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

patterned washi tape and the glitter gel pens? Where are the tablets she takes for hay fever? If the police searched her locker, why wouldn’t they have given the rest of her things straight to the Mitchells? And what did they take as evidence?

I put my head close to the square dark hole, reaching to touch the cold back wall. The wall gives way, something catches my hand, tugs my arm, dragging me along a cramped metal tunnel, no bigger than an air duct. I’m squeezed in a tube, tighter than a water slide, darker and more sinister. Gravity pulls me through time and space, down down, through to another place, the other place, the other side.

I step away, breathing hard.

I look around at the cack-green carpet, pocked with old chewing gum. The lemon-vomit walls, the dusty windows high up. The row of gunmetal grey lockers. Everything ordinary, nothing changed.

The library is the only warm bright spot in the early-morning school. Mrs Lithgow lifts her head and smiles when I enter and I think about if she only knew about the overdue copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock in my bag that I have no intention of returning.

The other librarians gather in the inner sanctum of the back office, plunging coffee and loading croissants into their mouths and talking about the wild orgies they participated in on the weekend.

A group of international students are already hitting the books and a poor Year Nine waif is curled up, asleep, in a beanbag.

I try to focus on the art shelves, because when I called her on Friday Chloe sounded stressed, and if she needs all the help she can get, then I need all the distraction in the world right now. If I can find a book about that Bill Henson guy she’s always banging on about, then maybe we’ll have something to talk about in fourth-period Art today.

When I think about Emily Blake and dead girls in general and sweetpea honeypie sleepover parties and Mrs Christie’s pursed-up face and everything that has been swept under the school carpet, a red tide of rage threatens to engulf me.

I blink it away and think about the open locker and how I could get a bag and scoop everything inside into it, I could collect and preserve those small leftover bits of Yin and take them to Chunjuan and Stephen to compensate for the fact that I didn’t send a card, I didn’t send a text, my family didn’t make food and bring it to them.

I give up on art and round the corner and see Petra at a carrel with her human security blanket Audrey. They both still think I poked Petra in the eye deliberately, so I reverse before I’m seen. I collect a pancake stack of magazines and install myself in the new cushion pit that smells of dry-cleaning and Old Collegian donations, realising too late that the opposite curve of the pit is occupied by Claire and Milla, hunched over an iPad. They’re engrossed and don’t see me, so I pick up a magazine and start to flick through it.

‘Go back further.’

I strain to hear Claire. Milla’s finger swipes at the screen and my ears rotate like satellite dishes.

‘I’m sure I saw it around here,’ Claire says.

‘That’s when they went away at Easter…Oh! Is that it?’

Claire grabs the iPad right out of Milla’s hands and reads from the screen.

‘If you could see me now you would know I’m not your little girl no more.’

‘What does it mean?’

My mind surges. The words sound familiar but I can’t place them. I can see why Claire and Milla are caught on this one thing, because it’s not the way Yin speaks at all.

‘The day before she’s complaining about her Geography assignment.’ Milla again. ‘Later that day, that’s in rehearsal, see? You can see the back of Petra’s head, and that’s Sunita.’

I’m still friends with Yin, but I hide her updates. I don’t think they’d show anyway, we never interact anymore and we’re probably completely algorithmed out of each other’s lives.

‘What were we doing in April?’

Claire forgets to keep her voice down. Mrs Lithgow’s head swivels in our direction. And then I get it.

‘It’s a song lyric,’ I say.

Claire and Milla realise—finally—that I’m in the pit with them.

‘If you could see me you would know, I’m not, not, not your little girl no more—it’s a song by Lana Dreams.’

They look more confused than ever, as if I’m taking the piss out of them, as if I’m trying to cause trouble rather than solve the biggest problem they have right now.

‘Look it up if you don’t believe me.’

Claire taps doubtfully and then turns to Milla.

‘Does Yin even like Lana Dreams?’ I hear her whisper. ‘It still doesn’t explain why she would write that.’

I forget for a moment that I’m dealing with orchestra nerds. ‘That song was everywhere over summer. Didn’t you hear it?’

Everything I say seems to beat Claire down further into her seat.

‘I guess so, yeah, of course.’ Milla sounds anything but certain. She seems on the verge of saying more, but then the curtains go down, the impenetrable wall goes up, and both girls curl back in on themselves, shutting me out.

‘Have either of you heard anything?’ The words pop out of my mouth and keep tumbling, tumbling, boinging about the cushion pit, sounding desperate. ‘From the police or the Mitchells? Did the police come to your house again?’

‘No.’ Milla’s response is mumbled and Claire looks away like she’s trying to pretend I’m not there.

They must hate me.

Yin must have talked about me, complained. They probably heard all the worst stories about me.

And who has been crying the most these past five weeks, who wrote tributes and poems and laid flowers, who missed out on days of school they were so upset, who kept looking at their phones like a miracle could happen, who had gaping space left in their weekends—well, not me.

I get up and leave the pit.

It’s pouring