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

wasn’t completely hopeless and lazy, and I’ll drop out of school if Audrey wins again.’

She looks at me with surprised hazel eyes and doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and then my cheeks start to go pink.

‘Well anyway—’ I say, right at the same moment she says, ‘I’ll think about it?’

And then it’s even more awks for sure and I juggle the paperback I took off the shelves from hand to hand and Chloe jumps in, trying to save this sinking ship.

‘The real history of Hanging Rock is more interesting than that book.’

‘You’ve read it already?’

Chloe nods but only for a split second before she realises she has done a big fat nerd tell. She read this term’s English texts last holidays, in advance, I know it. Maybe she even read them all before the beginning of the year.

‘All that spooky fictional stuff distracts from the actual meaning and history, which is that the rock is an important ceremonial place, and huge numbers of the traditional owners were murdered in the area by settlers or died from introduced disease or got forcibly moved to missions.’

I look doubtfully at the beautiful lily-white girl on the cover. ‘That’s…disturbing,’ I say, and then I run out of things to add. I focus all my mental energy on the carpet beneath me, but the floor refuses to gape open and swallow me. I didn’t do anything to stop that tasteless too-many-Asians conversation in art class and now I have nothing to say about our country’s genocide so I’m pretty much living up to the low standard of who I’m supposed to be.

‘Look up the history,’ says Chloe. ‘It’s true.’

‘I will.’ I rise to my feet and I’m about to go when I turn back and say, ‘Do you know why we’re not studying this anymore?’

Chloe’s cheeks are flushed; she blushes a lot when people speak to her. ‘I guess, because it’s about missing girls?’

That sort of stops me dead for a moment and then I do this jerky head nod and continue on my way, singing to myself la la la because it seems like the teachers actively want us to never think about Yin again and at the loans desk Mrs Berryman looks at me like I’m trying to steal Picnic at Hanging Rock, not borrow it.

‘It’s not on your English list anymore,’ she says.

‘I know.’ I slap my library card down. ‘And yet, here I am.’

I put my world-mufflers back on while she says something else, but she might as well be talking to me through a tin can and string. No, scratch that. She might as well be talking to me from a very distant planet.

DAY 19

The pretence of normal lasts until about two minutes into History when Mr Wright announces that a police officer is gatecrashing and before you know it, there she is in the doorway.

They’ve picked a young policewoman so that we can relate to her and everything, but quite frankly I’m surprised that Mrs Christie has let us be exposed to the people in blue at all. The principal has been blowing off steam about predatory journalists after several students were approached at the Junction last week, and you pretty much get the feeling she would like to turn Balmoral into a moat-circled fortress, inside of which we put equal effort into protecting our virginities and our grades.

This is how the policewoman starts:

‘Hi, I’m Celeste, and I’m part of the team investigating Yin’s disappearance.’

She uses Yin’s name, but she doesn’t say ‘home invasion’ or ‘abduction’ like they do on the news. Disappearance is a watered-down, inaccurate word and I immediately get an itch on the back of my knees.

The policewoman sits on the edge of the teacher’s desk, like Nouri does, and she kicks her feet as she talks and she has her hair in a low bun and they’ve picked her well because with her countryish round freckled face you might trust her so much you’d be able to tell her anything.

‘It must have been a really scary couple of weeks for you, so I’ve come in today to tell you what’s going on and answer any questions you have.’

She runs over the official police line, but it’s the same as what’s on the TV and in the papers and what I hear when I eavesdrop on my parents’ phone calls to their friends by picking up the spare phone in the entertainment room. My head starts up with the blah blah blah and prickly fire creeps up my legs and I have to refocus hard.

‘We have forty people working on this case, and we’re looking at every possible angle and taking every phone call we receive very seriously. We’re working around the clock to find Yin, and we want to get her home as much as you do.’

She makes it sound like they can bring Yin home, like that’s still a possibility, but that can’t be true, can it? Not now. The hot prickles wrap around me and it’s unbearable but I stay still in this forest of alert green-and-orange backs and watch.

What I see is that Petra sits straightest of all in the front row, with her hands resting on a piece of paper covered with writing, staring at the policewoman like she would never break eye contact in a million years, not even if the room caught on fire. This is normal for Petra, because she is literally trying to hoover the knowledge from every corner of the room, all the time, and you can’t even stand near her for fear of your brain getting vacuumed. But there’s an extra level of hoovering today.

We’re all listening when the policewoman says, ‘I know you’ve been told not to talk to the media, so I have to tell you that some outlets will be running reports this week on something new. The police will be confirming at a press conference very soon that we’re looking for a serial offender.’

Petra