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

me ‘prowling the streets’ tonight so I lied and said that Marley’s parents were dropping us off and picking us up too. We’re too many to attack, but someone could easily be watching us, waiting for a sheep to drift from the pack. All our parents made us switch on location services and Find My Phone before we were allowed out, like a thin slice of electronics can protect anyone from anything.

Marley totters back from the nearby bushes, trying to straighten her tights. Her bracelets shine in the dark.

‘I remembered something I have to tell you,’ she says. ‘Mum gave me a Zen book. It says that an individual life is a wave in the ocean. The wave rises up and exists, and then it disappears back into the ocean. The wave is gone, but the ocean continues.’

‘That’s amazing.’ Ally looks at me. She’s sitting on a wobbly seat shaped like a chicken. ‘Don’t you think?’

I turn my eyes to the darkest corners of the park and say nothing because that is the dippiest thing I’ve ever heard. Who wants to be a fucking wave when you could be the ocean?

I examine the line of trees at the edges of the oval, the bit where the ground dips steeply, and the barely lit football club building near the car park. There are houses not too far away, but the eucalypts and ti-trees form a thick barricade around the reserve. Every few minutes there’s the faint growl of a car driving along the crescent.

A memory crawls out of the shadows, as thin and insubstantial as a ghost. When I open my mouth, steam clouds spill out, and words too.

‘When I was eleven we went camping in a national park,’ I say, ‘and got lost out in the trees. I went for a walk and stomped around until I couldn’t recognise anything. When I realised, I tried to go back the way I’d come, but the campsite wasn’t there. I walked around and around in circles until all the trees and tracks looked exactly the same.’

Yin had been there as well, of course, but I don’t say that. After two hours of walking we’d both started to cry, tears and snot and dust mixing on our faces. It got dark early, and it wasn’t until the first stars were visible that we’d heard Mr Mitchell cooee in the distance.

I erase Yin from my story, snipping her out neatly. It’s not difficult to do; I’ve been doing it ever since we started high school, when I realised that she wasn’t going to keep up. Even in the first weeks of Year Seven I could tell which girls I should make friends with, which older girls I should emulate.

Yin couldn’t be part of the project, and so I cast her off. She went quietly, that was always her problem. You have to fight in life to get what you deserve. She should have fought harder.

Shelter is only just beginning to fill up when we arrive. If we’d got here at nine, like Sarah wanted to, we’d have been dweebs sitting around on the couches, waiting for things to get started. It’s not rocket science, but I’m the only one who seems to understand these things.

I hang in the shadows near the pool table while Sarah and Ally talk to Bill and Ben the Private-School Chinos Men. Sarah and Ally both acted more sober than they actually are for the bouncers, and now they’re pretending to be drunker than they actually are for the boys. Thanks to my impeccable planning skills, the boys were excited to see them arrive, rather than the other way around. Sarah is leaning up against Bill/Ben’s shoulder, faux-laughing. He flicks his floppy blonde angel curls, looking like he keeps Rohypnol in his pocket.

I already need to pee, but I don’t want to go through ‘the carwash’—the narrow corridor to the bathrooms where boys congregate on either side and try to grab parts of your body.

Shelter is almost over, let’s be honest. There are some kids who look barely thirteen and we’re definitely the oldest ones here. If you turned on the lights and turned off the smoke machine and the music, all you’d have is a bunch of loser teenagers sitting around drinking coke.

Liv has offered to get me a fake ID so I can go to real clubs. But when I think about hauling everyone around town with me, pantless and tipsy and way-too-excited, it exhausts me. Maybe all my friendships are dissolving right before my eyes, maybe the group is too hard to keep together, maybe I can’t be bothered anymore.

The dance floor is aquatic, with purple-tinged arms waving in the air like seaweed. I keep my eyes on Marley in the middle, happily drowning, and I smile a little. The girl can dance, I’ll give her that much.

In Picnic at Hanging Rock you never find out exactly what happens to the girls, but there are hints. That’s probably why it was on the English list in the first place, so the teachers could wring the joy out of it with endless theories.

I don’t need to theorise; I know what happened to those girls.

They followed vixeny Miranda through a crack in the rock, through an almost-invisible tear in the fabric of the universe.

I imagine the cracks that might exist in our daily lives, in ordinary places. Secret doors at school, jagged edges of air that don’t match up at the train station. Fractures leading to another world. Where do they go, those girls that accidentally fall through a gap in the universe? What’s on the other side?

I blink. The lasers sweep across the dance floor and I can’t see Marley. It takes me a few seconds to locate her again. My heart keeps beating.

There’s a boy standing at the edges of the dance floor, watching me. He’s tall, with a shaved head.

His friends orbit around him in a way that suggests he’s the male