us for the calico bags, which Mum has left neatly folded in the required seat pocket. ‘That’s how you know capitalism is in a death spiral.’

It was probably a bad idea for Dad to do the shopping, but he insisted, and I’m holding on to a shred of hope that, by coming along, I might catch him in a moment of pride about our shared musicality and he’ll change his mind about Cathy. I don’t want to be a liar anymore. We wander through the sliding glass doors, and I breathe in the stale air-conditioning and even staler piped music.

‘Did you know that guy Gruen who designed the modern shopping mall – he wanted these places to be car-free community hubs?’ Dad says, with a derisive look back at the packed carpark. ‘He hated what they became so much that he didn’t want to be associated with them, but that’s what we know him for.’

‘That’s so sad,’ I say, mirroring his expression carefully as my eyes pass over the closed-down kitchenware shop, the tobacconist’s window filled with garish novelties, a discount hairdresser blaring Top 40 songs from ten years ago.

We walk on in silence.

Dad wanted the record store to be a community hub, too. For a time, it was. He really lived his values. When his parents died in the accident, he shared some of his inheritance with Maggie, the original owner, who would sit at our dining table and trade jokes and stories that a young me would always scramble to understand. But over the years, everything dwindled, and then Maggie passed away.

Now someone we’ve never met serves milkshakes and ice creams in that place, and someone else scraped the posters off the walls and replaced them with flat pastel pink wallpaper. Dad drives a different way across town, so he doesn’t have to pass it by. He hates what it became so much he doesn’t want to be associated with it.

I summon my courage as Dad picks over the organic tomatoes. ‘Hey Dad, did you like my song?’ I say, hovering around behind him. Normally I’d be racing through the list with Mum, but it’s been so long since Dad did the shopping that I’ve forgotten if I’m supposed to help or not. Whether it’s me or a tomato, Dad always sees flaws I don’t.

‘Liked? I loved it, of course!’

I swallow. ‘You know, it’s really all because of Cathy.’

He stops in the middle of the aisle, the week’s kombucha bottles clinking in protest. ‘How on earth could you say that?’

An older couple pushes past Dad to reach the pasta sauces behind him. I cringe, knowing they might have heard him. So, I lose my window to speak.

‘I love you, Astrid, and I’d never get in the way of your beautiful music, but it’s really hurting me to see you getting manipulated by such a pathological liar. People like her are always charming while they’re taking something from you. She’s taking your music and using it to make her pedestrian singing look good. She’s a user, and I’m scared that when she drops you, you’ll be hurt.’ He’s facing me; he’s in my space; I’m frozen again. ‘If I had my way, I’d go to the school tomorrow and insist that you get put down as a solo act. You’d do so much better.’

I flush. ‘It wouldn’t … I wouldn’t …’

‘I know this is hard,’ he says. ‘People like you, who are talented and creative – they face this a lot. I would know. But I know you don’t want to listen to your old dad.’

He squeezes my arm, a little too hard for the affection that I know he wants to show, and he finally resumes pushing the trolley. Those words hover in the air behind us as I follow him and his trolley down the organic food aisles. I want those metallic wheels to scream, but they glide with infuriating softness.

Under the fluorescent lights of the department store, she slips past Dad and me, unseeing, her fingers flicking over the marker pens, earphones in. She’s changed her style completely, slouching in boxy clothes with her hair compressed into a sharp, diagonal fringe that obscures most of her face. In my daydreams, for years, I’d run into her like this, I’d cry out her name and we’d squeal and hug each other, and it’d be like no time passed at all. But Carla walks right by us and I am just relieved to remain invisible, a ghost of our friendship.

All my previous compositions were flukes. This is the only rational conclusion. It’s like a giant filter has squashed all my audible frequencies. The air refuses to move.

For the fourth night in a row, I evade detection, shielding the laptop light from the doorway as I sit up in my bed and scroll through years of past sound experiment files.

Each sound awakens memories in me: the first time I heard electronic music in Dad’s record shop and told him I wanted to learn; when Carla and I hosted an impromptu dance party in her room until we both tripped over; the last day of homeschooling, when high school still felt like a perfect fantasy. I’ve left them all unattended since I made them, so they still hold their connection to the times in which they first came to me, here in this same room. I’d hoped that revisiting them now would inspire something in me, that I would find some kind of connection among them, but I don’t even know how to assemble them into something that makes sense, let alone make anything new. Instead these files sit colourless, listed out down my finder window, separated by uniform little gridlines that keep them apart. There are so many of them, but they all feel so empty.

I have never fallen silent like this before.

Something about all this isolation.

Lowering the laptop lid with as much conviction as silence will allow, I wrap myself in my sheet and roll over to face the blank, unblemished wall. Overcome with an irrational urge, I reach out one fingernail and scratch at the perfect paintwork until a tiny piece chips off, embedding itself under my surface.

I’m so tired of covering everything up. I wish I had any other choice.

Cathy is the only person who can pull me out of this silence. So, even though she’s clearly preoccupied with preparing for her university audition, that Friday, I skip homework club one more time to be with her. I almost told Mum, but her manner since Dad’s outburst after the swimming pool has been somehow unreadable to me, and every time I’ve opened my mouth to say something, all I could think of was that overnight bag. If she’s keeping secrets from me, I will keep this from her. Besides, I’m almost eighteen. In any normal world, I could do whatever I want.

But now I’m standing in Cathy’s kitchen and my ears are ringing with the pressure of all these lies and all the words that Dad said like user and liar that seem to fit me more than Cathy, and, meanwhile, Cathy seems to barely register my existence. While all these things have been happening to me, something has also changed in her world, and I don’t have the words to close the distance, let alone understand what’s happening inside her mind. I worry that it’s me. I worry that she somehow knows about what happened with Dad. What will happen. I worry, too, that she doesn’t know anything about this at all, that she thinks I’ve stopped spending as much time with her for no reason, or that she thinks I think she’s a liar, a user. And I worry that all these worries are changing me, changing us, closing us off from the kind of friendship I want us to have – from those moments of sharing everything, where silence wouldn’t feel this empty. My hand shakes as I pour plastic-packet orange juice, trying to mask all this angst with processed sweetness.

I tiptoe through Cathy’s house with these glasses, and then I loiter around the corner from her. She’s reaching for that sequence of high notes that keeps throwing her off in this audition piece. I’ve noticed how hard she’s been working on this, of course, but she hasn’t noticed me. Right now, she focuses her eyes on a single spot on the opposite wall, which flaps its wings: a moth flying towards me.

Cathy stops when she sees me. I am unwelcome. I sit back down with my laptop and headphones and blank session, spilling the juice all over my hands and wiping them off onto my school skirt. My mind plunges into a sea of excuses, in case one of my parents notices later.

‘So, what did you think of my song, then?’ Her tone is flat.

‘Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to listen,’ I mumble. She has no idea how hard it was for me to get here, but she doesn’t want me here at all.

The moth is now trying, desperately, to exit through the closed window. It doesn’t belong in the light. Cathy opens the window a crack and scowls at it as it flies away, slamming the window shut behind it with a bang.

‘Oi!’ calls out Pete from the next room.

I jump at the sharp syllable, knocking the rest of the orange juice all over the carpet.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ I fly back out to the kitchen, racing back with damp tea towels.

Cathy watches me critically. The tea towels don’t really help.

‘Bicarb – do you have any bicarb?’ I demand. Every second counts.

‘Yeah.’ She still doesn’t really move, keeping her eyes fixed on her audition notes. ‘In the pantry.’

I run back into the kitchen, pulling out dusty corn starch in old jars and potato flour and almond flour and something with a faded handwritten label I can’t read, before unearthing the frail box with its hardened bicarb contents. A rapid scan of the higher shelves reveals white vinegar sitting among tomato and soy sauce bottles, and I shove them all aside to reach it, running out to the living room, throwing everything onto the stain and rubbing at it until it disappears. Then I breathe out. I slump back down to my laptop, resisting the past places that these odours try to take me.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t do this,’ Cathy says.

‘Shouldn’t do what?’ I’m still trying to breathe.

‘Were you listening at all?’

‘I was worried about the carpet.’

‘No one cares about the carpet,’ she says. ‘We can’t all live in a display home.’

The hurt in her expression snaps me out of the domestic trance. But I know I can’t disguise the hurt in my own eyes when I meet hers.

‘Good afternoon, girls!’ It’s Louise, a half-eaten banana in her hand and a laptop under her arm. (What is it with this family and unnecessary technology risks?) The banana dispels the cleaning smells, and I breathe easier.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’ Cathy demands.

‘Accounts,’ Louise groans. ‘Just looking for a cosy corner to procrastinate in.’

I laugh because the situation seems to call for it. Louise smiles at me, even when her gaze drops to the pile of damp tea towels.

‘Stop playing that you’re all chill, Mum,’ Cathy says. ‘Chill people don’t hover.’

‘I’m going to take these to the laundry.’ I scoop up the tea towels and clear out.

Their gazes follow me.

My heart thumps in my ears as I throw the tea towels into the washing machine – one by one, so it’s as slow as possible – but I can still hear everything through these thin walls.

Louise speaks calmly, despite her daughter’s tone. ‘We’ll be here for you, whether you choose to do this or—’

‘Stop trying to talk me out of it!’ Cathy’s voice is strong enough to rattle the windows, or at least rattle me.

Louise tries again. ‘We’d never—’

‘There’s no space in this family!’

Cathy’s sobs echo through the laundry. I sink to the tiles, among the neatly folded piles of faded pyjamas and school uniforms and aged detergents. I can’t go back out there. It all feels wrong.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ Louise’s voice is still soft. I try to imagine she’s telling me this, but I still can’t stop shaking.

‘It’s not okay,’ Cathy cries. ‘I can’t sing like this.’

‘That’s okay,’ Louise says, and I silently beg Cathy to listen to her. ‘You can do it tomorrow.’

‘No!’ Cathy cries out in frustration. The sharp sound grabs me by the throat. ‘Sometimes things aren’t okay, Mum. You can’t delete a problem by speaking over it with your positive affirmations.’

‘I know this is hard right now, but you are going to be okay.’

‘I just said … ugh, I can’t do this. You and Dad – don’t come with me to the audition. I can’t. I just can’t.’

Silence slices through the house. I hug my knees to my chest.

It was a mistake to come here today. A deep cry rises from some unknown dark place inside me, and I bury my head into my hands and become smaller, smaller, smaller.

It takes minutes or hours for Cathy to edge into the laundry, where I’m still hunched with my back against the dryer. I’d do anything to get up and pretend that this never happened. But I can’t move.

‘Oh, shit, Astrid, I’m so sorry.’ She sits next to me. ‘Are you okay?’

It’s okay, it’s okay. I look at her face, which is still blotchy from her tears. It’s okay.

‘It’s not a big deal, I promise,’ she says, wrapping her arm around me. ‘We just blow off steam a lot in this house. I’m sorry if it scared you.’

I shake my head.

She sighs, resting her head on the wall. ‘I just really hate how my parents keep tiptoeing around me like I’m about to shatter. It freaks me out. And then there’s Matt, calling me every day and going on about the audition. We’ve planned this since we were like fourteen and it’s fine for him, because he already got his offer last year when I was young enough not to think about it and … ugh. See? If I unload on anyone about how all this actually feels, I just end up proving them right.’ She bursts into messy, noisy tears. ‘Maybe I am losing it.’

I move closer to her and pat her shoulder. The gesture feels hopelessly small, but her warmth brings me back to the room. I can be here. I can be here for her. ‘You’re not losing it.’

‘Can I tell you something hard?’ she says. ‘You know how I told you about my mum? When she was sick, when I was little, my parents didn’t tell me for ages. They thought it would protect me or something. Well, one day I was home alone with her, and she was folding clothes in my room and then she just started gasping for breath suddenly, and I was only, like, seven, and I honestly thought she was going to die, all because my parents thought I was too young to hear the truth about panic attacks.’ A tear rolls down her cheek. ‘I think trying not to tell me ate away at her and made it so much worse.’

‘Cathy, I’m so sorry.’ I’m sorry about all the ways I have to protect you, too.

‘She’s okay now,’ she says. ‘She’s been okay for years, but it stays with you, you know? So now when my parents hover around me, I feel like there’s something wrong with them, or something wrong with me, and it’s going to sneak up on me again and ruin everything.’

I don’t know what to say.

‘I’m sorry. Am I being too much? I’m too much.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I say, finding my voice at last, even though it won’t be enough. ‘Of course you can talk to me.’

‘Thanks,’ she says, wiping her face with a pair of her pyjama shorts. ‘You can talk to me, too, you know.’

I don’t let myself imagine how that would feel.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks.

‘I just …’ I just realised I’m running out of energy for lying. ‘I was just thinking about whether to ask if you’d want me there with you at your audition. So you aren’t alone.’

‘It’s in the city,’ she says. ‘Wouldn’t your parents kill you?’

‘How about this?’ It’s like I’m watching myself talk. ‘Tell me when it is. I’ll do my best to get there. If I do, it’ll be a nice surprise. If I don’t, well, you’ll know I tried as hard as I could, and that I’m with you in spirit.’

She hugs me close, and even through all the layers of lies that keep me here, I know that this friendship is real. And so worth lying for.

Before I leave that afternoon, Cathy insists on one last run-through of our song. All the little peaks and troughs of the sound waves unfold, as they have every other time. Then we lie flat on the living room floor as the sugar hit from the orange juice falls away.

Everything threatens to flood back into me. I focus on the ceiling light, on the dust gathering inside its cover, on the tiny gap between the light fixture and the ceiling, where an uneven hole has been cut out. It dangles so precariously, trails of dust lighting up in the late afternoon sun. I can’t tell whether all lights are like this. Maybe everything’s always been this fragile everywhere, all the time, and I just didn’t notice.

‘Hey, so, anyway,’ Cathy says, sitting up and combing the spiky bits out of her long hair with her fingers. ‘I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an old phone.’ She stands up and makes her way out of the room even as she finishes her thought. ‘You can have it for recording. I know you like to make weird stuff and base it on what you actually hear. Well, if you think of any final touches for the track, you know, you can just record it. Or, you know, just use it for whatever you like.’

I take the forbidden phone in my hands. Its little weight is added to my burden of secrets, but there’s something powerful about this one.

‘You don’t have to show me what you use it for,’ she says. ‘But you know I’m here if you want someone to listen.’

I slide the phone underneath my fitted sheet that night, so it’s squeezed into the side of my bed that faces the wall. It’s not a perfect hiding spot, but nowhere here is. Here, beside me, the pristine paintwork bares the scratch I left, revealing nothing but the layer of paint underneath, in a slightly cooler shade of white. Underneath this, there could be another layer and another and another, all the way down to the skeleton of this place. A wave of irrational anger takes hold of me. The truth is buried so far beneath the surface that it’s impossible to find.

I no longer want to be silent. But, when I speak, all I can do is lie.

On Monday, even in the empty indoor basketball courts, there’s an awful wind; I wrap the thin school jacket tight around my arms, cursing the uniform policy. I prepare the backing track for the choir performing in today’s assembly, the incomplete melodies filling this space like a ghost. Veronika and Takeshi are rushing around, with Ms Torres directing them, but even though I have come to love this part of my week, everything feels muted.

Leila catches my eye from across the room. She’s wandered in early, amongst the cluster of students who drift here from their free period, looking for the least uncomfortable places to sit. It’s the first time we’ve made eye contact for weeks. Her expressive eyes fix on me, unreadable, and I make myself hold her gaze, trying to send her some kind of truth. Something changes in her when I do this, and she trains her eyes on me more intensely. A thrill travels down my spine.

This is something only normal people can do. But I’m walking over to her, despite myself. I’m smiling at her, despite myself. I’m saying hello, despite myself. I still don’t have the words, but the feelings are there. It’s a crush: a word and a feeling.

‘Hey, homeschool girl,’ Leila says, plonking herself and her bag on the cold floorboards. ‘You been skipping homework club?’

I flush, gripping the single cable in my hand, wishing I could coil myself up like that and disappear.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not a snitch.’ She sits there, like she’s waiting for me to explain myself. ‘I’ve skipped heaps of things in my time, trust me.’

Oh.

‘Can we – can we do another tutoring session?’ I whisper to her.

‘I’m good, actually,’ Leila says.

An awkward silence squirms its way between us. She shuffles from foot to foot.

That’s when Ms Torres finally twigs that Leila is here, distracting me from my very important duties. ‘Leila.’ Her voice projects straight to us, all the way from the other side of the hall, even without an exclamation mark on the end. Leila doesn’t flinch.

‘I don’t mean for you,’ I blurt. ‘I mean for me.’

‘Ooh, I see,’ she smiles.

‘Leila Martinez. I hope you’re here to help.’ Ms Torres walks towards us and I launch myself back into the cables, which are now tangled around each other.

‘Always, Miss,’ Leila says. ‘Always.’

During our homework club time on Friday afternoon, Leila invites me to walk around the neighbourhood near the school. She insists that taking a break from study is exactly what she needs. The sun shines down on us like a spotlight. So, I’m here with her, in broad daylight, like I’m no longer someone to stow away in the cobwebbed corners of the library – at least once all the other students have departed.

We meander into the park at the end of the street, doing a long circuit around the football field with its sweaty after-school attendees yelling and whooping at each other and birds and butterflies drifting in the air above us.

‘I used to come here back when I skipped school a lot,’ she says.

‘I heard you did that,’ I say, without looking at her.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Cathy,’ I say apologetically.

Leila sighs, grabbing a stick off the ground and dragging it in a line beside her. I brace for one of her silences, but instead she says, ‘You can never outgrow anything here. But I did … outgrow it, I mean.’

‘I heard that too.’

‘Huh.’ She’s wearing earrings in the shape of lightning bolts. I think of the way it feels when she touches me. Only normal people …

I plunge my hand into my pocket and pull out her $20 note. Before I can change my mind, I whisper, ‘I need to know how you did it. Well, sort of. I need to fake a school excursion. On a Saturday.’

Leila knocks my hand (and the money) out of the air. ‘You make no sense to me.’ Her hand lingers on my arm. I shrink away. Only normal people … ‘That’s a weird thing to ask. Maybe you should tell me what you’re really up to.’

I shake my head.

She sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘You can fake a letter and a form, I guess. The school letterhead isn’t exactly complicated.’

‘Can you show me how?’

She pushes the stick deeper into the grass behind her, and it snaps. ‘Ah, man, look. I promised my mum I wouldn’t do shit like this anymore. I can tell you how to do it, but I have to stay true to my word.’

‘Thank you,’ I whisper, wishing that more of my words could also be true.

‘Just don’t do anything stupid,’ she says. ‘It will catch up with you.’

She wanders off the path and taps a tree trunk nearby. Bubble letters etched into its trunk read ‘LDM’. ‘Told you I used to hang out here. I guess two years isn’t a long time for a tree to heal up. Sometimes the hurtful crap you do sticks around, right?’

I nod, tracing the edges of the letters, which now look like old wounds. The sap must have dried and fallen off years ago. Silence blankets us as a cloud passes overhead. ‘It’s still growing, though,’ I say eventually.

‘Hey, um, so I’m having a party next Saturday, if you’d like to come. I mean, if you don’t have any fake excursions to go to.’ She’s still touching the smooth bark of the tree, the silver rings on her fingers reflecting the sun like sparks, but I don’t look away from her, even when it hurts.

Next Saturday. Cathy’s audition.

‘I wish I could,’ I say.

Even though she’s teaching me to be a better liar, I hope she can believe me.

Nothing changes the morning I turn eighteen. I have barely thought about it, and now it has happened. My first action as an adult is to wake up in my suburban bedroom, open my thick curtains and look out across the sun-bathed yard to the white timber fence that separates us from our neighbours’ garden, where sparrows dance in the morning light. On my closed laptop, the fake excursion letter sits, unprinted, silently whispering its lies. Even though I am now an adult, and no law would stop me from going wherever I want on a Saturday, everything else will. I think again about Nick and the future he wrote about. But here is my future. My future is still here.

The rain competes with Dad playing his blues song in the living room. Mum arranges the cream over the birthday cake. Cream is another banned item in our household on a regular day, and my favourite part of birthday cake is how effective it is at delivering maximum cream.

Under the worn-out Happy Birthday banner that has accompanied all our birthdays, Mum lights the candles and brings over the cake. She and Dad sing.

Today, Dad says nothing about Mum being out of tune. Instead, he just takes photos, which he’ll get printed and add to our album before the week is up, as he has since I was small – these moments fixed in place with stickers bearing joyous comments about life, love and happiness.

‘I can’t believe you’re eighteen, sweetheart,’ he says.

I can’t believe it, either.

As calm descends over our little family, flashbulbs of laughter echo in my memory, disembodied. The sweetness of the cake becomes nauseating.

The wind changes direction then, and the rain pelts through the narrow space between houses, slamming into the dining-room windows. I can’t remember the last time it rained on my birthday. You would never see the rain in our photos.

The calm stays with us until it’s time for gifts. Sitting with my legs crossed in the living room, I unwrap new jumpers, plaid shirts, socks and headphones. Dad gifts me some of my favourites from his record collection. My hands hover over the beautiful covers, stretching through time – The Avalanches, Pink Floyd, Floating Points, Aphex Twin. I’ve loved them for years, but I’ve always been too afraid to even touch them. I wrap Dad in a jubilant hug.

‘Thank you,’ I say, basking in this moment of warmth.

‘I know you’ll take good care of them,’ he says.

I nod with genuine happiness.

But then, as I unwrap the last gift in the pile, I realise that this peace is about to end. The torn wrapping paper reveals a set of hemp sheets, pressed into neat rectangles and tied with jute twine.

Dad grins at me as I do my best to control my fear. Sometimes, here, love, fear and control are all the same thing.

‘I know it’s not the most exciting gift in the world,’ Dad says. ‘But if you’re sleeping well, everything else will seem easier.’

‘Thanks, Dad. I love them already.’ Crushing the new sheets against me, I stand up quickly enough to make my head spin. ‘I’ll take them straight to the washing machine—’

‘No need!’ Dad says, raising a hand in a gesture I know he intends to be peaceful. ‘I did that after I bought them. Give them to me and I’ll put them on for you.’

My arms tighten around them. I can tell Mum’s eyes are on me, but I know better than to look at her when I feel like this. Instead, I fix my gaze on the antique dishes in the display cupboards on the other side of the room. Precarious. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s okay. I want to do it myself.’

Dad smiles, but the expression has soured on the edges, mocking. I meet him with an un-ironic echo of his expression. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘You’re just not really known for having the coordination to handle a fitted sheet.’

‘Actually, I’ve been doing it myself for years.’ My voice shakes. ‘You just never noticed.’

It’s quiet – too quiet. Everyone – even Dad – is still and silent, like they’re posing for a photograph.

Before it can all come crashing down, I break away, racing into my bedroom, throwing the new sheets on the carpet, tearing my old fitted sheet off the bed, closing my hand around the little illicit rectangle of Cathy’s old phone. There will be trouble. But it can’t be worse than what would happen if he saw this. Looking behind me to check that I am still unobserved, I shove the phone into the depths of my schoolbag in the corner of the room, and then I emerge, dragging the new sheets behind me, into the destruction.

I prepare to tell Dad that I’ve changed my mind, to present him with the sheets by way of apology for my burst of ‘enthusiasm’, but of course he is already swearing at Mum, who can no longer hide her tears. She withstands all those frequencies, unmoving. Now that the larger threat is averted, there’s nowhere for me to go except back to reality. My heart hammers in my chest as I clamour for a way to bring the peace back. ‘Dad, please, I’m sorry.’

He glowers at me.

‘I just – I was just a bit too keen on the independence thing, with turning eighteen,’ I babble. Despite myself, tears start leaking down my face. ‘I was excited about the sheets because they’re so nice and so I wanted—’

‘Don’t you dare cry,’ he shouts, closing the space between us. ‘You have no excuse to behave this way. You get your bed made for you like you’re still six and still that’s not good enough for you. Tell me, your highness, what would be?’

Mum tries to get between us. ‘Cliffy, please—’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says quietly. ‘I won’t be doing anything else for you. Either of you.’

He snatches the new sheets from me and takes off down the hall. Mum follows him, begging him to stay, but I walk away from their thumping footsteps. Enclosing myself in my room, I switch on the phone, connect it to the Wi-Fi, and call Nick.

When Nick arrives, I run down the hall and into the swirling rain. Dad is long gone, but Mum’s bare feet pad down the hallway, and she calls out to me, but I let the wind and rain drown out her words. I run down the driveway, past the bin with my new sheets hanging out of it, and I throw myself into Nick’s car, which smells like servo pies, and while I’m still wrestling with the seatbelt, we take off down the street, any street, away from it all.

‘You’re going to be okay,’ Nick says.

His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, from a time when I could – when I did – believe that, and although I reached out for him just an hour ago, I can’t reach him anymore, not the way I used to, before he chose to walk away. It is not all going to be okay.

‘You’re here with me,’ he says then, as though the silence weighs too heavily on him, filled as it is with all this time. ‘For as long as you like.’

Still more things he can’t understand anymore. I can’t. I can’t stay as long as I like. I can’t leave, either. I’m trapped. Frozen. I try to stop all this thinking, but I can’t. Some memories – like being twelve – are still alive like this for me, and they are still happening, again and again, because I can’t leave. I am not here with Nick. I am in the past, his past, my future.

The icy rain drips down my neck. I bite my nails, trying to find something – anything – to keep me in the present. The streets blur past us, but nothing is solid. I can’t even find it in myself to feel sheltered by Nick’s presence, by the love that it took for him to drop everything and be here for me like this. Not after all the time that he has not been here, that he chose not to be here. Underneath everything in my life now, there is only fear. Fear and loneliness.

We pull into a drive-through takeaway shop, Nick raising his voice over the howling wind to order us hot drinks: tea with two sugars for both of us, like when we were small.

The breaths keep coming. I am still small, so small. I cling to the door handle and to Nick’s gentle words, my knuckles going white with the effort of just staying here.

In the waiting zone, we say nothing. There are still too many years in the car with us. But Nick digs around in the mess in the back of his car and somehow unearths a sandy beach towel. He waits for me to stop biting my nails, and then he hands me the towel. Still shivering, I undo my hair, flicking droplets onto the dash. The weight of the towel helps.

Nick reaches out a tentative hand to ruffle my hair. ‘Ah, there’s the little scruffy nerd I remember. Welcome back.’

‘Shut up.’ I smile weakly, deflecting his hand, but comforted by its warmth. This, we used to do this. There were so few normal moments in our family, but we made some of our own, with teasing; with our arguments, even; and with these moments of reaching out – even if we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time. Sure, we disagreed on basically everything from the state of the world to the acceptability of low-waisted pants. And, sure, we often hated each other. But, when we were alone together, it was all so very normal.

The last day I really felt normal was my twelfth birthday. I broke tradition for it, shelving our family’s Happy Birthday banner on that special day, as we drove up the road in our sunscreen and swimmers (and me in my requisite bathing cap). Dad was inventing silly lyrics to some old song on the radio, and Carla and my other friends from netball squeezed together in the back, laughing hysterically. They can’t have all been wearing seatbelts.

The next thing I remember is my hand sneaking into Carla’s plastic bag of lollies, the sourness on my tongue, the way the artificial blueberry taste burst into my mouth – and the tongues of my friends, stuck out in jest, with bright patterns of yellow and green and pink. We were all different, but we all matched.

The laughter in the car as we drove back home, the heady chlorine, the sugar rush – it left me giddy, so giddy, so relaxed.

So, when Carla joked about the lifeguard falling asleep on duty, I burst out with honest, relaxed, blue laughter.

He was watching in the rear view mirror.

Goosebumps rushed up my arms.

I had nowhere to go.

Then there was the toothpaste bubbling in my mouth as I hunched over the sink; out of sight, Dad’s playful voice echoing in our hallway, as he made fun of the coal that’s used to make artificial colours in lollies; my friends whispering in confusion from outside the bathroom door; my mind racing as I tried to spin this into a story that would somehow save me.

As the spots of blue dye circled the drain and my friends’ whispers circled me, everything closed in. I was shaking; I was crying – then I was numb. Within months, at my primary school graduation, the whispers had spread all around me, from the netball girls to everyone else, and I knew I was completely alone. Not even Carla stayed, even though we’d been friends since we were six. The last time she spoke to me, she said that my family scared her. That I scared her.

All these words – long disembodied – still live here in my mind, dispelled only by my wordless music.

But my body remembers.

With teas in hand, Nick and I pull over at an anonymous little park, somewhere in a newer suburb than ours, where all the trees are still young and cradled by stakes, so that they grow in the right direction. Nick pops the windows and leans back in his seat. Raindrops gather on the dash, but he doesn’t even look at them. He sighs.

The night air smells like eucalyptus trees, like eucalyptus, like disinfectant, like cleaning … Time threatens to collapse again, so I cling to the paper cup with both hands, letting the warmth course through me, keeping me here. It takes everything, but I am here with him now, out of my timeline, just for these moments. The milky tea makes my nausea worse, but I drink it anyway, burying my nose into the lid to mask the eucalyptus smell.

We hover here in the dusk. Nick insists on sending a text to Mum, reassuring her that I am okay and that I will be delivered back to the house long before Dad finishes his usual post-rant trip out of the house.

For once, I don’t have to make anything up. I can just be in this one place. Just how it used to be, sometimes, when Nick and I were together.

‘I really missed you,’ I say, staring out at this person who disappeared from my life, trying to piece together what else might have changed since I last saw this face, now almost twenty.

‘I missed you too,’ he says. ‘I was hoping that one day you would find a way to call.’

‘I was … I was too sad that you left.’

‘I was sad that I left, too.’

Of course I imagined Nick’s new life in this intervening year-and-a-half. I imagined him slouched confidently in the back of his law classes; eating cheese sandwiches in bed while streaming TV at 2 am; wearing the same embarrassing faded track-and-field shirt to bed every single night, even now when he probably has housemates. But I never imagined him sad.

Jarred by the realisation that I know him less than I thought, I close the distance between us a little more, looking at him properly for the first time since he left. He is no longer the awkward, skinny teenager who hunched in his oversized clothes, as though he were trying to disappear himself into the abstract idea of fashion (or what he thought of as fashion). Instead he is wearing new wannabe lawyer clothes, his brown eyes rimmed with liner, a smudge of shadow colouring the lids. I realise I have lost something here, the chance to see my sibling’s gradual transition from youth to adult, which I guess I am now also making. But despite that, he’s still that same kid who let me crash on his floor when I was scared that everything was changing. No matter how much it seemed like he was trying to disappear in those earlier years, he stayed … as long as he could. Now, here he is for me, while I’m scared that everything will always stay the same. And I will believe him, as long as I can.

‘I don’t know anything about you anymore,’ he says, and I realise he’s looking back at me in the same way I was looking at him. I look down at my clothes – the same ensemble of blue jeans and one of a rotation of plain black shirts under a button-down shirt – and I realise that, although I cannot yet express it on the outside like he can, I am also not the same.

‘I don’t think I know myself, either,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’

‘You will.’

‘How? I want to know what it’s like.’ The urgency of this, coming from somewhere under the surface, surprises me.

‘It’s good,’ he says slowly. ‘Being an adult, being in control …’

‘Wearing winged eyeliner …’

He strikes a pose. ‘Dress for the job you want, sister. And that job is being fine.’

A playful smile flickers somewhere below my surface, but I can’t tease him about this. Instead, maybe a beat too late, I answer, ‘You look good. You look like you.’

‘Thanks for that,’ he says. ‘You know, it actually happened really quickly, becoming me, I mean. Like, the day I left, that first night on Rachel’s couch, it was like I could actually see who I was, or who I might be. And, despite everything, I slept so well, like all those years of thinking I had insomnia, like it all happened to someone else.’

‘That’s where you were,’ I say. ‘You were basically just down the road.’

‘For a bit,’ he says. ‘I ended up working nights at the uni bar and saving up to move closer to campus. I think our friendship would have ended if I’d stayed with Rachel much longer.’

‘Eating sardines in windowless rooms is generally frowned upon.’

‘That was one time!’ Another beat of silence, but this one feels warmer. ‘Remember that time I “borrowed” that lip gloss from her house?’

I do. And I remember Rachel, too, her clacking sandals and her sharp bangs and her bright green glasses and floral body spray. I remember the way Nick looked at her. I remember teasing him for having an embarrassingly obvious crush on his best friend, until that day, when he emerged from his bedroom with the faintest suggestion of pink bubblegum still on his lips. Not from a kiss, I knew. I remember his honesty – the way he never hid, not really, not fully, even in the face of what came next. Especially then. I remember that – the price of it. I was there.

I was there and I remember being so furious with him for causing it all and then just slamming his bedroom door behind him, leaving Mum and me to deal with the fallout of his self-expression, while we had none of our own.

I was there and I remember vowing for the millionth time that I would never do something so like that, drawing that kind of attention to myself, which could only end in one way.

I was there and I remember trying even harder to be less there, to be less anywhere, to be less – including a tiny inkling of something I was only now beginning to understand – how I felt about Rachel. Another, until now, unnameable, un-understood feeling.

It wasn’t Nick with the crush.

‘You were always brave,’ I say now, into this thickening atmosphere. ‘Braver than me.’

He clears his throat again, his eyes averted, as though he, too, had returned to that place. ‘Impulsive. Probably a fairer thing to say.’

‘Brave,’ I repeat. ‘And if I’d been brave back then, I would have said that I loved that look on you.’

‘That wasn’t our world,’ he says.

Wasn’t. Isn’t.

‘And, well, I also would have told you I was kind of crushing on Rachel for like four years.’ I flush. It’s been a long time since I trusted anyone like this.

His gaze returns to me then, and the light that flickers there confirms an understanding I should have known we had years ago. ‘You didn’t hide it as well as you thought, sis. I was just waiting for you to have enough space to figure it out.’

I’m still flustered from the revelation, eyes focused on the carpet under my feet, toying with its corners. ‘I’m not saying I still like her now or …’

He gives me a playful push. ‘Just because I talk a lot doesn’t mean I just go around spilling everyone’s tea, you know.’

‘Sometimes it feels a little like that.’

He clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes. ‘Maybe it’s more that you don’t say enough.’

‘Only lawyers need to talk the way you do. Lawyers and auctioneers, maybe.’ It’s another playful needle at him. I want more of our old banter back. But maybe it’s too soon. He looks at me seriously again.

‘What about you, then?’ he asks.

‘What about me?’

The sincerity in his eyes settles into a kind of sadness. ‘Tell me about yourself. What’s changed? What … I don’t know … What do you want to do after school?’

I shrug. ‘Something sensible.’ I suddenly can’t give shape to the ambitions that I thought were so strong in me – the university, the stable career, the predictable steps away from here. But I can’t think about that right now. I still feel like I’m barely here. So I turn the conversation back to him. ‘What about you, though? What do you want to do after uni?’

Despite the sadness, his eyes flash with excitement. I can tell he’s glad I asked, despite himself. ‘I think I want to be an environmental lawyer. I mean, so does everyone else, but, um, I think I might really have a chance at it. I’m doing well.’

I groan. ‘How are you surprised about that? I saw all your report cards, remember. You made me see them. You followed me around—’

‘I’m always surprised when I do well,’ he says, a finger subconsciously rising to the corner of his eye, where the eyeliner reaches the ghosts of future laugh lines. Little smudges appear where he touches. I wish he’d been home to help Mum with her makeup on that first day. ‘But I’m sorry about that,’ he says, ‘I am. It was always hard to see you clearly while I was in that place.’

That place. Those words feel cold somehow, and I shrink. ‘Now you don’t see me at all,’ I say. ‘Or that place. Instead you’re going to all these cool new places all the time, taking classes, buying makeup. I’m just at home. All the time. I’ve barely even left this postcode since I last saw you.’

‘That’s going to change.’ But his tone has shifted now, a little less certain, a little more aware of the weight of what I’m dealing with. I have closed some of the distance, reaching out to him, and now he is coming back in time, and joining me here.

We drink in the silence, the sweetness losing its warmth, becoming cloying.

‘Is Mum really going to leave?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, tapping his feet in an old nervous habit. ‘She just told me she didn’t want to tell you until she was certain. She’s worried – she’s worried about safety, she’s worried about money, she’s worried about you.’

‘Nothing’s ever going to change, is it?’ It’s a question, but I say it like a statement.

‘I know you want to stay around for her, but the day’s going to come when you have to make a choice,’ Nick says. ‘You’re going to have to decide whether you stay in that place and keep living this way or do what I did. I want you to have this, what I’ve had.’

‘Because you feel bad.’ I swallow the last of my tea, which has gone cold and thick.

‘Because I feel good.’

‘I’m happy for you,’ I say flatly.

Nick suddenly looks at me with an earnestness that squashes all the sarcasm and ill-will out of me. ‘I want to tell you something else. You know, since I left, I’ve met so many different people, been able to study different courses, done some therapy, well, lots of therapy. Getting away broadened things for me, made me realise things.’ He pauses. ‘All this has led me to realise … You’ve heard of non-binary gender, right?’

I can see how important this is to him. Nick is still speaking to me from so far away – this other world with all its possibilities.

‘Basically, I’m still working out exactly what this means for me, but for now, what I know is that I don’t identify as a man or a woman and I want to use gender-neutral pronouns. I’m still alright with “he”, but I much prefer “they”.’

‘Oh.’

I’m processing how this works grammatically, but I don’t want to admit that to Nick. It seems like a pretty trivial thing to be stuck on the mechanics of made-up grammar rules when someone’s telling you how they feel. Maybe sometimes words can hold us back. Sometimes rules can hold us back.

‘There’s a multiplicity in “they” that I really like, at least for now.’

‘Multiplicity?’ I’m trying my best to keep up.

‘You know, like many possibilities … Different or changing selves, even … I don’t know. That’s the whole thing. It’s different for everyone and you don’t have to have all the answers straightaway. You just have to do what’s right for you and go from there.’

‘I’ll use “they” for you from now on,’ I say.

‘Yep.’ They smile and down the rest of their tea.

I smile back. So many possibilities … ‘Hey, Nick, you know, I’ve been thinking, too … I think I’m in love with a girl at my school.’ As soon as I say it, it feels so right. It feels like joy. It feels like my eyes watering as I walk beside Leila in the sun.

Nick’s smile breaks into a grin. ‘High five, sister!’ They follow through with a resounding slap on my palm. Then their face falls. ‘You know you’re probably better off avoiding mentioning that to Dad, right?’

‘Duh,’ I say, weighted down again by the reality of my situation. That’s when I realise … ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Anything.’ Nick’s whole face lights up, and I see how much they wanted this to happen.

‘My friend has an audition. At the conservatorium. Could you pick me up from outside the school and drive me there on Saturday and just not say anything to anyone, even Mum?’ The anxiety returns and I stick my head out of the window, breathing in the freezing, damp air.

They sigh. ‘I’ll help you, as long as you don’t do drugs or go to any raves … at least not without me.’

‘Hah.’

‘I almost forgot what this is like,’ they sigh.

‘That’s the thing, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry.’ The words have a different weight when they say them now, and I know that we’ve just taken some big steps towards understanding each other as adults.

I sigh and kick my feet up on the dashboard. I don’t know why I do this; the angle is uncomfortable. Maybe I just want to break a rule and survive it. Then I whisper to Nick, ‘I have to go back.’

When we pull up outside number nineteen, the garage door is still wide open, revealing our orderly shelves that tell the world that – despite this breach of security and decorum – everything is under control inside, as long as you don’t look closely enough to see the car charger trailing out onto the gravel.

The rain is gone. Dad is still gone.

‘I’ll walk you up,’ Nick says. ‘Just in case.’

Just in case …

Walking up the driveway, I am light-headed, thinking of Mum and how unsafe she is right now. I’ve always felt like if we say and do the right things, we can control this. But we didn’t. And then I left her here.

A whirlwind of news stories descends in my mind. Man kills wife. Man kills wife. Man kills wife.

But then Mum is sprinting down towards us, her bare feet splashing up the puddles onto her pyjamas.

I am home. We are safe.

‘I’m sorry, kids,’ Mum says, and wraps us both in a hug that contains memories of blanket forts and childhood lunches made of bread and cheese.

‘Mum, you have nothing to be sorry about,’ says Nick. Their voice carries the distinct sound of a therapist, and for once, I can’t help being grateful that they got out. But I also think I hear Mum say to me, ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

It’s hard to explain, but this used to be my favourite part of Dad’s cycle, long before I knew it was a cycle. Mum crawls onto the couch in her fresh pyjamas, handing me a warm toasted sandwich and a tray to prevent any crumbs. The deal – established many years ago when Dad started leaving overnight like this – was that, in these few hours we would get alone before he returned (invariably in the early hours of the next day), we could snuggle and eat cheese sandwiches and watch movies that were usually banned, as long as we were vigilant for crumbs and the sounds of our car arriving back in the driveway. Tonight, though, it’s Chicago – a film that Cathy spoiled for me, believing me when I said I’d already seen it. So, I close my eyes a few times, bathing in the certainty of knowing what comes next.

Nick still hasn’t cleaned their car when they pull up outside the school on Saturday. The same beach towel sits strewn over the passenger seat. They throw it into the backseat when I climb in, so it rains sand over me in the exact moment I hug them.

They’re also laden with treats: a cute, cliché picnic basket almost overflows with cheese and crackers. Their eye makeup is even more dramatic this morning, and they’re wearing a long earring in one of their ears. I wonder if anyone went with them to get it pierced.

‘Hope you don’t mind tagging along with my friends first. I agreed ages ago.’ They gesture to the picnic basket.

‘I don’t mind,’ I say, snatching a packet of chips before they can intervene.

‘I can’t believe you did it,’ they say.

‘Me neither.’ It was almost too easy, with Dad believing the bit about the school excursion almost as soon as he returned (thanks, Leila), and then Mum dropping me off at the school gate this morning, where I immediately rushed off to get changed and wait for Nick.

‘Don’t make a habit out of this, okay? You’re ageing me.’ They stick a big, floppy sunhat on my head and one on their own as we pull up to the park. For good measure, they roll sunscreen over their nose, leaving a ghostly trail across their pale, freckly skin.

‘Are you serious? It’s like 8 am.’ I rub the unseen sunscreen dollops onto my sibling’s smiling face, staying well clear of the artful green-smudged eyes.

‘Sun safety never went out of style.’ Before I can do anything about it, Nick’s covered me in sunscreen, too. It’s probably just as well. Sunburn would come with consequences.

When we get out of the car, they squeeze my hand as we follow the waves of ambient techno towards a chaotic group of laughing people spread out over a couple of old-fashioned picnic blankets. The little group envelops us, and I’m folded into this bright early-spring scene, with Ivy and Prue, their matching holographic roller skates draped over their shoulders; with Paolo, who’s focused on finding the perfect tune to blast out into the parklands; with Ellis, who uses they/them pronouns like Nick and, unlike Nick, can actually bake passable cookies.

Everyone is making their own rules as they go along, with their clashing clothing and loud public music and insistence that five is a perfectly normal number of cookies to eat in one sitting. I’m so grateful for this little island of time and space where I can just be.

As Nick leans into still more gossip, I lean back on the picnic blanket and my bobby pins press uncomfortably on my scalp. I sit up and shake out my hair, then I lie back and gaze up at the sky. The grass blades are bumpy and satisfying under the coarse wool, and I let the sunlight fall on me.

‘Hey, Nick, ya fairy!’

I sit bolt upright, imagining we’re about to get attacked.

Nick’s kissing the assailant hello as I stagger to my feet. ‘Dee, this is my sister, Astrid. Astrid, this is Dee, she/her, all round awesome person.’

Dee is older than the others, and the only spiky thing about her is her hair, but I’m still on high alert about the casual slur-throwing. ‘Astrid! So cool to meet you. Can we have a hug?’

I nod. I’m still feeling … alarmed … but I really need a hug.

‘Lay off, Dee. Can’t you tell she’s not a hugger?’ Paolo says from across the picnic blanket.

‘Ah, shit, my bad,’ Dee says, dropping me and stepping back.

I flinch at the swear word, despite myself.

‘Sorry if that was a bit much.’ Dee clasps her hands behind her back, looking genuinely apologetic. ‘My brain doesn’t function this early.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I was fine about the hug, it’s just …’

‘Oh,’ Nick says. ‘It’s the slurs, yeah?’

I nod, my cheeks burning, and I swear there’s a collective oh that rises from the entire group at once. These words, like queer and fairy, and the others they casually say around here … I learned the meaning of some after hearing them directed at Nick (usually) or Mum or me. They have hurt us.

‘It’s called reclaiming slurs,’ Nick says, scooting over so they’re right next to me. ‘This is how we repurpose our hurt into strength, like how some people call themselves bitches. It’s fine if you’re not keen to do it, though.’

I wonder how that word feels for them now, what it might be like to reclaim hurt into strength, to take all those phonemes one by one until the meaning leaves them, to turn them all into good pain. The shadows shrink into the sun, and I stretch out more, opening up to let the light in. Phone cameras are all around me, and I should be worried that someone will capture my presence here, that it will somehow get back to Dad, despite his dislike of the internet. But today, somehow, the risk thrills me.

Let them all see me.

Across the blanket, beyond my bare toes, I watch Nick and their friends ask each other the kinds of questions I fear most.

‘Going home was way triggering, right?’ says Paolo, his soft voice carried on the wind.

‘Had to help my old sis,’ Nick replies. ‘But yeah, never again. I just worry about Mum, you know.’

‘You’re doing what you can,’ Paolo says, and when I prop myself up on my elbows and we make eye contact, I realise he knows my story, too, even though we’ve never met before today. ‘She wants you to look after yourself.’

Nick closes their eyes and nods.

‘And you too, Astrid,’ Paolo adds. He’s still looking at me when I look back at him, his brown eyes knowing and sad. ‘Nick told me you’ve been thinking about heading to university here next year. You have friends here, you know, potential roommates, whether you do that or go somewhere else.’

I feel the truth in his words. ‘Thank you.’

Strengthened by all this vulnerability, I turn to Nick. ‘How did you do it? I’m so afraid of leaving.’ Leaving. Even the word feels like it doesn’t belong to me.

‘I’m still afraid,’ Nick replies. ‘But I did what I needed to do. Always fit your own oxygen mask before helping someone else.’

‘And therapy,’ Dee interjects.

‘Thanks for diluting my metaphor,’ Nick says, ‘but yeah, loads of therapy.’

That word sits heavily in the air. I smile, but I know I’m not disguising my discomfort.

‘There’s no shame in needing a bit of a hand,’ Paolo says. ‘People weren’t meant to sit alone in little bubbles, even if all that fragmentation makes more money for the CEOs of the world.’

His ideas sound like Dad, but the way he speaks couldn’t be more different.

‘It’s all right that you’re not ready,’ Dee says, still relaxed. ‘Everyone’s path is unique.’

No one pushes anyone else. The conversation moves on with ease, and before long, everyone’s talking about who is dating whom. They share an esky of strawberry ice creams, even though it’s only ten in the morning, passing one to me. It melts all over my hands and the sweetness sticks to me.

An hour later, I’m subsumed in university students, navigating buildings named after people who must have done important things involving harps and tubas. Cathy’s is not the only audition, and several times I get caught up in the anxious buzz of parents and high school students with those signature plastic ring binders and unusually shaped suitcases that announce them as musicians.

Everyone moves with purpose towards their dreams, like Cathy, like Nick. Even though I know I’m still so young, it already feels much too late to consider joining these purposeful people, despite music being the thing I love the most. As I wander through the campus, some of them glance at me over their shoulders. It’s like they know I’ve never let myself dream. It’s like they know I’m already tired of having an audience.

I find a map and make my way to Building E, where the auditions will take place. Cathy and I went online and found a meeting spot underneath this weird abstract sculpture, so I sit on the side of it, even though it’s covered in dead leaves, which press hot imprints into my bare thighs.

A flash of dark hair appears now and then. Each time, I look up, my widest smile ready, and each time, the smile freezes on my face as I meet a stranger’s eyes. The sun reflects off all this architectural glass and I have to move into the shade, in case the sunscreen’s worn off.

It’s 11:15. The audition is only fifteen minutes away. A boy about the same age as Cathy rushes out of the glass doors and around the corner, where he must think no one is watching. He collapses onto a bench and bursts into tears and I’m ashamed to be here. I edge further away, trying not to hear the sobs.

It’s 11:30. Cathy still doesn’t arrive.

Left alone here, surrounded by impartial, impersonal glass, I feel so far away from her. I have no way of knowing if she is okay – or if she just left me here, deciding at the last minute that she didn’t need me after all. I should have realised this is what would happen when I built a friendship on a lie.

In Nick’s car, gripping their phone, I listen to Cathy’s phone ringing out, desperate for an answer about where she is, or was, and why she would leave me there like that.

I’m so angry I could scream.

Nick pulls up outside Leila’s apartment complex and gives me a parental look that is completely unjustified by our two-year age gap. We were arguing the whole way here. Nick was very insistent that I should head straight back to the school, so there would be no chance I wouldn’t be there when Mum arrived to pick me up, but once I told them that I was going to see that girl, they let me borrow their phone again, this time to check Leila’s address, and then they drove me all the way to the party.

Still, I think we’re both surprised we’ve arrived here.

Well, almost. I try the car doors, but the child lock is on. ‘If you take me back to the school, I’ll just leave,’ I say for the second time.

‘This is dangerous,’ they say. ‘I never did anything like this when I was—’

‘You’re damn right you didn’t,’ I snap, anger boiling over the walls and out of me. ‘Now you’re out there contemplating your existence and falling asleep in lectures, while I had to fabricate a whole school excursion just to get out of the house. If you think this is you somehow helping me—’

‘Just please promise me this is the last time.’

The car still smells like sunscreen and I long to be back in the security of this morning. I swallow. ‘You got to leave.’

‘You’ll get to leave, too,’ they say. ‘Until then, you have to stay safe.’

The moment I hear the locks click, I throw myself out of the car and slam the door. I storm down the path, surrounded by identical brick units, until guilt seizes me, and I turn back to say a proper goodbye.

But Nick has already left.

Leila’s door is unlocked, so I slip in, unnoticed. Deep techno beats vibrate the walls, and a steady thrum of chatter emanates from all sides. All the sounds fill me up, dulling the throb of anger in my chest. I climb over all the spilled cups and pizza boxes on the floor. Then I cross my arms in the middle of the lounge room, eyes falling to the neat folds of tea towels on the kitchen bench, the precise angle of the couch cushions. There are traces of a tidy person underneath all this mess. I feel for Leila’s mum right now.

So, this is a high school party. I hover. No one looks at me. In the distance, a swarm of people envelops Leila. Priya and Lily huddle off in a corner, and I have a pathetic urge to run over to them, but I have no idea what I would do after that. I haven’t really given them a reason to care about talking to me – or the sense that I care about talking to them.

It occurs to me then that I basically don’t know anyone else here. I know all their names. I know the way they dress at school, which ones talk in class and which ones smoke behind the gardening shed. But I’ve been too preoccupied to speak to most of them. I’ve always had Cathy around. Maybe a lot of my progress here was really just holding her hand, letting her drag me around, letting her use me.

That’s not my voice. No, no, no.

‘Astrid!’ Connor says from the kitchen, and I can tell he’s already drunk, even though it’s only just after 2 pm. ‘Want one?’ He brandishes some kind of pineapple abomination at me.

‘Sure.’ Anything. Anything at all.

He grins at me and pours some alcohol from an alarming series of half-empty bottles. With a chaotic shake that compounds the stickiness of the kitchen bench surface, he finishes his work and jams a paper straw into it.

Mum would love him.

‘Oi!’ Connor calls out to the indifferent masses. ‘Who’s 18? You need to buy me more tequila.’

Okay, maybe not.

I smile awkwardly at him, taking a slurp of the drink. It’s almost unbearably sweet and somehow reminds me of throwing up tropical juice when I was seven and had a super gross stomach bug, but I am an expert at hiding these kinds of feelings, so I take another swig and tell him it’s good. It is good, because it distracts me from all the other feelings – the ones beyond words.

An hour later, the mid-afternoon light is softening over the dancing bodies outside, where the techno beat still throbs. I still have no way to reach Leila, who is enveloped in those comfortable, beautiful people outside. I still have no way home. But Connor is giving me his full attention. It’s just us two weirdos on our little weirdo island. I kind of like it. It’s an escape, just for now.

He leans across the kitchen table. ‘I wanna be a pilot,’ he says. ‘But I feel like an imposter even saying that. I’ve never even said it out loud.’

‘I know you will,’ I say, and even though (or maybe because) I think he might be too drunk to remember, I add, ‘You know, I want to be behind a sound desk. I’ve never said that out loud, either.’

I imagine those sound waves reverberating through the room, leaving a ghost light on for that future I hope will one day, impossibly, be mine to discover.

‘You’re cool,’ Connor says, rocking back and forth in his chair. I wish he’d stop that because my heart leaps into my mouth every time.

‘I’m really not.’

‘It’s like the way you never wear makeup,’ he says. ‘You’re so real.’

It’s a compliment; I can tell. But I hurt. I hurt on behalf of people like Leila and Nick, who are definitely real. I hurt on behalf of the version of me that was free to find out whether I like it.

‘So,’ he says, ‘are you going to the formal with anyone?’

‘No.’ This is out of nowhere. ‘Well, I mean …’

‘Would you, um, like to go together?’

I have literally never had a single thought about the formal – other than a brief sideways glance at the invitation, which was mailed to my house in all its ridiculous silver glory, seemingly made for someone completely different. So my mind goes blank. I try to wake it up again.

‘Actually, it’s fine. I don’t want to know,’ he says. Reality rushes back and I am truly mortified. I’ve sat here too long, staring at him, without even answering his question. ‘It’s a good thing for me to learn how to be alone. This is so awful, but I thought having a crush on someone else meant that my relationship was over.’ To my horror, his eyes fill. ‘Now I just miss her.’

‘Oh, Connor, hey,’ I say, placing a cautious arm over him.

He pushes me away. ‘It’s okay. This isn’t about you.’

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I can still listen, though.’

He shakes his head. ‘The absolute last thing I want to do in life is make a girl uncomfortable.’ There’s a pain behind these words that must come from somewhere else. I wish I could fix it, but I know I can’t. Like those letters carved into a tree, I know there are things we just have to grow around.

We hug it out in a fog of coconut and pineapple alcohol until he pulls away, wiping his eyes. ‘Please don’t tell anyone I cried like that,’ he says.

He teaches me how to pinkie-swear, which is something I already knew from the second grade, but I don’t tell him that.

‘Astrid! You made it!’ Leila bursts back in through the door, her hair dripping all over the tiles, a towel wrapped around her that’s already soaked through. Connor and I both blink at her like we’ve forgotten we were at a party. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t even say hello,’ Leila’s saying. ‘Come on, at least come swimming with me.’

Then one of my hands is in hers. She’s grabbed Connor’s hand, too, I tell myself. This is just a friendly gesture. Stop thinking. Stop thinking. Stop thinking.

‘Nah,’ Connor says. ‘I’m too far gone. The table is my friend.’

He slides out of her grip and paws at the table. Leila rolls her eyes at him. ‘Can you believe him?’ she says to me. ‘Does this every time. This is why I don’t drink.’

My hand is still in hers. She squeezes it and I tense.

‘Well?’ Leila says, pulling on my hand until I stand up. ‘You can’t come to a pool party and not go in the pool.’

‘I don’t have swimmers.’

‘Oh, yay,’ she says. ‘I finally get to dress you up!’

Even though I know I’m on borrowed time, I follow her to her room.

Ten minutes later, I’m wearing a borrowed pink bikini, bits of me spilling out in all directions, physically and emotionally.

Unperturbed, Leila drags me out the door of her unit and across the pavement, weaving around the Saturday scenes of kids riding scooters around the circular driveway. On the ground are amazing chalk drawings that must be hers. I picture her riding her bike around here with her younger siblings and neighbours whooping and giggling behind. It’s brighter here because of her.

The pool is empty. Leila pulls me through the gate and lets go of my hand long enough to drop her towel. I try not to ask myself whether she’s waited for everyone else to leave the pool, whether she’s still embarrassed to be seen with me. A splash of freezing water startles me out of my overthinking. She splashes me again and again, a wild grin spreading over her face.

‘Hey!’ I yelp.

‘Come on!’ she calls.

I check again that I’ve fully done up the knots of this bikini.

‘Hurry up,’ she urges.

I tiptoe over to the edge, aware of the units with windows facing in our direction, tacky floral curtains drifting out in the cooling breeze. I cross my arms tightly across my chest. The water is freezing. I edge into a seated position. My feet distort in the water, tinted blue by the painted concrete. I take one more breath. Then I slide in. The cold smacks the breath right out of me.

‘Oh my god,’ I breathe, as Leila paddles over to me.

‘Right?’

‘You like this?’ I scoff.

‘It makes me feel alive.’ She’s dancing around me in the water, but I think I catch her teeth chattering.

‘Well, I feel like I might die.’

She’s drifted closer to me. ‘You should keep moving, then.’

Before I can overthink it, I flip over in a somersault, water going up my nose, and I emerge choking and sniffing and wondering why on earth I thought that was going to look cool or smooth. I blink back tears from the chlorine now burning up in my nose.

Leila reaches out and pats me on the back. Each point she touches comes up in goosebumps. ‘That’s not what I meant, but okay.’ It’s intercut with watery laughs. Her body is distorted under the surface, so I can’t read her.

But then her hand links with mine again. Under the water, it’s different, closer somehow. I squeeze her hand back. I plunge into the water, but I don’t let go, taking a precious second away from all the sound waves above. She pulls me closer, and I surface, gasping softly as all the atmosphere returns – the sparrows, the crickets, the curtains above us, her breathing beside me. We’re standing inches apart in the water.

‘Is this what you want?’ she asks me softly.

‘What?’ My heart quickens. I can’t dare to think about it.

‘Do you want … Ah, you’re so innocent.’ She sinks under the water, and she drifts away from me.

It feels like forever until she surfaces, and when she does, it takes all my strength to stand there next to her. She’s fallen silent, the gap between us feeling suddenly bigger.

I have to say it. ‘Do you … uhhh … want me to kiss you?’

Her mouth falls open and for a second, I want to delete myself from all her memories.

Then she smiles. ‘Here I was thinking I’d have to be the brave one.’

The space between us closes as she wraps her arm around my waist. I copy the gesture. Her skin is soft, and our bodies are together. She presses her wet lips against my ear, and I shudder. ‘I’ve wanted to kiss you for a long time.’

‘You can,’ I whisper.

She leans in towards me. Our lips touch and her mouth opens. My heart races. I should have practised. But it’s too late now. I close my eyes and follow my instincts, finding them there, waiting for me, in relief.

Goosebumps burst out all over my skin. They’re not like before, in the pool. These ones are made of pure fear. I’m in Leila’s mum’s passenger seat and Leila’s left her own party to drive me back to the school. I smell of fake vanilla body wash and my neck still carries the ghosts of Leila’s soft fingers caressing my hair under the warmth of her hairdryer. All these sensations – they belong to someone else, someone who doesn’t need an accomplice to drive them back to school for a fake excursion.

You can’t fake your way into a relationship. Or whatever this is – was – might have been – if only I could tell the difference between love and fear. My eyes overflow.

‘Astrid? Are you okay?’ Leila pulls over into the emergency lane.

Everything I feel is beyond words.

‘Did I … did I upset you?’ She reaches a tentative hand towards me.

‘No, no, no. Just cold,’ I manage, turning from her to hide my tears. I wipe my face with my shoulder and wait in the silence until Leila turns the car back on.

She drives the rest of the way without speaking, each gesture clinical and absent. When we arrive, she unlocks the doors wordlessly. Her phone flashes and she types with one hand, keeping the screen obscured. A lump grows in my throat, silencing me completely.

I get out of the car. She doesn’t say anything then, either. Even the world outside the car feels muted, swallows me up into the landscape. I look for any kind of sign from Leila, but she is still buried in her phone. So I shut the door, and turn away.

Then I run. Away from her.

I sink into the bath that night, so heavy beneath all these eco-friendly soap bubbles with their sweet orange aroma that is supposedly derived from actual oranges. Out in the kitchen, where my name is still erased from the whereabouts board, my parents discuss the week’s meal plan as though I am not here. While I’m frozen out, in Dad’s world, I am not here. But here is still the only place I can be. Even though the lies I told today gave me everything I wanted, the person I lied to the most was myself. Cathy wasn’t there. Now Leila won’t be there, either. I wash away the fake vanilla and the strawberry ice cream and plunge back into lukewarm reality.

‘I know what you’ve been up to.’ On Monday morning, when we take off down the street, this is the first thing I hear Mum say.

‘What do you mean?’ I’m still groggy, shaking the sleep from myself, heavy from everything’s that’s happened.

She keeps her eyes trained on the road, her lips in a line. I can’t tell how much trouble I am in. She says, ‘Do you think I’ve never been seventeen?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Do you think I’ve never been hungover?’

‘I was just tired.’

‘You smelled of alcohol when I picked you up. If it had been your father—’

‘No.’

She pulls over in the usual makeup spot, unbuckles her seatbelt, and stares at me. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said no. No, you don’t get to guilt trip me like this about lying. You’re lying, too.’ The words are spilling out of me now, the anger from Saturday still not gone, but spreading. ‘I know about your bag in the shed.’

The colour drains from her face. I’m shocked at the power that this simple sentence has over her. ‘How did you—’

‘I found it myself,’ I say. ‘And you know what? I shouldn’t have had to.’ There’s a hotness behind my eyes, but I don’t let it turn to tears.

‘After everything we’ve been through, I didn’t think it was fair to you …’ Mum’s voice trails off, then she tries again, ‘I wanted to be sure …’

I stare out the window, and I’m back at the music conservatorium, alone with the impersonal glass. ‘Mum, are you leaving without me?’

She reaches for me, a desperate expression on her face that I’ve never seen before. ‘How could you say that? I would never, ever leave you there.’

I pull the school jacket tighter around my shoulders, but it does nothing to stop me from shaking.

Mum is crying now, but I can’t reach out to her. I shrink into myself, my head in my hands, while she speaks. ‘A long time ago, when your dad was still at the shop, I tried to speak to a counsellor about him, and they told me to leave first. It made me so angry, like I was getting blamed for everything all over again. Did you know that family courts sometimes order children to go to their abusive parent’s house on their own?’

‘I’m not a child anymore,’ I say tonelessly.

‘That’s why I’m trying now, but I can’t do anything right away. You know how he is. I’ve been taking all the records from the filing cabinet – you know, the things we’ll need if we leave – and photocopying them one by one, and even then, I’ve been so scared he’ll find out. I didn’t want to burden you with all that.’

The silence is heavy. The streets outside are still and empty. It feels like we are the only two people in this suburban world, and that we’ll be stuck here forever.

I drift through the schoolyard, at a loss. I don’t want to see Cathy, after she left me alone at the conservatorium. I don’t want to see Leila, after I left her alone, too. And I don’t trust myself not to spill out more words now that I’ve started this morning with Mum. So, I walk as fast as I can without running, trying to burn some of this furious energy, so that I can decide what I will actually do about these people I care for, and all these feelings about them that frighten me so much.

I do a pointless circuit that gravitates towards that more neglected end of the school, where the woodworking classrooms are. That’s when I see the two silhouettes leaning in a confidential discussion, one bent towards the other, their features obscured by the sunlight. It’s only when I burst into the classroom where they’re standing that they take form.

I hear only these words, ‘I need to know she’s not like that, you know?’

Then Leila and Cathy halt their conversation. Neither speaks to me. Neither moves. But it’s all so clear. The whispers are about me.

The anger flares in me again, and I run from it. I run from them.

Walking between afternoon classes that day, I am still a ghost. Neither Cathy nor Leila crossed paths with me all day, with Cathy having disappeared from the music block when I drifted past at morning tea, and again at lunch. Even now, I can’t help looking across the bustling walkway, hoping Cathy will materialise and erase the unease that’s clutching my stomach. But, even if she wanted to, I don’t think she could. Not after Saturday. Not after this morning.

‘Cathy’s done this before, you know,’ says Lily, joining me on the path to history class, following my gaze across to the music room.

From beside her, Priya snorts, the unkind sound jarring me. ‘You put up with too much from her. We all do.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

‘You know what? I’ll tell you,’ Priya says, wedging herself between me and Lily. ‘I was worried you’re kind of, um, too sensitive, but you need to hear this. Cathy does this. She ditched us for years before you were around, then she comes skipping back into our group like it never happened. She thinks she’s better than us.’

‘I don’t know if that’s …’ But I’m too upset to defend Cathy.

‘I’m telling you, there’s a pattern. Back in Year 10, she wanted to do everything with us. But then, as soon as Matt showed an interest in her, she was gone.’ Priya snaps her fingers. ‘We weren’t exciting enough anymore.’

I can’t say anything, my gaze fixed on my heavy school shoes. Priya puts a hand on my shoulder, playing the older, wiser peer. ‘Listen, Astrid, if my experience here has taught me anything, it’s that people don’t change.’

You can’t outgrow anything here.

When I arrive in the assembly hall for tech crew duty the next day, the first thing I see is a supremely unhelpful poster advertising the talent quest finale, the gold-lettered date now only a few days away. Cathy and I still haven’t spoken, despite a whole other day passing. I’ve barely seen her, and when I have, I’ve turned the other way, afraid that the emotions bubbling under the surface would spill out of me. Even though I’m hurt, I’m still protecting her. This fact just makes me sadder.

I’m too early, and there’s nothing to do until the other tech helpers arrive. I’m alone. All the chairs are stacked in one corner, soon to be filled with my classmates, whose laughs and shouts will ring out around the room until they are made to fall silent. The notion that I could be one of them feels further away than ever. So far, this same heavy feeling has accompanied my entire experience of adulthood, like everything is so much harder to change than I thought.

Cathy strides in through the front doors, which are still supposed to be locked. She swings her tote bag around as she closes the door behind her, almost crashing it into a wall. I think about using that second to run from her, but I don’t this time.

‘Hi,’ she says, approaching me, my hurt reviving as I remember her bent towards Leila in that conspiratorial whisper.

‘Hi.’ I’m leaning against the back wall, unable to retreat any further.

‘Did you forget? I’m singing today – the anthem.’ She makes a vomiting gesture.

‘Oh, yeah.’ I shove my hands into my pockets, wishing the rest of me could follow. ‘You don’t have to do anything, and there’s no time to rehearse. I’ll set up your microphone. You can just come back when everyone else does.’

‘Can I … Can I help you test it or something?’ Her hands are in her pockets, too.

‘Fine.’ I head over towards where all the miscellaneous AV stuff is kept.

She follows. ‘Hey, I know you’re angry at me.’

‘I’m not.’ It’s a strong word. Words can get out of your control before you know it. Just ask my dad.

‘Don’t bullshit me.’

‘I’m not.’ I am. Lying again.

She sighs. ‘I didn’t say anything bad about you to Leila, you know.’

There’s an icy feeling in my chest. ‘Great.’

Cathy throws her bag down. Something in it makes a shattering noise. ‘See? You’re angry at me! Just admit it!’

‘I’m not angry,’ I say carefully. ‘I’m just glad you’re alive, seeing as you disappeared on Saturday and left me wondering if you’d died.’

‘You came?’

‘I told you I would be there.’ I am still speaking softly, uncoiling the microphone cable.

‘You said you’d try,’ Cathy says. ‘Then you didn’t hang out with me again. It’s not exactly like I can text you about it.’

The icy feeling sharpens in my chest. ‘I still tried.’ My voice echoes around the empty hall and I feel enclosed by it, frightened of it. ‘I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’ve actually been trying this whole time. I told you things are hard, that my parents are strict, but I am trying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says quietly. ‘It was … It was basically the worst day ever. I broke up with Matt.’

‘Cathy, I’m so sorry.’ My heart squeezes in shame. Of course, she had a reason. Of course she did.

‘I’m not.’ She makes herself at home on the cold basketball flooring, sticking her legs out and turning her head up to the ceiling, where the unused basketball hoops hover far above us. ‘I never wanted to go to the conservatorium. That was his idea. And you know, since he left, I’ve spent this whole year trying to re-evaluate my life while everyone else kept pushing me.’

I drop to the ground next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s okay,’ I whisper.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she says.

‘I missed you too,’ And I mean it. ‘Are you okay?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘But I will be. Are you okay?’

‘No, but I will be.’

‘So, you do still wanna kick ass at the talent quest finals?’

I squeeze her tight.

Outside the library before the next homework club, I gather every ounce of my strength. I know I can’t let another school day end without talking to Leila, but I also don’t know what to say. There are no words for this feeling. It’s deeper than my words, or at least older than them. All I know is that it’s the feeling when someone swears, or they drop something and it smashes, or when there’s disinfectant lingering on a kitchen surface …

Leila arrives then, with her blue bag shrugged high on her shoulder. Seeing her, I’m struck all over again by how true it is that I want to know her, that I wish I could kiss her again … and how true it is that I can never have this relationship I know I want so much.

She pushes through the library door, and I sprint after her. ‘Leila, wait.’

She pivots towards me, but stays at a distance, gazing at me with an expression clouded with hurt. My heart beats faster, and I steady myself on the security scanner near the exit, bracing against my own hurt.

‘I’m sorry. I know it was strange, the way I was …’ I trail off. It feels like she’s not there with me.

Leila glances towards a cluster of our classmates approaching. She shakes her head.

My heart races with all the useless energy that won’t stop this hurt for either of us.

It’s the feeling when you’ve done something wrong.

It’s the feeling when someone locks you out.

On the night before the talent quest, Dad hasn’t moved into the next stage of the cycle, but my name has returned to the where-abouts board. I am still here. Dad says his first words to me in over two weeks, asking if I’m ready for the performance. Even though everything is so frightening, so uncertain, I am ready. I give him my best performance: I smile.

Students converge on the ancient little bus that will transport them all from school to the talent quest finale venue. Everyone except me. Dad didn’t sign the permission form for me to go with them. He insisted I should go with him and Mum.

I move from foot to foot restlessly, hoping that, in a few brief hours, I’ll be dancing again with Cathy. Even though, this time, winning won’t give us any more time together.

‘I wish I had a ritual for shows,’ Cathy says, her hands shoved in her pockets as she ambles closer to the bus.

‘Like how some artists ask for only green M&Ms before a show?’ I shuffle forward, along with her.

‘Yeah, like that, but helpful.’ She edges up in the queue, as Priya thumps on board the bus, not even looking at us. Today, we’re just rivals.

‘I’ve got nothing.’

Cathy wraps me up in a tight squeeze. ‘There,’ she says. ‘How about that?’

I throw my arms around her back, and she intensifies the hug even more. It doesn’t feel like the embrace we shared in the qualifier, but I keep hoping that this is the path back to that feeling. ‘I’ll … make sure that … when you’re … super famous … I … come to every one … of your shows … to be your rag doll … forever.’ I exaggerate each syllable like she’s squeezing the life out of me, ending with a dramatic splutter.

She erupts into a boisterous giggle. But I can’t smile back.

The warmth from Cathy’s squeezing goodbye hug fades with the day’s sunlight. I wrap my own arms around myself, but this does nothing other than make me feel smaller. Restless unease propels me back into the shadowy school grounds. In front of the bathroom mirrors, I pull the purple dress on over my head. I try to feel embraced by it, but alone here under the flickering lights, I’m smothered.

My parents are twenty minutes late.

The bluesy bass notes radiate from the sedan as it screams into the pickup zone. I throw myself into the backseat. Showing this kind of urgency in front of Dad is dangerous, but I can’t help it. I’ve lost my ability to pretend.

‘Hi,’ I venture.

‘Did she leave you here on your own again?’ Dad doesn’t start driving. I want to scream.

‘Cathy?’ I say the forbidden word with caution. ‘She left with everyone else. The bus left on time.’ I can’t help myself.

Mum, in her favourite blazer, turns to me and transmits a warning that would normally freeze my words in my throat.

‘Don’t you worry, my star. You’re gonna get there with time to spare. I’ll do whatever it takes, not like your so-called friend.’ Dad looks back at me, even though his face is red, and something must have happened between him and Mum, and the whole thing is a lie. He reaches out for my hand, but I can’t. I can’t. I move away, just a few millimetres, out of his reach. He squeezes my knee instead, and I stiffen.

Then the jerk of the accelerator knocks me back in the seat and we are racing, streaming by the cheery yellow school buses and the little kids on their bright bikes, and I pray that none of them swerve out. The seatbelt digs into my bare collarbone, and I lean forward against it. A light turns red as we fly through it and out onto the highway, a flash following us – maybe a speed camera – no time to tell. The car revs harder and harder, drowning out the mournful guitars, as we descend onto the highway. He’s done this before, but never like this.

‘Slow down!’ I can’t stop myself.

The car squeals into the emergency stopping lane. Cars and trucks hurtle past us, blaring in through the open windows. I roll mine up and turn to him, still shaken. ‘What are you doing?’ I know perfectly well what he’s doing.

Dad doesn’t answer me. He raises both hands in the air in faux indignation. Then he turns the music up. He has frozen me out again. Next to him, Mum sits silent.

Anger digs into my chest. I throw off my seatbelt. ‘So, you’re not talking to me again?’ I’m shaking, just at the weight of naming what’s going on. This is against every rule. But I keep going, yelling over the music, ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering with any of this. I’m already going to miss the start of the show because of you.’

Neither of my parents respond. There is nothing in the rulebook for this. So, I unlock my car door. I am engulfed by the dirty air. I slam the door. The lock clicks behind me. Ragged bushland stretches out to my left and right. Parched leaves fall beneath my feet. Through the passenger window, I see Mum’s face. I see her gesturing towards me. But, before anything else can happen, the car screams away in a mass of other screaming cars.

I stagger forwards, facing away from home. There is only this in-between space, this neglected grassland between the emergency lane and the bush beyond. So I walk, the rhythm of my footsteps filling my mind in the place of everything I cannot yet process. A dead possum lies on the side of the road, run over and forgotten, little tufts of fur strewn around the black tarmac. I walk closer and closer as all the cars drive past, the only witness to this innocent creature’s suffering at the hands of someone who couldn’t slow down. It did nothing to deserve this. And it is for this that the sadness wells up inside me, overflowing beyond my walls, the tears falling on the long, wild grass.

Pieces of litter drift past on the wind. The tears could start up again, so I stare hard at the train timetable. There are only two trains out of this station: one north, one south. I know that if I can just get to the right suburb, I’ll find it – that big convention centre by the side of the main road. I even vaguely remember seeing it out the window when we picked Nick up from various debating contests held there over the years, back when I had that reason for leaving my postcode, a passenger on my sibling’s road to freedom. But I was never really paying attention, because those journeys weren’t ever really mine.

I read the list of stations. But none of the stops match the name of the suburb where I’m supposed to be going. I’ve been trapped for so long I don’t know how these place names connect, or whether I’m going north or south or some other direction entirely. My heart races and the station spins around me until I plunge onto a defaced metal bench – the slurs screaming out at me.

I can’t do anything on my own.

But I can’t stay here. I have to try. With a vague look back towards the highway, I commit to the northern direction, trying to appear like I know what I’m doing. This is how things have been for me – a series of disoriented guesses.

Across the tracks, on the south platform, a group of teenagers congregate. One of them checks the timetable. They know exactly where they’re going. It’s like everyone else has a map – or at least a phone.

The tracks separate us, and I’m invisible. But their sounds reach me – the whooping, the giggles – and the laughter reminds me of Leila.

Then the train sweeps into the station. A digital voice announces its arrival and destination as the yellow door slides open, revealing an array of people studiously avoiding looking out into the nondescript suburb – or at the sad girl in the purple dress. I climb on board, passing the ticket machines with a twinge of fear. I have never stolen before, but I am stealing onto this train.

I just hope it takes me further away from home.

Inside, opposite me, a family sits close together, sharing a digital game of Monopoly on their phones. I smile to myself at their innocent joy, at their ability to ignore the rest of the world. With all the strength in me, I will myself into this normal family, with their nappies stuffed unevenly into the pram, with their youngest child touching the floor without consequence, with the oldest child given free rein over a gaming console, with all the devices. It’s only when I exit the train that I smell alcohol, and I wonder if anywhere is as safe as it might look.

To the left and right, the houses look nearly identical. After exiting the train in a suburb that I vaguely recalled as close to where I’m going, I thought I might follow my ears to a noisier, busier road – or just anywhere I recognise – but I was wrong.

Brick houses extend in all directions, their jagged wooden fences and neat spring gardens and basketball hoops deceiving me as I wind through street after street, all of which are named after cultivated flowers like azaleas and poinsettias. Those flowers circle around me, blending into each other until I can no longer tell if they’re repeating themselves.

I cross my arms in front of me and walk faster. The houses and the flowers follow me. Shadows lengthen and join up all around me.

Somewhere, in some direction, the stage will be lit. The performers will huddle backstage as their own whoops and giggles echo around them, reinforcing their excitement. My name will be the only one unchecked on the roll. No one else would miss this.

But I am missing it.

A man walking home from the shops points down the street named after hibiscuses and then hesitates and asks if he should call anyone. I shake my head and keep walking, ignoring the fearful, small voice in my mind that calls after him, asking him to protect me from these growing shadows, and from the father who is so unpredictable that he would hold my hand and call me a star and then throw us into the traffic, uncaring if we live or die.

I’m afraid.

It is dark when the never-ending suburbia gives way to the major road, the one I’ve been looking for. My stomach lurches as the venue appears up ahead, on the opposite side of the road. The moment there’s a break in the traffic, I hurl myself across the road.

I’ve made it.

In the orange lights of the carpark, panting, I come to my senses. There is no school bus. There are no people. My feet ache. When I break the walking rhythm and climb the venue stairs, it’s like seasickness. It’s too late.

I rush into a bathroom, in a cloud of sweat mixed with body spray: a ghost of those lost hours. Someone’s left a bright pink brush beside the sink. It could be Cathy’s …

Cathy sitting in the auditorium, playing it cool, checking her phone; Cathy, tapping the beat in colourful heels, humming her melody with perfect pitch; Cathy, waiting backstage, her pink tulle dress colourless in the darkness, as the stage, illuminated, sits empty …

I wash my face in the sink until the cold water drips down the front of my dress and my hair grows heavy on the sides of my face. Through my reddened eyes, everything blurs as I wander back outside.

The cool air-conditioning in the lobby sends goosebumps up and down my arms. Lounge music is playing, the kind you might be forced to listen to while on hold with your power company. The clash between this inert scene and how I feel inside makes me want to scream.

Through my sore eyes, I spot a young man picking up the remnants of the talent quest, the trampled papers with the order of events and the names of all the finalists who must have left half an hour ago or more. And me.

I stumble towards the faded red velvet chairs plonked unevenly in the middle of this room, throwing my bag down and sinking into the one closest to me with deep relief that my feet are no longer being crushed by each step. I pull off my sneakers. The blisters bubble out in the spaces where the shoes dug into my skin.

I cannot walk back to the station. Maybe I will be here forever.

‘Astrid?’

It’s Ms Torres, dragging a couple of heavy-looking black boxes on a trolley behind her. I put up the walls, so I don’t cry with gratitude.

‘We were wondering …’ She stops herself, obviously catching sight of me properly. ‘Are you okay?’

I might be shaking. All I say is, ‘Is Cathy okay?’

‘Oh,’ Ms Torres says, looking down at her work boots. ‘I didn’t catch her before she left.’

‘Can you call my mum?’

We wait on the steps outside the venue. I try to insist that Ms Torres should leave, but she shakes her head.

‘School policy,’ she says. ‘Them’s the rules.’

It’s an unseasonably warm night. There’s a bit of fog, and the world distorts, the streetlights and car headlights melting together so that nothing is clear anymore. The colourful dregs of an iced soft drink slosh back and forth in Ms Torres’ lap, as she answers a few text messages, her hand almost knocking her drink several times. If she’s upset to be stuck here with me, she doesn’t show it. As always, she’s just stable.

At one stage, some calculations pass through her mind, taking the form of a little furrow in her brow and some discreet sideways glances at me. The last thing I’d want is to have to tell her anything. It would make it all too real. I need to give her something else to think about, so she can still feel like she took good care of me. Teachers must report things. I must contain the damage.

‘It was stage fright,’ I lie, and then a small truth wells in me. ‘I was just too afraid.’

‘We all get scared sometimes,’ she says. ‘You’re gonna be okay. Next time, though, if you’ll let me say so, you should probably tell Cathy.’

She leaves the spotlight off me, and I stay wordless.

When the car door opens into this near-empty space, my heart squeezes. Behind Mum is a matte silver Mercedes, someone still silhouetted in there, their headlights casting us in a strange misty spotlight like it’s a high-budget music performance. But this is reality.

I hesitate for one more moment in the safety of Ms Torres’ shadow, even as she stands and stretches, keeping her distance. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, and she shakes her head, walking away.

Then it’s Mum instead, racing up the venue stairs. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her hair flies around her like a halo. ‘I’m so sorry it took me so long,’ she’s saying. ‘He wouldn’t let me come for you. He hid the keys.’

I hold her tight.

Thirty minutes later, I’m wrapped in one of my oldest coats, much too hot but grateful to be a little less exposed, barefoot and dazed in the dinner crowd at a service station. My knees are weak with the weight of what I’ve done. On the drive here, it sank in – all those interlocking decisions – like signing up for talent quest, like saying all those curse words, like stepping out of the car. I’ve been heading towards this moment for months, and I don’t know what happens next. I still have nowhere else to go but home. And now I’m terrified of going back there.

Mum and Maria – solicitor, workplace colleague and Mercedes owner – are milling around behind me. Maria has managed to calm my mum down, somehow, reviving a workday debate about a contentious email chain. It’s like the most stressful thing going on here is a passive-aggressive reply-all. It’s disorienting. It’s a bad dream.

I blink up at the synthetic food photographs rotating through the electric screen. They make me seasick again.

‘The meat-free burger is nice here,’ Mum says, squeezing my arm.

‘How do you know?’ I ask.

She smiles knowingly at me. It’s a shock. Mum never eats takeaway. Mum also never smiles now – not when things are about to explode. We both know what we will walk into when we peel ourselves off Maria’s leather seats and skulk home, back into number nineteen. Her mouth should be pressed into that fine, angry line – especially when I have not even apologised for all my reckless actions.

But instead, here we are.

I glimpse Mum properly then, standing so upright next to her colleague – her friend. She is such a long way from that shaky first morning in the car, as she confidently chooses her greasy comfort food. I guess she’s been learning how to be normal, too.

These two women, in their shiny sheer silvers and magentas, dig into their burgers, using hands and dirty napkins to wipe tomato and mayonnaise from their faded makeup. Crumbs fall onto the sticky service station table and the ever-present mobile phones. I’m still transfixed by this version of my mother, and for about five minutes, I don’t touch my food at all.

‘I’m going to call my husband. You should eat, honey,’ Maria says, standing up and walking off with her late-night latte in hand.

‘Are you okay?’ I whisper to Mum right away.

‘Are you?’ she asks.

‘No, Mum. I’m not.’ The tears bubble up again. ‘I’m scared of going home.’

I’m shivering now, despite the thick coat. Tears well in Mum’s eyes, too, and she pushes her chair against mine, hugging me like she’s still much bigger than me, like everything will be okay. The world is drowned out around us, though people must be staring. An impulse to run to the bathroom flickers – and then fades. This one time, in this fluorescent dining room of all places, I don’t need to hide. Let them all look.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ Mum repeats.

‘Please, Mum, don’t be sorry.’

‘I’ll never let it happen again.’

She squeezes me tighter, but I pull away. ‘Don’t say that, Mum.’

‘I can,’ she says. ‘We’re going to leave.’

I shake my head. In my mind, I am crammed into that garden shed, holding onto the overnight bag, alone. ‘Why didn’t you bring the bag, then? Why aren’t we leaving now?’

‘He’ll find us,’ she says. ‘Leaving is the most dangerous time. We have to do it right.’

Maria hovers nearby, and Mum gestures for her to join us. All the air goes out of me again, and I turn my blotchy face away from them, trying to bury myself into the burger, into the clinical smoothness of the artificial bleached bread.

‘It’s okay, sweetie,’ Maria says, patting my hand like I might bite. ‘I know all about it. I’ve been there.’

Maria looks so ordinary, so well put together. Knowing that she might have also lived through something like life at number nineteen gives me a strange twinge of hope. But I don’t know how to feel when I think about how clear it is that Mum confided in her, but not in me.

‘He’s putting you in danger,’ Mum says. ‘Things are getting worse. Maria has a beach house near my parents. When the time is right – when he won’t realise – we’re going to go there, where he’ll never find us. And from there, we’re going to start again. I already have a plan.’

For the first time, hearing those words, I let myself believe that this might be real.

In the backseat, I clutch Mum’s work phone, open one of the social media sites on her internet browser, and search for Cathy’s name. Just as I expect, it replicates down the browser window. In identical clip after identical clip dated hours ago, minutes ago, seconds ago, her face lights up in red and purple, her pixelated pink tulle figure repeating – she’s taken over our high-school social-media microcosm completely. I tap on a play icon and wait for the internet connection to stagger to life.

‘So, here I am. It’s not what you expected, right?’ Cathy’s holding onto the microphone with one hand, gesturing with the other like she does when she’s singing, but she’s almost yelling into it. I steel myself for what’s ahead, the tightness in my chest growing with each echoing word.

Whoever’s filming can’t hold their phone steady, as though each word is physically bombarding them, too. ‘I’m supposed to come up here, but I’m not supposed to speak to you,’ Cathy’s saying. ‘No, I’m supposed to sing to you, with nice, open lyrics you’re free to interpret – or even better, no words at all – so you can go home thinking, wow, that girl is such a good example of … I don’t even know … cute high school coupledom or hard work or whatever, as long as it’s nice and shareable and makes for a good promotional picture for the school.’

Cathy pauses to breathe, her face washed blank under the spotlight. ‘As soon as I go off this stage, I cease existing for you. That’s how I can be in Mr Williams’ woodworking class for two years and he still calls me Kalinda, but you all remember the TV ad I did before I was old enough to know algebra. That’s who you want me to be. So that’s all you see.’

Another face appears at the edge of the curtain. It’s Ms Torres, I think.

‘I’m tired of faking! I’m not your Morticia!’ She glares at the tentatively approaching Ms Torres, and speed-walks away from her, as far as the microphone cable will take her. ‘I don’t even like musical theatre! I never did!’ She’s walked right out of the spotlight now. ‘That was Matt, and for the record, he never asked me if I liked it, either. All he did was push me into things and follow me around and keep me away from my friends and interrogate me about everyone I talked to, while you were all too busy romanticising the shiny stage couple to see that I was hurting. Well, I’ve been on that treadmill so long that I don’t know why I was ever running in the first place.’

She doesn’t drop the microphone. She places it gently back on the stand before Ms Torres can reach her. Then she walks off the stage of her own accord, the clicking of her heels erased by distance.

Under the suburban streetlights, Maria plays a Halsey album and edges us closer to number nineteen. Even though I’ve gotten carsick, I don’t look up. My head spins, thinking of how my life is out of my control. Everything feels like too much. All I can think about is the grainy face of my friend on the stage.

Since I last looked, a bunch of new share posts flood the social media site, including an impassioned statement from Lily. ‘From now on, I’m standing up for myself like this,’ she says, among a persistent line of fire emojis. ‘If I had a quarter of this bravery, I’d die happy. Go, girl!’

But, even in Lily’s post, the video’s freeze-frame shows the despair in Cathy’s eyes – as though she can hear the twee words like inspiration and bravery hovering above her, which so strongly contradict her request to walk away from the spotlight. I should have been there for her tonight.

I type her number into Mum’s phone, but I can’t bring myself to call.

Our car is in the driveway, with all the doors flung open. Dad’s still home. Maria insists on driving around the block a few times, her husband nearly silent on the other end of the Bluetooth – for safety, they say, but I don’t know when I will feel safe again.

My heart thumps as Mum turns the key in the front door. Dad is in the kitchen, standing over an overnight bag packed hastily, spices and cereal boxes strewn around where he’s searched for his tea bags and oat milk – and the kombucha, which leaks, unattended, onto the bench and floor below.

‘Ellen,’ he says coldly. ‘Find me the granola.’

It’s like I’m a ghost. I stare at Dad, and he refuses to meet my gaze.

I’m frozen out.

Even as my head spins with stress, my heart flickers with sympathy for this man who wants to control things so much, but who doesn’t know where the cereals are in his own house. Part of me wants to run to him, to embrace him, to tell him how sorry I am that it came to this.

But I know that part of me too well now. This is what I feel when I’m at school and someone’s lip twitches, when Cathy’s shoulders slump with disappointment, when someone like Leila locks me out and leaves me alone with my regrets. This is the fear that’s made everything so heavy. It lives here with us, behind that perfect concrete facade, behind even the most well-constructed walls.

I take one more look at my parents and head straight into my room, sliding down to the floor, my back against the closed door. The shaking has come back now, and I nestle into my old coat. It smells like our old laundry detergent – bright like clean linen. That artificial fragrance leaks into this place, displacing my bedroom from time and space, until I can imagine it belonging to someone else – a future person who will take my place once we leave here, curling up into a fresh and tidy bed, knowing nothing of the fear that once lived here.

Dad, striding down the hallway, proclaims, ‘I should have never married you, Helen. We were bound to have kids like this.’

‘Cliffy …’ Mum’s back playing her usual role. I know she has to, but it’s so hard to hear now.

‘She’s turned out just like you,’ he adds, in a soft tone that makes me hold my breath. ‘You should go drop her off at that feral kid’s house, so she can roll in the dirt and yell like a banshee.’

The putdowns start then – all those adjectives that blur into each other like the words in the bathroom stalls and on the public benches and in the school grounds and in my room that terrible morning. I know it’s the last thing Mum wants, but those slurs still work on her, and her sniffles echo down the hallway, falling away from me, even as Dad’s heavy footsteps stamp closer.

I am alone, unable to take away the pain of anyone I love.

Dad pauses outside my door, yells through it. ‘I have no daughter.’

Pulling my walls down, I let his disembodied voice in, even though it hurts so much to really hear him. I need to feel how wrong these words are; I’ve been running so long that I’m at risk of forgetting why.

It’s in the blue in-between time, when the stars are still out, that I finally give up on pretending to sleep that night. I wrap myself in my scratchy blanket, despite the night’s warmth, so that I can feel embraced. Even though it’s just me and Mum here for now, I tiptoe out to the study nook. Nestling into the office chair, I plug in my laptop. There’s comfort in the near-silent yet predictable whir of its fan, which has accompanied me through so many insomnia episodes like this.

I open Cathy’s social media profile, from which she’s wiped the recurring videos, and everything else, too. It sits blank. Maybe Cathy is still awake too, her tired eyes illuminated by the blue light, as all those repeating words cascade across her feed without her consent.

For a long time, maybe hours, I stare at the blinking cursor in my school email app, with Cathy’s address sitting motionless in the little bar. Even though I was bursting with words before, they have all run dry now. I wonder if this is because, on some level, I know that the last thing my friend needs is my hurt. She has plenty of her own, and it’s all my fault. There’s nothing I can say to her, because even an apology feels selfish.

It’s the houses that come back to me then, in the streets named after the flowers that get farmed and tied up for anniversary bouquets and proposal bouquets and apology bouquets, where I wandered with my aching feet in the dying afternoon light. In Ableton, where I have spent so many sleepless nights, I find comfort in the early morning, crafting sounds that evoke for me all the identical houses, the fences that embrace them, and the structures that keep people silent with their closing and their distancing and their deceptions, like the sprawling entertainer’s decks and the automatic block-out blinds and the painted facades that leave no room for a crack to appear. Still, in a quiet moment, a disembodied voice might echo out between the hedges, or soft and restless footfalls might disrupt the disciplined post-dinner silence. It takes a lot to notice, but once you do, you always will.

When the rising sun hits the window and wakes me up, the first thing I think of is sitting in Cathy’s bedroom that first afternoon long ago, when she told me all those truths about her life. Even from inside those suburban walls, the sun’s warmth permeated everything, and I was so safe, but I’d been too frightened to tell. Maybe, back then, I was closer to what I really wanted than I could have known. I could have reached out and touched it.

I just had to be brave.

The sunlight reflects off the monitor screen, obscuring all the sounds of suburbia. My eyes are unfocused. Beyond this screen, even though there are so many familiar things around me, I can’t make out what anything else is. That’s okay, I think sleepily.

It’s much too early.

So the plan. It’s real. The first step is to drive to my grandparents’ place this morning – in Maria’s Mercedes, just in case. Mum’s parents need to know what’s going to happen. And, until it happens, they need to take care of this linen bag and all the photocopied papers inside it. Mum pulls me out of school for the day, claiming sickness. She lets us do this together.

We are flying down the highway, because we only have until lunchtime, when Dad is liable to show up at Mum’s office, as he has almost every day, even on the mornings after these nights when he threatens to leave. I thought that was love, but now it’s looking a lot like control.

Through my bleary, sleepless eyes, the winding road to the coast brings back tiny snippets of memories. In some of them, there is laughter, car karaoke, games of I Spy; in others, Dad is mimicking my grandparents and their obsession with TV news and single-use plastic wraps.

Mum never laughed.

She’s laughing now, singing along to Adele on the radio. She’s not out of key, like Dad always says, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she was.

‘Why don’t we just keep driving?’ I say, staring out the window at the road signs and neglected rural front yards drifting past us, putting so much distance between us and all those fragments of the past.

‘I’m not pulling you out of school,’ she says, passing me some bright pink chewing gum – the forbidden kind that stains our mouths and fills the car with a sickly strawberry scent. ‘You only have a few weeks left.’

‘But then what?’ I ask. ‘Dad basically never leaves the house. How will we ever get time to pack and get out of there?’

‘I don’t know. Something will happen. He’ll go to a concert. Rob will take him to one of those clean-up days.’

‘He hasn’t done anything like that for months.’ I cross my arms.

‘We won’t go until we have a complete plan. It’s the only way to be safe.’ Mum’s voice has the brick-wall quality of any good lawyer. So, a silence falls over us.

Mum and I never do road trips. I wish I could fill in all the years we missed with this single hour, but the window has long passed, and this silence carries all those long-gone times. My childhood – already legally over – will really end in a few short weeks. We are almost there, and I’m about to have those normal things I so wanted to be part of – like graduation, like formal …

‘I know,’ I say.

Mum turns down the radio. ‘What?’

‘I know when we can leave.’

When a familiar, smartly dressed older woman opens the door, she hugs my mum with no words. The two of them rock back and forth, like how someone would rock a small child to sleep. It’s the sort of embrace that makes a generation fold into a moment. As I stand behind them on the porch, the distant waves crash, and I am small again, picking yellow flowers out of the grass in this little front yard, twisting them into bracelets that fall apart the moment I try to hold them.

There, beyond me, I see my grandfather – his eyes not on me, but on a framed photograph of my mum on the wall, when she was younger than me. I wish I could go back in time and warn her about what’s ahead, but if I did, I wouldn’t exist. Instead, I just look at her in the photo. She’s holding some wildflowers in this same yard, just like I once did, and she’s caught in an unexpected moment, her body angled away from us and towards the sea. As she smiles back towards us, flowers are falling unseen through her fingers, where they drift off to re-join all the others, growing wild in all directions.

I wonder if the two embracing women also feel time collapsing, the temporariness of all things enveloped in the sea spray.

On the drive back, the radio is off. The sea salt breeze is trapped in the car. When the coast has disappeared from view, I wind down the window and watch through my hair as all the houses rush past us in their orderly rows. Throughout the journey, I just keep thinking the same sentence over and over again, trying to make it feel like something. We are leaving. We are leaving. We are leaving. It’s so hard to believe it when we are always coming back.

The salty sea air clings to my school uniform in an unused conference room at my mum’s work that afternoon. At first, we were nervous that Dad would show up for lunch at any minute, but he didn’t. In the space he left in Mum’s lunch break, we sat together, going through the notes deep on a hidden folder in her computer, detailing all the work she’s put into making sure we can leave safely. All her reasons for not leaving yet, all her reasons for not telling me earlier, all her reasons for being afraid and cautious and hopeful and so very different to how I thought she was. There are checklists. There are steps. There are services to help. Now, because of me, there is a date. The formal. An event so big, so unmovable, so loud and bright and dramatic that these secret things might just be able to slip into place then. If I can be brave. If I can perform.

But for now, all I have to do is hide until the bell rings. I cradle the matcha tea that Mum made me before she disappeared into her afternoon. This glass space offers no privacy, and the conveyancer and estate lawyer have a good old gawk at me – a stranger – on their way past, heads swivelling until they disappear into the hallway. For all the smart clothes and Bluetooth headphones and technical terms, it’s basically high school here.

And if it were a high school, my mum would be a popular student. Her posture is perfect, her hair shining, makeup bright and neat, even under the unforgiving fluorescent lights. Even though she’s technically junior to everyone else here, her colleagues all smile when they see her – authentic smiles that crinkle their eyes – and they stop to listen to her, their bodies oriented towards her, even as they stay in motion. Even Maria – flushed red with the stress of some unknown employment law case – stays still to join one of these conversations.

Mum would have made a great lawyer.

I raise my head off the smooth wooden desk and prop myself back up at the laptop. With drooping eyes, I slide off the borrowed headphones, which leave sore impressions on my ears.

Muffled discussion drifts towards me again from outside, its tones spirited in debate. Everyone here knows all the rules inside out – it’s their literal job – but, if I asked, none of them could give me any advice about the uneasy emptiness in my stomach. There aren’t any rules that govern this kind of heavy feeling. I’m on my own. I drink the cold dregs of matcha from the borrowed mug, trying my hardest to return to a sense of comfort, but the air conditioning chills me.

It’s strange to think about how well Mum and her colleagues belong in this place, while it’s much more than my school uniform and lack of employment contract that mean I’d never fit in. Something makes this place different for them, drawing them here, rather than all the other places they could have ended up. Maybe it’s practicality, predictability, even boredom. But something else unites the happier people here, the ones who speak with those spirited tones. It’s contentment that they find here. Contentment is there, even in Maria’s frantic expression just outside. The sense that this is all so meaningful is etched into every line on her face as she grabs her car keys and heads for a hearing, her lips pursed in determination.

I’ve felt that way before, just not in a place like this.

I slide the headphones back over my ears, an ache growing in my chest. Then I remember Cathy recorded her vocal warm-ups during one of our rehearsals, and I open one of those audio files, my throat tightening at the raw sound of my friend playing with her musical ideas. She can use words so well to express herself. She selects them apparently at random, but they always seem right – maybe it’s the shape of them, the balance of vowels and consonants, or just the pure satisfaction of singing a curse word like it belongs in an opera. To me, though, when I want to open up to people like Cathy and Leila, no matter how much I prepare, I am wordless, distorted and fragmented. I could never just open my mouth and sing like this – any more than I could drive a Mercedes across town to argue for an unfair dismissal claim.

Instead, I open my laptop, dragging that little audio file into Ableton, watching as the sounds load onto the screen as a beautiful, evolving set of waves. I stare at all this variation one more moment, and then I open my barely used granulation synthesiser plug-in, and I embrace my fragmentation. The granulator breaks Cathy’s voice into tiny samples – each a little snippet of a whole that only I will know. The words shatter into pieces too small to recognise – some combined / some reversed / some glitchy – but all so human. This is what it feels like to have words caught in your throat. This is what it feels like to love someone who hurts you.

I’ve never done this before, but I move beyond those little grid lines, letting the distorted voice expand like the waves of the ocean that still linger in the air. The patterns evolve with an element of randomness. I follow them wherever they take me, thinking of all the places I might go, all the experiences that might be ahead of me. Maybe I’m not always in control, but as I listen, it feels right.

The technical college website isn’t in my history. Its ads have not followed me, like the ones from the university I always thought I would attend.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any internet research about what I’m supposed to do next year. But here, on the technical college website, combing through the blog articles and recommendations and reviews, I realise that this isn’t like before – I know what I want to do. I have all along. I’ve even said it before. I just didn’t let myself think about it.

With no research at all, I already knew these things: I like music but not audiences. I like spotlights but also the dark. I still want to be unseen, but not because I’ll be hiding – because I’ll be backstage. This new plan – it will be exciting, and it might not be easy, but if I can find my place, I might one day find myself content.

As Mum packs her things into her work bag and waves goodbye to her adoring fans in the office, I make up my mind and download the application form to study sound. It feels so strange to have a future in mind – one that goes so far beyond number nineteen and everything it represents.

Half an hour later, I speed-walk from the car and straight to Connor, who’s waiting for his bus. In the shade of the scraggly old trees, he sits off to the side, his skinny knees poking out, scrolling aimlessly on his phone.

‘Hey, how’d you do in maths?’ I puff.

He grimaces. ‘Don’t want to think about it.’ Then he squints up at me, taking in the dishevelled school uniform, no doubt. ‘Why are you here? I thought you were off sick.’

The unnerving sideways glances from Ms Ebrahim (on bus duty) are certainly not helping. But I’ve given up on blending in today.

Connor blinks at me, but I leave his question unanswered. ‘Sooo,’ I continue awkwardly. ‘Have there been any more attractive offers, or are we still the best platonic item to hit this year’s formal?’

‘Of course,’ he says, and I’m relieved that he doesn’t blush about it. ‘I’ve made plans with my other friends, though, but we can hit the red carpet together first, if you like.’

‘I’m glad we’re friends, Connor,’ I say, meaning it. Having someone I really trust beside me on that night will make all the difference. I just hope I can keep him out of everything, without hurting him, the way I’ve kept hurting Cathy.

‘Same.’ He reaches out and gives me a fist bump. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to tutor me in this gesture.

‘There are gonna be rules,’ I say, as nonchalantly as I can. ‘My dad can be … strict.’

He doesn’t answer right away. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says eventually. ‘I won’t make an ass of myself. I’ll save that for the after party.’

‘So, um, how do you feel about rocking up in a Prius?’

It’s done. The plan is in motion. When I get back into the car, Mum squeezes my hand.

‘I love you,’ I say out loud.

‘I love you, too,’ she says.

So much of our relationship has been unspoken – all the brief signals and nudges that kept us alive. Today has been the start of something different.

When we get home that day, Dad leans over the hand-mower and waves at us – both of us. My heart seizes when I see him like this, and an image flickers in my mind of him here, doing this same mowing, in this big house, all alone. The grass will keep growing and being cut, growing and being cut. It doesn’t feel real that it could go on without us. None of it feels real.

Mum and I wave back, both overcompensating. Maybe she’s having the same thoughts as I am, but we need this. It seems surreal that Dad would move on so quickly from such a major conflict like this. Maybe it’s a mirage, a trap, the kind of mood that will quickly turn back into those storms of hurtful words. But now, it will be my job to keep him here in this unsettlingly positive place – more than ever, I must perform the role he wants from me. He has to take me to the formal. It’s our chance. So, I slide out of the car and give Dad my most genuine smile.

Shedding grass blades, he walks with us towards the kitchen. Mum doesn’t clean up after him, but disappears into the pantry before he can say anything. It’s like she feels this too. It is too quiet. Too peaceful. It’s almost like he knows.

‘Are you feeling better?’ he asks me, and I nod. ‘You could have been abducted or killed, you know. I was so worried.’

I nod again. This is the part in the script where I should apologise. But, despite everything, I can’t go that far anymore.

Dad pours himself a glass of kombucha. ‘This is why I was so concerned about you being influenced by that little narcissist. You were becoming someone you’re not. I’ve missed the old Astrid.’

All Dad wants is for me to say that he’s been right all along, that nothing he did was out of place, even when he screamed at me, even when he disowned me. He doesn’t seem to know that words are too strong to disappear from my memory, but much too weak to build a new reality.

So I say, ‘I’m still the old Astrid.’

Dad downs a second glass of kombucha, wiping his mouth jubilantly. ‘I’m so glad you have the strength to stay true to yourself. I’m sorry you had to learn the hard way.’

‘Me too,’ I say.

Mum emerges from the pantry, and in one swift motion, Dad grabs her wrist. I freeze, heart in my mouth, and time seems to slow down. This is the moment. This is when he will proclaim that he knows about the bag, the phone, the plan. But then all he says is, ‘No, no, Ellen. Take the night off. You deserve it.’

Mum’s afraid, too. I can tell. We’re used to being left, not to leaving. Nothing is normal now.

That night, I pad down the hallway, memorising the path over and over again with each soft footstep. In this eerie half-dawn, these clandestine trips to the source of internet already feel like a memory or dream. Sleep has left me, but I can still make the most of this time, to find comfort in my old routines.

As I creep into the study nook, blue light accosts me. I gasp. It’s Mum, her work laptop perilously perched under the desk. She gasps in response, hitting the key combination that hides a window in the same motion as swivelling around. Realising it’s only me, she breathes out, sliding the laptop back up onto the desk and resting her head, recovering from the shock.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ I mouth.

She nods. Mindless YouTube videos loop infinitely above her tired head. Her laptop looks so innocuous, childlike, even though we both know that there is much more here, even though the cause of her sleeplessness is nested here, inside a bunch of folders with unassuming names like ‘Misc. Filing’. The plan is complete. All the details are there. But, looking at the exhaustion in Mum’s posture, I know she is still worried that there are gaps, and that we will fall into them and never escape.

I realise there’s only one thing left that I can do. I tiptoe back to my room, plunging into the schoolbag, which is now looking so scuffed and worn, its job almost done, as though this has been years, and not months. Such a long time, such a short time, so much changing. Still the old Astrid. I pull out Cathy’s phone and its charger, carrying it back to Mum, as I should have done so long ago. She doesn’t question it; she doesn’t lecture me. All those things are already slipping into the past, even as we still inhabit this place.

‘That’s it,’ she whispers. ‘We have everything we need. Now we just have to keep things normal. Go. Pretend to sleep.’

As soon as I close the car door and enter the school grounds the next morning, I sprint through the winding paths, dodging clusters of chattering students for whom impending external exams seem to be the biggest worry – at least that they’re willing to share with each other. I have much more to say than that. The words fragment as I think them, but I don’t need a plan right now. Before everything changes, before I leave for good, I just need to see my friend and tell her … something true.

Up ahead, the woodworking studio is washed in bright sunlight, each concrete block outlined. Everything’s safe, it seems to say. But that’s a lie.

Inside the classroom, slouched at a design computer, Cathy gazes out the window. Her shoulders are already stooped under her own pressures. In that moment, even if she wouldn’t understand, I still want to protect her from what I’ve been going through. My shoulders slump, too, with that thought, and I feel much more adult than I want to be. I sigh, the weight of the schoolbag constraining me. Maybe I should just leave …

‘Oi!’ It’s Cathy. She rushes to the door, and before I can register what’s going on, she’s dragged me inside this room that smells like lacquer or wood polish or something else I know nothing about.

She drops my arm and stares at me for a minute. I realise she looks much more adult, too, with her hair now pinned professionally in place, free of fly-aways. Her posture is rigid, like that very first audition. Now that I’m here, looking at her, I don’t know what to say.

‘Are you gonna apologise?’ she demands.

I nod, lifting my gaze from my heavy school shoes to look into her tired eyes. ‘I really am sorry, Cathy.’

She plonks herself heavily onto one of the school desks, swinging her legs, her feet covered only by purple socks. Her shoes are kicked off across the room, despite all the signs about safety and closed shoes. She looks at her feet, and not at me. ‘If you wanted to break up our friendship because I ditched you, you could have just said so. You didn’t have to ditch me back.’

‘What? No, no, it’s not like that.’ I have to push each word out of me, but I know how much they matter to her, so I keep pushing. ‘I would have done anything to be there.’

‘Why, then?’

I shake my head. Even this movement feels heavy.

‘You can’t just apologise and give no reason and expect me to accept that and be okay. I was totally humiliated.’ She’s crying, and she doesn’t hide it. All I can do is cross the room to the teacher’s desk, grabbing his floral tissue box for her. But when I return, she’s wiping her face with her sleeve, the little saltwater spots turning transparent. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘You do,’ I say softly, sitting on the floor, among traces of sawdust.

‘No, I don’t.’ She raises her voice enough to make my ears ring. ‘I tell you everything, but you don’t tell me anything. I reach out over and over again and get nothing back. It’s all fake with you.’

Inside, I fight to stay there with her. I fight to let go of the residual anger from that audition Saturday. Sometimes silence really is the right choice – or at least the only choice.

But the words pour out of her. ‘Do you know how my year ended last year? I went with Matt to his Year 12 formal, and that’s the day he picked to tell me he was going overseas. We were together every day over that whole time when he was applying for things, but he waited so that I ended up crying in front of everyone, like he wanted it to be part of the show. Even though I was a mess, and my makeup was going everywhere and hurting my eyes, the teachers still didn’t let me leave early. I thought that was the worst, but now there’s another show, and it’s recorded for posterity – or bloody inspiration, depending on who you ask.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I hug my knees up to my chest. All my energy is going into keeping my breathing steady.

‘You know what? Don’t be sorry about that. I’m not.’ She leaps up from the table. ‘You know, my parents are literally the only people who don’t seem like they’ll be personally offended if I don’t go off and become some sort of diva they can claim they knew in school. Instead they’re both hovering around me like I’m about to have a breakdown, or they think that’s what’s already happened. But it was just that I finally got to say what I think. If they can’t cope with the truth, that’s their problem.’

I should have known this all along.

Her lip quivers again. ‘You know the thing that’s hardest about all this? You’re the one who inspired me to go this way.’

I’m confused. I don’t know what it means to inspire someone to have an alleged breakdown.

‘I felt so alone after Matt left, and my friends had all moved on, so I was by myself for all of Term 1. Being isolated in high school is like death, I’m telling you. I kept feeling tempted to act like someone I wasn’t, to convince Priya and Lily that I was a different person from the one who ditched them for a boy, but of course they didn’t believe me.’

A pang of hurt clutches my chest, and an insecurity I didn’t want to name clings to me. ‘Is that why you decided to be friends with me?’ I hold my breath for a second, willing the tears to dry up rather than run down my face. ‘Was it just because there were no other options?’

‘No! What do you think I am?’ She’s hurt too, now. ‘I met you and I saw your quirky style and your honesty about being homeschooled and I thought, wow, here is someone who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think. I need to be more like that, I thought, and I wanted to encourage you to stay that way, too, so I reached out, but you couldn’t get away from me quick enough. Guess you weren’t who I thought.’

Her words feel sharp, cutting through the personas that she helped me build. All I wanted was for her to know me, for us to truly be friends. But I couldn’t have something that normal. I could only pretend, and it didn’t work. ‘I never tried to get away from you,’ I say quietly. But, in this moment, everything feels confusing. I can’t tell what I want, what I ever wanted. There are too many layers of lies.

‘Stop lying to me,’ she says, and there it is again. She is right. Too many lies. ‘I had to basically invite myself to your place, and then after that, which by the way was the first time I’d had a sleepover with a friend for years, you barely ever hung out with me again. What did I do to deserve that?’

‘You didn’t deserve that,’ I say quietly. ‘I wish I hadn’t had to do that.’

‘And then, even when I told you what I went through with Matt, you were just so angry with me about the audition. It’s like all you could see was what you were going through. You couldn’t see me.’

‘It’s not like that,’ I whisper, holding myself as steady as I can.

‘I trusted you with everything about me, and you never reciprocated at all.’ Cathy’s hugging her tote bag against her chest, and it’s so easy for me to picture her so much smaller, crying in her bedroom amongst the half-folded laundry. ‘I feel so used.’

Used. ‘That’s not who I am,’ I say.

‘Who are you, then?’ she demands.

‘I’m your friend.’

‘Then be a friend and tell me the truth.’ She grabs a fistful of tissues and wipes her face. ‘What is going on with you?’

The sound of the highway rushes in my ears. It bends and distorts in my memory, into all those hurtful things that weigh me down and frighten me. I want more than anything to let it all rush out. But it’s the wrong way to do this. I bury my face in my knees and sob.

‘It feels like crap that you won’t tell me,’ she whispers, jumping off the desk and sitting next to me on the floor. ‘Please, you can trust me. If you’re tough all the time and don’t share your feelings, things can fall apart.’

‘That’s not fair.’ I turn my hurting eyes towards her, even though all these windows are open, and students passing outside will see me crying.

‘What do you mean?’ she says.

‘You don’t like it when people pressure you to perform. Then don’t pressure me to tell you things!’ I withdraw from her, surprised at my own anger. ‘I know how much you like honesty. But it’s so hard for me to talk about my dad. It’s so hard.’

My tears fall onto the carpet, mixing with the sawdust, revealing hidden layers of dirt below. Everything’s too heavy and I can’t look up again, but I feel her sitting next to me, her arm around my shoulders, until the bell rings and startles us both.

Dad’s the same as always that following night, with the hints of warm summer barbecues and natural mosquito repellent already floated on the October air. It’s only me that’s different, sent to stargaze with him in this suburban park. This is the next step of the plan.

We’ve done this so many times, but never like this. Even though Dad’s relaxed here, with his kombucha bottle in hand, the stakes are so high tonight. So, I smile at him, trying my best to crease my face in the same directions as always, but I know the light hits my grown face differently, casting unfamiliar shadows in places where there was once simplicity. I worry he can see right through it.

‘You go first.’ This is all he says, and I line up everything so I can see just right, and I stare up into the cosmos.

Venus doesn’t look like much through our telescope. It’s not strong enough. It’s bright, but the details are beyond us. I stare at it anyway until my eyes water.

Now is the time. It must be.

‘So, I sort of, kind of, have a date to the formal,’ I say, hoping that Connor wouldn’t mind being referred to in this way. ‘His name is Connor. He’s really nice.’

‘I’m so proud of you,’ Dad says.

‘You can meet him before I go, if you’d rather.’ I swallow.

‘I trust your judgement, my star,’ he says. ‘But are you sure you want to go? It’s not like you.’

‘I thought it might be fun.’ My heart races, and I clench my fist behind my back. ‘I want some pictures of me finishing up school, and I thought Rob is the best person to ask. I thought you guys could hang out nearby afterwards, so I could have a safe lift home.’ That’s it. That’s the plan. I need him to agree to all of this.

‘We could do some portraits at home, sweetheart, and then you don’t have to spend all that money on theatre.’

My heart nearly stops. I wasn’t counting on this. ‘But I want to make a statement, Dad. I want you to drive me in the hybrid car, so I can show them all how ridiculous they look in their sports cars.’ It’s strange, but I guess that part is true. A lot of normal things are ridiculous. Especially sports cars.

His proud eyes reflect the moonlight, so bright that I look away. ‘Okay, then. I guess I understand.’

So, that’s done.

I turn to him and say, ‘Have a go. It’s really something tonight.’

We speak softly to each other, and he ruffles my hair and talks to me about the things he’s picked up in these days at home, from watching videos online about the beginning and end of the universe, about how we are all space dust. Everything is impermanent, and these stars are ghost lights left on from another time that’s already long passed before anyone even saw them.

‘That’s why I called you Astrid,’ he says, as he’s told me so many times. ‘Because the most beautiful thing about us is that we are astral. We are stardust.’

I wish he could be like this every single day. We could have been so happy.

There is a story behind my name, of course, and it’s not the one that he just told. Mum and Dad followed a baby name blog when they found out they were having a girl. They’d agreed easily with Nick’s name, but I threw a spanner in the works by existing because: 1. Their older child already had the name they liked and; 2. I wouldn’t have suited that name, anyway. As I later learnt, Nick’s name has to do with both victory and people – two things that life has not given me in abundance. But the baby name blog my parents followed had a mistake. The name meaning for Astra, which came directly before the listing for Astrid, is identical: of the stars.

In the years since, I have of course looked up my name meaning elsewhere online, like anyone would do. My name is actually Norse, and it has many meanings on different websites, but my favourite is all about strength. But when my parents first showed me that baby name blog, and Dad told me about my place in the night sky, I never had the heart to tell them the truth.

I kept my strength to myself.

The next step is to buy my formal ticket. So, in the morning, I dig up the little silver invitation, which flitted its way out to our suburban mailbox, and was nearly discarded long before this idea ever occurred to me. Crinkled and torn in the bottom of my schoolbag, it forlornly gazes back at me, revealing an RSVP date that was weeks ago. My heart sinks. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this: It’s much too late. I muffle my scream into my pillow, then grab my bag and leave. This is on me. I have to figure this out.

I stare out through the grimy window of the maths classroom later that day, wondering how I am going to get around this latest disaster. I’m terrified to say anything to Mum, in case the plan dissipates once again and we are frozen in place yet again, waiting for some indeterminate time when we could escape, but the clock ticks, taking away each second I have before I’ll have to tell her, and my mind is blank.

This is my new desk, wedged between Sergio and Veronika. It’s unstable, with a wad of paper under two of its legs to prevent it from rocking, but from here it’s also impossible for Leila’s gaze to fall on me – as I know it has in every class since her party. Every time I look back at her, her eyes fall instantly to her worksheet, freezing me out all over again. It’s way too much to bear.

Outside, a pair of younger students are skipping class, unafraid of the teachers who will inevitably barrel out of a classroom to yell at them. In the moments before that happens, they are teaching each other a silly ballroom dance, cradling each other in a stumbling theatrical embrace in the grey school grounds. Breaking all these conventions doesn’t frighten them.

That’s when the idea forms. It was only fitting that the formal tickets were all gone. I would never belong in that space, as much as I once would have wanted to. Cathy is the missing piece of the plan. Her house is right near the formal venue, and she is the person I most want to see on that night. I need to invite her in: I will stand on the red carpet, like all the friends and partners from other schools, all those people just passing through. I will pretend. But then, I will slip off down the street to the safest place I know. And, in the place of that terrible night last year, when Cathy had to force that smile under the disco lights, I can give her something different – a night when she can raid that haphazard bathroom cupboard, spray her hair whatever colour she likes, dance with no one watching …

Whatever is coming next, beyond the rings of that very last school bell – we can wait for it together. I will let her in.

I am watching the clock again in a different classroom, in a different uniform, in a different frame of mind. I am watching it again and again as it ticks through the last weeks, the last days of my high school life. I am watching it now, from the back row of my very last academic exam. This is the next part of the plan: finishing school.

The shrill alarm pierces the air. We stagger, blinking, out of the English exam and into the sun.

The teachers around us take on their most serious tones, dropping their voices an octave to be heard under the fire alarm’s incessant cries, directing people to move outside in an orderly fashion (whatever that means).

This might be a false alarm or a drill, but that won’t stop my heart from racing. The worst-case scenarios linger so close to my consciousness that I have to fight the images of gas leaks and explosions and explosions from gas leaks. Bad things happen like this – in the middle of sunny days when it seems like everything will go to plan. Plans can’t always save you.

It’s only when I sink into the freshly mown grass in the oval – where we are to gather in an emergency – that I come to my senses. Even as my babbling peers crowd around, this pristine neatness reminds me of home, the little tufts of severed grass still green like our Sunday mornings. Despite myself, that’s still a comfort. From this steady earth, I look out on all these young people, many of whom are about to go out into the world, where (most likely) no one will make them wear orange ever again. I don’t know how I feel about being one of them. I’ve been running so fast it’s been difficult to feel anything – other than the urge to keep running. Especially now that Mum and I are running away from home.

Leila sits next to me.

Neither of us speak. I’m so aware of her presence, the way the little grass blades are grazing against her bare knees, the way the air now carries the faint scent of blueberry lip gloss. My heart thumps and my insides churn. At least this is stopping me from imagining everyone dying tragically. I’m just dying metaphorically instead. Argh.

‘Hi.’

This syllable jolts me. ‘Hi,’ I echo. This is a bad time to realise I have no idea what I want from this interaction.

The silence stretches into several beats. Maybe I misjudged this. Maybe she didn’t know I was sitting here until she sat down.

‘Um,’ I say. ‘I can go sit over with Connor or something, if you like.’

She shakes her head, her hair falling over her eyes so I can’t read her at all. Not that I could before.

So, now I can’t move, and I can’t speak. The sun beats down on us and the grass looks duller already, as I run the little seed pods through my hands, ants marching across my arms and legs. Each second feels like a minute, but I know this silence isn’t mine to break, so I make myself stay still with this discomfort. I don’t run. I let the grass clippings go.

The pollen shines in the sun, and Leila instinctively covers her nose and mouth. ‘Hay fever,’ she says through her hands.

‘Oh, whoops, sorry.’ A selfish part of me is relieved that we’re talking.

‘Listen,’ she says then, as the fire bell halts. ‘In the car, I could tell you were anxious. That’s valid, whatever your reason. I just …’ She shrinks a little, like she’s trying to protect herself from our chattering peers, but they’re all enveloped in their own conversations. ‘I know I shouldn’t have talked to Cathy about us. I was … scared.’

‘Scared of what?’ I ask. The sunlight feels cold.

‘Sorry, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I’m just going to say it. I felt like you were stressed out because … because … we kissed.’ She hides her face in her hands.

I don’t know what to say. All I can think to do is shake my head, over and over.

Leila is visibly uncomfortable with the silence, looking up again. ‘That’s why I asked Cathy what you were like. I kind of … for a while I wondered if you two were together, so … I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to talk to you until I calmed down. I kind of have a history of saying things I don’t mean. But then it took too long, and it was awkward and weird and … I’ve just been feeling like shit.’

I meet her eyes properly, shocked by the sincerity I find there, and then ashamed that this still comes as a surprise to me. Here is another person who cares about me despite everything, who is telling me her truth, who is hurting because I have not done the same. But there is only one truth I feel I can offer in return just now. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Really, really sorry.’

She shakes her head, and she looks like she’s about to say something else, so quickly I add, ‘I left you in silence first. You were being nothing but kind to me, driving me to the school, even though that must have made no sense to you. I gave you nothing in return, less than nothing.’

Leila looks at me, and I know she’s waiting for more, for the reason that’s still caught in my throat. ‘It sucked,’ she says. ‘It was the worst drive home ever.’

‘Yeah.’ I swallow. ‘I mean, in your shoes, I would want answers as well.’ And, for a second, I see those silhouettes – her and Cathy – differently. I see two people who cared about me, who were hurt, and who wanted to understand, in their way. I don’t know how to give them answers. I don’t know how to say what I need to say.

‘If it helps, um, Cathy just pushed me to talk to you,’ Leila says. ‘She didn’t really tell me anything. But, um, Connor did.’

‘Connor?’ Of all people …

She looks away from me, her piercings shining silver like that first day. ‘I think I know what’s been happening with you. Connor does, too.’

‘What do you mean?’ I rub one of the grass blades against my hand until it oozes sap. Then I feel sorry for causing this damage so mindlessly.

‘The permission slips, the excursion letter, and now this stuff with the formal. Why would you make such a big deal about going on the red carpet with Connor when you don’t even have a ticket to get into the venue? You keep lying your way into things. That’s how I know you’re lying your way out of something bigger.’

I make myself look at her again, taking in the way the bleach has fallen away from her scalp, revealing the dark hair underneath. Leila has always seen me, right from that very first day. ‘Thank you for helping me,’ I say. ‘You and Connor – more than you know, you are helping me, even though I know sometimes I have not been easy to be around.’

‘You’re not the only person who’s gone through what you’re going through,’ Leila says. ‘And you’re not the only person who’s sometimes a bit hard to be around,’ she adds with a slight, lopsided smile.

She reaches out with her warm hand and holds mine. I don’t know what this means for us, but I know I am not alone. Right now, that means everything.

School is basically done. The bag waits for us at the beach house. Now, there’s only one more step to take.

I slide open my cupboard door and stare at all my clothes, many of which were birthday or Christmas presents over the years. Some were sent from my grandparents, completely the wrong size or style, which I folded up, unable to bring myself to part with this idea that they had of me, that I would be bold enough to wear a tiny black knit sweater with a red faux leather jacket with sequins. Maybe if Cathy and I were a progressive rock outfit.

So, under the guise of spring cleaning, Mum and I silently reorder them, making a small pile that Mum will scoop into her bags after Dad and I leave for the formal. For now, though, we just fold them and place them back as though we are still tidying up, and I fight the impulse to stick everything in the pile to take with us. We make a mnemonic: left is to be left; right is the right one. Then we laugh, because it reminds us of the homeschool French lessons that made us both cry in confusion all those years ago.

Mum opens my old art class folder, and it’s filled with the watery paintings that sometimes captured the grain of our old kitchen table. She pulls out one of them – from when I was about ten years old, not long after Dad inherited the money and we moved here. There’s this place, painted in bold, singular colour strokes, and the four of us standing outside among some fictional flower embellishments – Nick, Mum, Dad and me – our bodies distorted under my ten-year-old hands. At the time, I’d thought it perfect. Now, I put it aside.

‘You were so proud of that one,’ Mum says. ‘You can bring it if you like.’

I smooth out the blotchy paintwork, the identical houses of my sound piece returning to my mind. I wonder how many houses have a painting like this stored in a cupboard. Then I shake my head.

‘I know some things were strange and difficult, but you don’t have to throw it all away,’ Mum says. ‘Some things are safe to keep.’

When I don’t answer, she smiles at me sadly, placing the artwork back in the cupboard in this corner of the house, where it will stay long after we are gone. Curved in on itself, the only thing visible in the painting now is the big, yellow sun, and I remember that, on the day I painted this picture, it was storming.

Then time runs out.

On the night before the formal, Mum just does all her usual things, setting the table with the sliced meats and cold salad and homemade dressing and two dessert options. She makes conversation like it’s any other day, steering away from anything controversial.

Dad is wearing his aftershave, and it smells like him coming home from the record store and scooping me up when I was much smaller, much lighter. He is smaller than he seemed before, now that I know he has not somehow understood what we are planning, he has not heard our tiptoeing footfalls, our silent thoughts.

Even though he is still small, he takes up the space Mum makes for him. He complains about the neighbours – their tasteless music blaring throughout the day, the way the woman who lives there does aerobics so ungracefully. As usual, he says it lightly, jokingly, a cue for us to join in.

We have to.

It’s like I’m looking in on a memory, and this is all already passed. The sentences repeat in my mind after they’re said, as though I’m rehearsing them, knowing I’ll look back on them later. I force myself to eat; spoonful after spoonful of salad gets caught in my throat and sits heavily in my stomach. But if I stopped eating, it would draw attention. So, I swallow and swallow again.

I wish Nick were here. Tomorrow, they will be. Everyone has their part in this plan, even Dad, though he doesn’t know. Dad and Rob will take me to the formal. Here, I will say goodbye. They will head off to a bar, where Dad will eat and Rob will drink – both lonely, both unknowing – until 11 pm, when the formal ends. This is our window. Without a ticket, I will join the other partners and friends from other year levels and schools, walking the red carpet with Connor, then parting with my peers as they enter the building. Here, I will say goodbye. Then I will slip off to the surprise formal party I have planned for Cathy, who, as I predicted, had never considered going to her own formal. In Cathy’s warm house, right near the formal venue (to which I can return if I need, for my cover story), I will be safe. I will wait there for Mum and Nick. When they drive over to collect me from Cathy’s, I will say goodbye to my friend – and to all these lies. Whatever comes next – it starts tomorrow night.

We’ve rehearsed the plan so many times by now, but it is only now that I realise there is something missing. There is a part of my goodbye that still exists beyond words.

‘I forgot to tell you both: I made something new,’ I say, pushing the empty plate away from me.

I grab my laptop and let it scream out my sounds, and even through those tinny speakers, this creation speaks for me. Into this new track, into those fragmented vocalisations, I have poured all the things I wish I could say. If they were words, they might say something like this: I exist. I will no longer be quiet. This is what I want. This is who I am.

Without the four-on-the-floor beat, those predictable kick and snare drums I have always loved and leaned on, the rhythms might be harder to detect, but they are there. I know where they are, and I know what they are saying. And at first, these sounds are mainly atmospheric / amorphous samples that stretch out / shimmer beyond the verbal. But then, over time, more and more of these elements morph into snippets that /grad/ual/ly become discernible as voice. Layers and layers of voice, which loop / gather, which echo / escape. It is not my voice / it is.

For what I know is the last time, my parents move closer together, so they can both watch the laptop screen, even though there’s nothing to see – just a bunch of lines that obscure all this sadness, all this confusion, all this anger, all this un … certainty. They’ll never know this is the sound of me walking away. / / /

I wish you could understand.

Dad smiles at me. ‘I’m so proud of you, my star.’

I try to memorise everything about the way he looks right now. I’m still not ready, but I get up from the table then, tucking my chair neatly back in its place.

Despite everything, I’m still his daughter.

The keys jangle in Dad’s hand as he throws open the door and announces, ‘Your vehicle has arrived, my star!’

Still in my fluffy dressing gown in the early afternoon, I pad down the hallway. I’m procrastinating about the next step, which will involve hair styling and makeup and other signs that the performance has begun. The YouTube video tutorials are all lined up, and Mum’s studying hairstyle number nine right now, but I want to spend another minute in my pyjamas before I get ready to leave, so I follow the sound of my dad’s voice. Outside, the concrete is roasting under my bare feet, giving me no choice but to hurry.

Dad has decorated the car in a bunch of rainbow streamers, which reflect the setting sun in all directions. It’s so strange to leave this way, causing such a spectacle. It’s strange that Dad would get so into this event, too. He’s always said that school formals are the pinnacle of conformity and backwardness, a symbol of the mistaken emphasis that younger generations place on transient friendships. But here he is, running a chamois over the already spotless car. A tiny part of me is saying that this is all a mistake. A tiny part of me is saying we are home here after all. It makes me sad enough to shout out an excuse about hair curling before slinking back inside.

Nick: i will text so u kno whats happening tonite sis x

In our bathroom, Mum has heated the curling iron, newly bought for the occasion. I sit on the edge of the bath, its narrow rim digging into my thighs, and I stare up at the purple dress, which we’ve had altered into a last-minute formal outfit. Mum presses the curler against my head, the cluster of hair pulled tight from my scalp until I feel like the whole thing might come loose. An ominous puff of steam hisses out around us, and I wonder if my hair could combust and take the whole house down with me and give me a reason not to go ahead with all this.

‘You look gorgeous already,’ she whispers, her hands caressing the ends of my hair, which she used to cut here at home, when I was much smaller. ‘If anything goes wrong tonight, see Ms Ebrahim.’ We’ve already discussed this, but the details make us both feel safe. She turns away from me to grab the hair spray, but I don’t need to see her face to know how she feels.

Nick: leaving mine now x

Connor shows up at the front gate with his hair slicked back, an almost-matching purple handkerchief in his jacket pocket. There’s even a corsage, the cultivated white flowers decorating his hand. Time collapses and it could be thirty, sixty, ninety years ago, when people went to dances. We follow the scripts set out for us, even though we might otherwise know better.

As I smooth out the dress and wander down to the gate, he hands the corsage to me, careful to ensure that our skin doesn’t touch. His eyes flit to the shuttered windows of my house. I still kind of regret asking him to be here, but he’s done everything right so far.

‘Your house is a fortress,’ he whispers. ‘I’m kinda scared to breathe here.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I reply, holding the front door for him. ‘I promise that you’re allowed to breathe. Just not too loudly.’

He’s too pale to laugh.

Connor knows the plan. Well, he knows his part in the plan, thanks to a series of direct messages sent from Cathy’s old phone, now tucked precariously into my bra strap. He knows when and why to use this phone to alert us of an emergency. He’s serious, and he should be. I trust him, even though I can’t tell him the full truth. Not yet.

‘Is this the famous Connor?’ comes Dad’s voice in the hallway.

I link arms with Connor, and we walk into the house as Dad’s phone camera already starts flashing before he even says hello. I think I’m with someone who might have more experience with performing than I first thought. In all the photos, Connor and I are both alone in our thoughts, but we’re both smiling widely.

Nick: getting mums money out from bank x

When Rob arrives with his big SLR camera, the streamers dangle off the Prius with a little less grandeur. Dad hovers around them, trying to get them to defy physics and fly in the wind, but there is none. Meanwhile, Rob launches into his role with more enthusiasm than any of the rest of us are able to find, leaning backwards, squatting, brandishing an off-camera flash in our direction.

Connor and I walk down the driveway towards Dad and Rob, arm in arm. Mum waves at us, her eyes reddening, but she fights back the tears so well that only I will know. I peer past the front door and into the house one last time, down the hallway of this place where so many of my childhood memories live, but within moments it’s all drowned out by a song about graduating and having the best time of your life and I am pulled back into the performance.

Nick: grabbing docs from mums work x

We arrive at the venue. The cars are directed, one by one, into a procession of novelty horns and deep-bass dance music as the beautiful people of our high school pair off for their photos outside the exhibition centre, awash in its deep blue celebration lights. From the backseat in this traffic jam, I spot Priya and Lily sitting on the back of a metallic ute, their matching red boots swinging as they wave at an unseen friend. It’s like they’re wearing a costume of adulthood that draws attention to all the ways they’re not quite grown.

We’re almost there.

While our car idles, Rob jumps out with all the exuberance of a paparazzo. I wonder if he was told to behave this way, to convince Connor and me we’re captivating and photogenic – or at least not awkward and gawky under all these stuffy layers of linen and polyester. But I’m not looking at him or at Connor. I’m still looking at the back of my father’s head, at the silver threads that weave their way through his long blonde hair, the ones he said appeared after there was a complication with my birth, when he was afraid he might lose everything that mattered to him.

‘Here we go, my star,’ Dad says.

I’m sure that flashing camera outside captures my expression as I gaze back at my father in the rear-view mirror, at the sun-hardened lines on his face that tell a story that I only partly know. I take an extra second to disentangle myself from those emotions, taking the ones that belong to me, and trying my hardest to leave the rest, like the painting curled up in my cupboard.

I slide to the door of the car, opening it for myself before a scrambling Connor can reach me, and I take a step down, my sneakers sinking into the worn-out, faded red carpet. I have no choice but to take Connor’s hand and follow him into the lights of this fantasy world, in which I will play a leading role for one night only.

Dad and Rob take off into the night. They’ll sit around at the bar and trade stories about their respective little girls growing up, until it gets to eleven and Dad will turn back to collect me, telling Rob proudly about the way I safely avoid things like kissing, drinking and afterparties: his loveable eccentric daughter.

Only I will be gone.

Nick: at the house now will text again later x

At the end of the red carpet, my peers are swallowed up into the room beyond, which I am not allowed to enter. Connor is loitering with a bunch of his mates, each yelling over the others in an attempt to be witnessed. None of their suits fit quite right – some too loose and some too tight. I feel so much older than them. The thought that they, too, might soon feel this heavy grown-up feeling makes me sad.

I grab his sleeve. ‘Hey, are you still good to cover for me?’ He gives a single nod, crossing his arms over his chest. We both know that Rob is the weakness in this plan. He has no power over Dad, if his mood were to change, if he were to decide he has had enough of driving or holding court at the bar.

‘Stay inside, please,’ I say. ‘And thank you.’

‘Take care, Astrid,’ he whispers. As he crosses that threshold, I know without a doubt that, somehow, he knows the truth about me.

I hover then, unmoving, near the big open doors, running one of the looser flower stems from the corsage through my fingers until its perfume fills the air. From the other end of this hallway, Ms Ebrahim’s gaze keeps crossing to me. Having her there – and knowing that she’s at least partially aware of what’s happening – unsettles me, shattering every attempt to forget where I am and what is ahead. I’m so close to normal, but so far away.

Too late, I notice the tiny bumps on my skin, some kind of mild allergic reaction to this unfamiliar flower. Ugh, naturally. Even my body is rejecting the notion that things should go normally. Elsewhere, pressed against the skin of my back, the phone traps little beads of sweat that multiply by the minute, but I am still too afraid to hold it.

A bejewelled hand appears before my darting eyes.

‘Wanna dance?’ Leila asks. She’s wearing an electric blue suit and her hair is newly clipped into a pixie cut.

I look around me at this interstitial lobby-wasteland. ‘Here?’

She takes my hand and drags me away from my disappearing peers, finding a space just big enough for us. She’s swaying to a rhythm, and it tunes me back in to the music that’s been playing the whole time. In amongst this crowd of people pretending that they know all the rules of a formal dinner gathering, she spins me around and catches me, her hand lightly resting on my waist. I feel Ms Ebrahim’s eyes on us, but now those eyes are deliberately averted, and I am allowed this little transgression.

‘So, were you expecting me to teach you how to dance, too?’ Leila asks, spinning us away from a cluster of emotional kids – students – adults.

‘You’re the one who wanted to dance,’ I say. ‘I was actually fine to loiter uncomfortably.’

‘Sometimes you just have to start and figure out the rest along the way,’ she says. An unreadable emotion flickers across her face. ‘We can do that, right?’

I nod, slipping my corsage around her wrist. I’m surprised at how nervous she is, about the shaky, sweaty space between our fingers, which I close with a gentle squeeze.

‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I know that something is going to happen tonight.’

I gaze at her, trying to let these wordless gestures take the place of the words I want to say to her – that I will say to her – once everything feels okay again.

‘I’m here if you need me,’ she says. She lowers her eyes to our mismatched shoes, her sharp heels and my old sneakers stepping in uneven little motions. ‘Do you …? Are we …?’

‘Yes, if you want us to be.’ I break my silence to fill the gaps in hers.

She nods, and the unreadable emotion crystallises into something I think I might be beginning to understand, even if I don’t know the word for it yet.

The crowd around us is thinning. Time is running out. I draw her closer. ‘But I might be gone for a while.’

‘You’re leaving, aren’t you?’ she asks.

‘Tonight.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I promise I’ll tell you everything, soon as I can.’ And I mean it.

She says nothing, letting the smooth steadiness of her hand speak for her. It is all okay, and we’re okay, at least for this moment.

As dwindling clusters drift off into the made-up world beyond the doors, she pulls me towards her. The music stops as we kiss, and it’s everything I hoped it would be. But it ends before I’m ready. A single flower petal flutters to the carpet underneath us like it’s the end of a fairy tale. I let go of Leila’s hands and whisper my gratitude to her, before she is swept up in her friends and slips off through those double doors and into a joyous and ordinary world I might one day get to dwell in.

I hover in the foyer for another minute. Then, I am also gone, slipping off through the back door and into the humid night, shedding glitter and flower petals and what’s left of my stage persona.

The TV lights flash blue and white under the blinds of Cathy’s house. I pause outside for a second, relieved to be in this happier, less controlled place. My eyes rest on their haphazard fence, with those vines crawling so happily through and around it. Maybe they shouldn’t be here, but they’re beautiful in their suburban wildness.

I tap on the door. Cathy answers, already in her pink tulle dress, a game controller still in hand. ‘So, what is all this, then?’

I lead Cathy towards the closed door of Pete’s study, which has been set aside by her parents especially for this part of the plan. Cathy blinks at me, then she opens the door, so the fairy lights and candles wash over her beaming face.

‘Welcome to your not-so-normal formal,’ I declare, and Cathy laughs.

‘I can’t believe you did this,’ she says. ‘Don’t you feel you’re missing out?’

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘I did the red carpet and everything.’

‘And how was it?’ Her arms cross over her chest, and I think of Matt, her ex.

‘Once is enough.’

Falling onto the carpet, Cathy crosses her legs and ponders the tower of literary journals and magazines under Pete’s desk. ‘So, this is it.’

This is it.

‘As soon as I signed up for TAFE, I felt like maybe I could do my music again,’ Cathy continues, lost in her own world. ‘I’m writing a new song – one with lyrics, by the way – and maybe I’ll find myself some bar to sing it in.’

‘Wow, can I hear it?’

‘Um, not yet.’ She sticks her bare feet up on the journal pile, even as it teeters. ‘I learnt that from you, actually.’

‘Huh.’ I think again of Matt, of how he waited until this very moment last year to tell her that he wouldn’t stay. Of how some things are better left unsaid. Of how some things are better said.

‘It’s just me and my guitar,’ she says. ‘A bit of a change from our thing, right?’

I nod, the stage lights fading from my memory. ‘I suppose we were always going in different directions.’

We sit in that feeling for a minute longer, our pensive faces lit up by pink candles.

‘Hey, I have something I’d like to show you.’

‘Should I be worried?’ But she’s smiling.

I reach down the back of my dress as demurely as I can, dragging the phone out of my bra strap, trying to stealthily wipe the sweat off. Then I find my new track, setting a volume that sits somewhere between tentative and too much, and I let the discordant sounds echo through this tiny suburban room, the bass vibrating the windows and the monitor screens. I close my eyes and let the song take me to all the places that inspired it, the midnight study nook / the half-empty train carriage / the legal conference room / the twisted statues at the music school. Every object in this room, from a dusty old lamp to Cathy’s game controller, moves with those waves. They hear me. My emotions fill the whole room, even though I still can’t name them all, and I am heard.

As the track finishes, and the room falls silent again, Cathy hugs me. ‘Bloody weird!’ she exclaims.

‘Why, thank you.’ I hug her back, hoping she can feel how much I trust her.

‘So, one day,’ Cathy grins, ‘once I know how to weld, I’m gonna make you a bizarre instrument for your sound art so you don’t forget me when you’re famous.’

Sound art, hmm.

Pete smiles into the room then, an unfinished knitted scarf in one hand and a steaming tray of sausage rolls in the other. It looks so much tastier than any formal dinner, even if it might have been frozen fifteen minutes ago. ‘Canapés, anyone?’

Sitting on the floor of this spare room, we eat as many as we can. Then we kick the rug out of the way and slow-dance to songs about being friends forever, about growing up and not forgetting, about treasured memories and times gone by. We yell out all the over-the-top lyrics to old songs about heartbreak. I try not to think about how much I am listening for the knock that will divide us – me and everything I have known before.

At some stage, Louise tentatively appears, and Cathy pulls her into a dance, which I know must have been something they rehearsed many years ago – their bare footsteps synchronised. I close my eyes and feel the music and know I’m not keeping up, but when I open them, they’ve changed their steps, so they match with me, syncopated and silly.

The dancing gets more and more exaggerated and hilarious until someone must have cried first, because now we all are. But then the music stops.

My phone rings.

‘Astrid?’ It’s Connor, his voice shaky, his breathing audible through the line, even over the relentless bass of the distant dancefloor. ‘He’s back here. I don’t know what happened. He’s arguing with security. He wants to see you.’

The candles blur around me. Cathy glances at me in alarm, and I realise I’m hyperventilating.

I take a deep, smoky breath, drawing on a lifetime of staying calm when it seems impossible. ‘You’re doing great, Connor; thank you for calling me. Where is he now?’

‘I think he’s waiting out in the lobby. Listen, I don’t think it’s going to take him long to figure out that you’re not in here, or else security might kick him out, given the way he’s acting. Whatever you want to do, you need to do it now.’

There’s a beat. Then he says, ‘Um, can I help you? I want to help.’

‘If you can, get him to think I’m inside there.’ I’m shaking, but he doesn’t need to know that part. ‘Thank you. Please stay safe. I’ll see you soon.’

The phone clicks. I face my friend, whose smiling expression has turned to confusion, and now I finally know what to say. ‘Cathy, I’m scared. I’m scared and I trust you and I need your help.’

I call Mum first. Then I tell Cathy more of the truth – though only the bits that feel closer to words – and she listens.

In the end, she’s still there.

A minute later, Cathy, her parents and I all pile in Pete and Louise’s SUV and we tear down the road to the formal venue. My only option is to make sure Dad stays out there long enough to buy Mum and Nick time to leave home, before he can see them or pass them on the road. And the only way to do that is to go back there, even though it’s the last thing I want to do.

In the back seat, still in her pink tulle dress, Cathy is squeezing my hand, maybe for her sake, or maybe for mine. Between us is a giant pile of rice crackers, and although I’d never dream of eating right now, I know it’s a gesture of care that she thought to bring them. From the passenger seat, Louise lets the mainstream radio blast its announcements at us, and the ordinariness of someone winning movie tickets in a random prize draw is so jarring.

We scream onto the curb outside the venue in under a minute. It’s deathly quiet, and even the streetlights feel muted.

‘Wait for me,’ I whisper to Cathy, as I slip out of the safety of their car. ‘Turn the lights off. Pretend you’re not here.’

Pete, in his worn-out polo top and sandals, insists on following me as I edge into the side door of the venue, and we’re immediately accosted by the sound of all Dad’s furious words. Pete doesn’t leave.

I try to approach so that I seem to come from inside the ballroom. It doesn’t take a lot to be invisible to Dad when he’s like this. He’s still trying to convince the security guard that he should be allowed inside. But their argument takes a form I didn’t expect: It’s about photos. Dad brandishes Rob’s camera, proclaiming his right to photograph his own daughter on her special night. I draw a sharp breath, gathering my strength. Behind the security guard, on the other side of the threshold, I glimpse Connor and Ms Ebrahim. I’m not facing this alone.

‘Dad?’ My voice is husky.

He turns to face me. I’d already said goodbye, and it’s strange to see him again so soon, with all the anger contorting his features. The anger isn’t aimed at me, though. For now. ‘My star, I’m so glad you heard me.’

‘Why are you back here?’ I walk him away from the door, choosing a place deliberately far from Pete. I don’t have a plan from here. Only to wait for Nick to text me.

In this little lounge area near a dirty window, Dad leans towards me, pushing the camera’s preview button. ‘Look at these,’ he says. Dozens of images flash through the screen. Although they were taken only hours ago, I already feel so much older. The conflict in my eyes. The concern in Connor’s. The sad glances we exchange as we leave the car. ‘They’re rubbish. It doesn’t look like you at all.’

‘I think they show us as we were.’ The viewscreen rests on the last photo of me, passing through the door, saying my silent goodbye.

‘You’ve always been so kind, but you don’t have to be like that,’ he says. ‘Rob doesn’t see you, and then, instead of admitting that, he took this opportunity from us and photographed you like you’re a piece of meat. You deserved so much better and it’s all my fault.’ He squeezes my bare shoulder. The grip is tight enough that I flinch. ‘As soon as I realised, I came back here to make it up to you.’

It’s the skirt. It’s the short skirt. There’s always something I miss.

‘And then this piece of work Max on the door there,’ he raises his voice enough for the security guard to hear. ‘She decided to make it a crusade to ensure we miss a lot more moments. But I’m here now, my star. I’m just sorry I didn’t get here sooner.’

I don’t know what to say. Still no text from Nick.

‘We could take some more photos,’ he continues. ‘Better ones, like you wanted.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say, as gently as I can. ‘I don’t need any more photos.’

His manner changes, then changes again. All those subtle emotional cues I’ve spent a lifetime studying. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘There are those nice curtains over there. You could stand in front of them and we could do an old-style portrait. Like remember when you were ten and we did those space-themed portraits for your birthday?’

But I can’t pretend like that anymore. I just can’t.

The shadow falls over his tone, but I notice it too late. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he demands.

I shake my head. ‘Just tired, Dad. I’m just really, really tired.’

He sighs, snatching the camera away from me and standing up in one gesture. I don’t try to follow him. Even as his face reddens, I don’t try to calm him down. This is no longer my role.

‘It’s just like I said,’ he says, pacing around. ‘It’s all fucked.’

He’s shed all those rainbow banners. He’s shed all those stargazing moments. Here, in this moment, are the words I’ve been running from – the words that he does not yet know hold no more power over me. All they are doing is buying time for my mother and sibling. I am stronger than these words.

‘Six months of this place and you’ve changed,’ he says. ‘Dressing like a streetwalker, probably drunk.’

‘Sir,’ the security guard interjects, crossing the room.

But my dad doesn’t stop. ‘Where is the old Astrid?’

My phone vibrates.

Dad locks eyes with me, and there’s something desperate under the surface. Maybe he knows that his power is dwindling. But he can’t capture any more of me. All the words flow around me, so many of them unspoken, unspeakable. I realise now that I don’t have to share all of them with him. There are some silences that I choose.

I follow Max, the security guard, back towards the ballroom door. I’m moving faster than Dad, aware that he’s falling behind. Meanwhile, I take my phone out, reading Nick’s message.

Done x.

It’s real.

When I reach the threshold, I turn and look back at Dad one last time, and then I step through the door and into the party. Max steps between us, holding the barrier fast.

I stagger into the tangle of awkward and beautiful people, where the music has drowned out all of Dad’s words, and no one has any idea what’s just happened. No one except Ms Ebrahim, who half-runs towards me in her sensible flats, dodging emotional displays left and right.

Just then, Cathy texts me: He’s come out front. I think he’s waiting for you.

‘There’s a back way out,’ Ms Ebrahim yells over the music. ‘Come with me.’

I feel them before I see them – Connor and Leila, one on each side – and they walk with me silently as Ms Ebrahim leads me through my shouting, whooping, weeping peers, through glitter and spilled drinks and lipstick-stained napkins and single high-heeled shoes and streamers and all the disco ball’s flashes – like those photographs buried on Rob’s memory card, of me in the back of the Prius, taking that last look at my dad, before the hurtful words made their last return – and then we are in the service hallway at the back of the ballroom and it’s cramped and it’s dark and then it’s light and it’s orange and there’s Pete and Louise and Cathy and I am so afraid and I am so okay and the old Astrid is gone.

In the backseat of Cathy’s SUV, we make our escape towards the coast. I turn around and watch my town receding as we travel down the highway. The flashes of the streetlights pass by like the flashbulbs of an old camera, and there in my mind is my dad, lifting me up so I can pick a lemon from a tree … adjusting the telescope so I can see the moon … placing the big headphones on me in the record store so I can learn about blues classics … tending the community garden with all the gentle steadiness that was too difficult for him under our own roof.

He gets smaller and smaller.

I turn to face the unfamiliar road ahead. I don’t know what happens next.

Outside the house we’ll be staying at for the night, the ocean roars into the darkness. It’s almost too loud to speak, all thoughts drowned out by the beach, and the crickets, who herald the summer night with their familiar screeches.

Cathy and I pull our sneakers off and run through the backyard, struggling over the little timber fence and half-falling to the cold sand on the other side, narrowly avoiding splinters and grazes.

No one stops us, of course. We’re adults. It’s our risk to take.

Down on the beach, the sea rushes up and then pulls away from us. Each wave differs from the last; like the waveforms in my new track, they shift and change as they collide with each other, making new, beautiful patterns that I could never predict.

I breathe in the sea salt, and another memory appears in my mind, this time of my mum sitting on the sand eating ice cream with her parents. I’m not sure if it really happened, or if I’m just thinking of a photograph in my grandparents’ place, perhaps hoping I might internalise it like this and forget a little of my childhood isolation. Either way, I hope it will happen again, so I can remember it properly. We’re going off the grid again now – with a private number, working from home, no more school – but it couldn’t feel more different. It’s not isolation.

I glance back at Mum now, silhouetted on the back porch of this home, which has been so carefully prepared and safety audited for us by Maria and her friends. The familiar anxiety still flutters through me, and it might be a long time before that feeling diminishes for either of us, especially now when everything’s so temporary and unstable. But now she has Cathy’s parents on one side and Nick on the other. They are supporting each other, and we are not alone.

Cathy and I are standing by the shoreline now, our matching purple and pink dresses colourless in the midnight dark. She lifts her skirt, exposing her bare feet and shrieking in surprise with each new wave. When I join her there on the edge of the water, the bite of the cold makes me yelp and withdraw my toes. Our shouting voices carry forever out to sea; nothing keeps them here.

‘I should have told you sooner,’ I say to her then. ‘It’s hard to explain. I just didn’t feel safe.’

‘You’re safe with me,’ she says. ‘That’s all I want you to know.’

‘There are some things I still can’t say,’ I say, tracing the faint outlines of distant rain clouds over the sea. ‘But with the rest, I was afraid that if you knew, you wouldn’t want to know me. All I really wanted was to be ordinary.’

She smiles. ‘Well, I knew you weren’t ordinary the moment I first saw you. That’s why I decided we should be friends.’

‘You know what? I thought it was weird that you wanted to be my friend.’

‘Everyone’s weird in their own way once you get to know them. And I’m glad to know you.’

She drags me down into the shallows, the waves lapping at our feet, and I breathe in sharply. The silky material at the edge of my skirt mixes in with the sea, weighing it down. But I am light. I leap over the crests of these tiny waves and plunge my knees into the water, gasping with the freezing shock.

Cathy follows, and we drift here in the shallows for a while, all heavy and strange in these dresses. I drag my hands through the sand, feeling how it moves so freely around me, burying each finger for a second before releasing me again. It’s all still so overwhelming, but something about the power of these currents helps me to relax and let go, the sand trickling out through my fingers as it’s swept up by the tides. Sometimes, letting go is the only way.

There’s no question that we’ve ruined these dresses. The sand grains will stick in the tiniest gaps in the fabric, distorting the careful dimensions. No matter how many times we send them to the dry cleaners, we’ll still be carrying these little pieces with us, years later. Sand has that way of sticking with you.

But these peculiarities will also be the reason that tomorrow, when I’ve rinsed this dress, I will fold it up in my temporary closet here, smoothing over the creases and smelling the sea salt again, encountering a brand-new memory this time – one I’m certain about. I don’t know where I’ll go from here, but I’ll be taking this dress with me when I go.

Writers are often represented as solitary, but no one makes a book alone (even a moody introvert’s lockdown novel). Thank you to everyone who has touched this work; and an equally deep apology that this note will not include all the names it should.

I first learnt about writing novels through going to literary organisations. When I was twelve, I got to attend a class series for young people at the Queensland Writers Centre, where I first dared to imagine this moment. If you can, please support these places, especially those platforming traditionally marginalised voices.

To Clare and everyone at Walker Books, thank you for fulfilling my childhood dream, for understanding my vision (and where it needed work), and for establishing the Walker Books Manuscript Prize. Thank you, too, to the judges for choosing my story. Sarah, thanks for the beautiful electro cover. Melissa, thanks for the advice and the laughs. To all those working behind the scenes − in marketing, sales, support and admin, production and printing, typesetting, distribution and bookselling − thank you.

Thank you to all the other publishing folks who encouraged me (officially and unofficially) with this project; and to all these good influences: the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio; Frank & Co.; Myfanwy Jones; my online critiquing buddies at Inked Voices (especially E, Asche, Ella, Nicolette, Dione, Erica and Emily) and elsewhere (especially Özge, Emma, Kat and Steve); and the progressive teachers of Benowa State High School.

Demet, thank you for believing in me. Some of the best bits in this story came from our chats. I’ll always be grateful for your kindness and warmth.

To my writing group (and friends) − Megan, Ella, Alex, Emma and Georgia − you are the best (and most detail-oriented) companions.

To my friends, especially Michelle and Kate, thank you for dealing with my anxious and self-indulgent hand-wringing about writing and life.

To my high school bandmates − Raphael, Kieran, Michael and Jacob − thank you for the music and the escape (and for indulging my not-on-brand obsession with No Doubt).

To my family, especially Mum, Jon (and Gemma) and Krys, thank you for trusting me with some emotional truths, and for supporting me with this stubbornly pursued dream. Mum, thanks for introducing me to Jo March, too.

To Valentine, you’re the best writer’s cat (and paperweight).

To Lee, my amazing partner, thank you for being there, for understanding when to let me spiral at dawn (and when to intervene), for hearing this book in like probably five different iterations, and for making the Asian grocer scene come to life.

This book was written on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

Ange Crawford is a queer writer and editor, and a PhD candidate in media and communication at RMIT in Melbourne, studying spatial writing. How to be Normal is her debut young adult novel.

Ange’s writing is driven by curiosity and experimentation, and as a result, meanders across genres and styles. Among her other publications, she has contributed a personal essay on creative writing and Autistic lived experience to a newly released anthology with UQP, and she created Detective Story, an interactive fiction story that was a finalist in the 2021 Freeplay Awards for Excellence in Narrative.

Growing up on the lands of the Kombumerri people, on the Gold Coast, Ange always wanted to be a writer. Her first completed work was one (1) handmade book of Captain Planet fanfiction, which she proudly distributed within her family.

Apart from writing and editing, Ange is a fan of cats and synthesisers, and can often be found with an armful of books in a local independent bookstore.

FURTHER HELP AND INFORMATION

For anyone who may be affected by events and issues similar to the themes discussed in this book, such as domestic violence and coercive control, the following organisations offer advice and assistance.

If you or anyone you know is in immediate danger, call 000.

1800RESPECT is a national domestic, family and sexual violence counselling service.
Free
24 hours, 7 days
1800 737 732 (call)
0458 737 732 (text)
www.1800respect.org.au

Kids Helpline is a confidential online and phone counselling service for young people aged 5 to 25.
Free
24 hours, 7 days
1800 55 1800
https://kidshelpline.com.au

Relationships Australia provides support groups and counselling on respectful relationships, as well as advocacy
for abused partners.
1300 364 277
http://www.relationships.org.au
www.relationshipsnsw.org.au/support/services/domestic-violence-counselling

Mensline Australia supports men aged 15 years and older (18 years and older for video chat) who are dealing with family and relationship difficulties. Additionally, their Changing for Good service provides counselling for men who want to continue having healthy and respectful relationships and those seeking to change their own harmful behaviours.
Free
24 hours, 7 days
1300 789 978
https://mensline.org.au

Lifeline provides all Australians experiencing emotional distress with access to crisis support.
Free
24 hours, 7 days
13 11 14(call)
0477 13 11 14 (text)
www.lifeline.org.au

Additionally, see Australian Childhood Foundation’s page on young people and coercive control:
https://professionals.childhood.org.au/prosody/2022/11/young-people-and-coercive-control

And also the Criminal and Family Law Association (CFLA)
list of resources for assistance: https://cfla.com.au/resources

THE WALKER BOOKS MANUSCRIPT PRIZE

Walker Books’ mission has long been to publish works that become firm favourites and formative reading. Established in 2023 to coincide with Walker’s 30th anniversary in Australia, the aim of the manuscript prize is to foster a new generation of Australian voices, who best represent Walker Books’ values of excellence, accessibility and inclusivity. The Prize is awarded biennially (every two years) to an unpublished manuscript.

For more information see:
www.walkerbooks.com.au/manuscript-prize

How to be Normal
first published in 2025
by Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd

Gadigal and Wangal Country

Locked Bag 22, Newtown

NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au

Walker Books acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the country on which we work, the Gadigal and Wangal peoples of the Eora Nation, and recognises their continuing connection
to the land, waters and culture. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present.

Text © 2025 Angela Glindemann

Cover illustration © 2025 Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd

Cover and internal design by Sarah Mitchell

Additional cover images: (Abstract Gradient 1) theromb/shutterstock.com;

(Abstract Gradient 2) David_Do/shutterstock.com

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN: 978 1 760659 77 6

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.