The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

‘What are we going to do with our spare?’

Sarah hasn’t spoken in five minutes and I wouldn’t be able to tell you the last time that happened, hallelujah it’s a miracle. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

I flip my headphones off.

‘Oh, I have detention. I got busted wagging RE this morning.’ The lie slips out beautifully—the best sort of lie, the one you don’t know you’re going to tell until it’s half-said. A good lie gives me a warm tingle. ‘I said I couldn’t stay after school so Mrs Preshill said I had to do it in my free period.’

Sarah pouts. ‘We have a theory. We need to tell you.’

I should be relieved, I suppose, that Sarah is talking about something other than herself. But if she says one more thing about Yin’s parents, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Marley nods furiously behind her. ‘But we shouldn’t discuss it here.’

Sarah ignores that. ‘It’s Mr Martell. You know, Tyrone.’

I do know. Mr Martell is the school’s official photographer and he’s not ancient and he’s rumoured to have had sex with a handful of Year Twelves, or at least copped a handful of almost-legal Balmoral boob.

Mr Martell is supposedly hot, but his legs are bandy and he’s going to go bald early, you can already tell. He’s a bagel in a shop full of sliced wholemeal bread: not that exciting, especially if there are donuts available right around the corner.

‘Did I tell you about the time during theatre sports when I caught him pointing his camera right at my tits? Right at them! I should probably tell the police that.’

And there it is again. The me me me-nologue. Sarah is sparking with manufactured outrage.

‘Teaghan said that Rochelle saw a folder on Tyrone’s laptop that was called “Sports Day Cuties”,’ Marley says. ‘He had close-ups of all these girls’ faces and was going to take them home, you know, to fantasise over.’

‘Fantasise?’ I say. ‘Don’t you mean “masturbate”? Also, you know that Teaghan lies for attention, remember?’

There’s no way that Rochelle could get access to that computer. Marley blinks at me, but Sarah takes up the thread.

‘We remember, Tal. But maybe Tyrone’s got a pervert room at his house with photos of Balmoral students covering the walls and that’s how he plans who he’s going to take next. It’s his special collection of favourite girls.’

‘You got that idea from Devil Creek,’ I say.

They’re squashing the buzz I built up during lunch, the fuzz that crowded out the bad thoughts.

I see I’m going to have to jog their memories. ‘That happened at the end of the first episode, remember? When they found that creepy shed in the bush? It was for only a split second before the credits. They’ll come back to it later.’

We binged three episodes of Devil Creek together on Saturday night, not together as in the same room, but messaging each other from our separate houses. No one else picks up any of the clues, though.

The small country town of Devil Creek—where everyone is suspiciously buff and good looking and totally not inbred or married to their cousins—is rocked by the murder of the prettiest girl in town, Emily Blake, and of course she’s the nicest person too. Only after she’s dead do her secrets come out—and not just hers. Everyone in town is a suspect and the police still haven’t found the murderer, and conveniently probably won’t until the very last moments of season one.

Mere hours after the first season of the show dropped, Yin went missing.

I’m pretty sure they’re setting it up to reveal that lovely dead ginger Emily Blake was slutting it up with both of the two hot-but-ignorant brothers, each without the other knowing, and if they’re thinking that has anything to do with anything in the real world then they need to get a grip.

Yin doesn’t talk to guys. Maybe she talks to them once a year when our orchestra joins our brother school’s orchestra for two weeks of orgiastic rehearsals and they compare their reeds or work on their embouchures or whatever.

I feel sick all of a sudden and that’s not only an expression, because bile rises up into my mouth, acid and putrid, and I have to bend at the waist to stop things going further.

I’m a terrible human being for entertaining myself with thoughts about a fake show about a fake murder while Yin was getting ripped out of her ordinary life. When I try to imagine the first moment she realised there was a strange man in her house, I can’t breathe.

I pretend to be sure that she’s gone for good because isn’t it better to think the worst? Deep down, though, there’s stubborn hope that I wish I could wipe away forever, just for some certainty.

I push it all down and straighten up, once I’m sure I won’t puke.

‘Hello, are you listening to anything I’m saying?’ Sarah waves her hand in my face. ‘Are we going to Moose Juice on the way home?’

We’re the only three people left in the hallway, but pre-weekend electricity still crackles in the air; the normal kind plus extra nasty electricity because girls go missing on weekends and don’t come back to school on Monday morning. I realise that I don’t want to do anything this weekend but lock myself in my bedroom and stay in bed.

‘Maybe,’ I say.

We get the announcement at lunchtime that they’ve cancelled our classes for periods five and six and instead our entire year level crams into the gym and we spend the final hours of the school week trying to maim each other.

‘Ladies!’ hollers our new self-defence teacher, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who used to be on TV and calls herself the Ninja Trainer. ‘I’m going to teach you to use your natural feminine strengths to defeat attackers who are bigger! And heavier! Than you! Get into sparring pairs!’

I’ve read that ‘In the Unlikely Event’ email three times and