When I look down I see Yin’s Year Seven school photo smiling back at me from a tabloid front page. KIDNAP VICTIM FEARS, it says. Every muscle on my face tenses.
Was he following Yin for weeks without her noticing? Is he watching us all from a distance now, checking our reactions, feeling superior? Is he someone I know?
I go into the heat of the shopping centre and trawl the shops, liquorice twist dangling from my lips. Touching candles and buddha heads and prayer flags in the hippy shop, saucepans and cupcake trays and Thermomixes in the kitchen shop, memory-foam pillows and bamboo sheets in bedbathland. I stare through the window at the blonde ladies getting their toenails painted by Thai women, until one of the customers looks uncomfortable. She has a smooth bob and could be my mum.
The next shop has dance music pulsing into every crevice and I trail my hands over the racks of clothes. Stretchy leggings with mesh panels, crop tops, yeti jumpers, my fingers stick to everything they touch.
The assistant smiles at me, and picks at her phone like a chicken pecking at the ground.
I take an armful of clothes to the change room and they’re not what I’d usually wear, but I dutifully squeeze into them, zip and button and pull into place.
All of it is cheap and horrible but when I slip into a satin bomber jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back and a light sprinkle of plastic jewels, I can’t help but pause. I look at myself in the mirror. Plain schoolday face, tinted-moisturiser-only face.
The jacket isn’t me, but it’s something Yin should want to wear half-ironically, half-defiantly, on account of it being so blingy and Oriental. She never did have any fashion sense.
I zip up the jacket and put my school dress on over the top, arranging the collar carefully. Woollen school jumper next, even my blazer.
Saunter out, put things back, pretend to look for one minute more.
‘Thank you!’ I call out to the shop assistant as I leave, but she doesn’t even lift her head. She’s swiping her phone left and right, left left left left left left HOT. I hope none of the dudes she meets is a serial killer.
The side gate is open and the back door ajar when I get home and the prophecy unfolds right before my eyes. I leave my school bag on the back step and creep through the laundry. My feet won’t stop moving forwards, it’s as predictable as a B-grade horror movie, until I grab the squeegee my dad uses to keep his precious windscreen pristine.
I didn’t think I was worried but all of a sudden I’m close to being a complete mess.
Our cat Dylan Thomas wraps himself around my ankles and together we flow towards our doom.
Dylan Thomas: Your squeegee will save my fluffy little tail.
Me: I will smash their brains out. I will.
The cogs in my brain start turning over but my panic levels plummet when I see Liv parked in front of the open pantry doors, scooping giant wads of peanut butter out of the jar with her fingers. Making a big spoon out of her hand and ladling it in. Disgusting. I drop my weapon.
On the kitchen bench lies an unwrapped block of cheese, a jar of olives and an open packet of chocolate biscuits.
‘Where do you put those calories?’
Liv jumps. She’s rake thin and always has been, always will be. Even now, the only thing keeping her jeans on her bony hips is a studded belt.
‘Anywhere I can, little sis.’ Liv wipes crumbs from her face and sloppy kisses my cheek, and I pretend I hate it and don’t want her anywhere near me. I catch a whiff of comforting menthol smoke through the peanut butter haze and stare at her head. Just when I think Liv can’t choose an uglier hairstyle, there she goes, with the shaved bits and the spikes.
‘I’ve been waiting, so bored and hungry. What’s this?’ She points to the photo pinned to the fridge.
‘It’s my abduction photo.’
She doesn’t get it so I have to explain it to her like she’s a child.
‘It’s so if I get abducted Mum and Dad don’t give the police an awful photo of me that winds up on the news. That one’s a good one.’
Mum keeps taking the picture down and I keep sticking it back up again because I had no idea it would bother her and it’s a genuine superpower being able to irritate her this much. It’s up-to-date, unlike Yin’s photo. It was taken on my birthday earlier this year, and I look hot.
No one seems to be able to tell us if it’s safer to look good and be noticed, or whether it’s better to be forgettable and fly under the radar.
Instead of laughing, which you’d think she’d be generous enough to do, Liv’s face twists into something I’m horrified to see is pity.
‘I should have come much earlier, Tal. I’ve been flat out this week. I’m so sorry.’
I turn my face away, quicksmart. ‘He doesn’t take the pretty ones, don’t you know? So I think I’m going to be safe.’
I don’t count the moment a minute ago when I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to be safe.
‘It’s not about you getting kidnapped. That’s clearly not going to happen, so it’s not what I meant,’ she says.
I pick up the biscuits. The stolen jacket under my school clothes is scratchy. Liv’s duffel bag is on the floor. ‘Are you staying the night?’
‘I thought we could do a movie marathon.’
I’m sensing pity in everything she’s saying and doing now and I won’t have it. I can’t let her crack me open.
‘Well, that’s a shame, Liv, because I’m going out tonight,’ I lie. ‘Dad’s working late and Mum’s at the Parkers’ for book club. So you’ll be hanging out on your own.
