THIS WILL END IN TEARS, they say.

“OK, all right, I get it,” I mutter just as my phone starts to buzz. It’s my dad. I click the ringer off and shove my phone back in my pocket.

THIS WILL END IN TEARS.

4.

The first no posters go up outside our school on Monday morning. By lunchtime they outnumber the yes placards three to one. On every lamp post around the school gates they shout, TWO MEN CAN’T REPLACE A MOTHER’S LOVE. PROTECT CHILDREN. DON’T REDEFINE MARRIAGE.

Radha calls an emergency committee meeting.

“Surrogacy? She needs her mother for life, not just for nine months,” Melody reads in disgust. “If nothing else they’ve just completely forgotten lesbians exist.”

Gráinne Chen out of second year says, “I literally have two mothers. They just want to get married.”

“We could take them down?” says Shane.

“That’s illegal,” Radha tells him. “We can’t touch them or deface them. Freedom of speech and all that.”

We spend our break strategizing and delegating, finalizing our school’s mock referendum with the CSPE teachers, and leave feeling more cheerful, but the second we step out of school the posters glare down at our rainbow enamel pins, our YesEquality badges, our pathetic student attempts at activism.

And on the wall opposite the bus stop there are words written in purple Sharpie, in a cursive I recognize. They say MARRIAGE IS A SHAM.

I take a picture and send it to Angel. Your handiwork? I text. But when my phone pings a moment later the message is from my dad. I delete it without reading it.

At home my mum has chopped up her bed for kindling. It’s all in bits and splinters in the back garden, big like a bonfire. Kate, who got off school earlier than me, stands on the patio watching in horror.

“I couldn’t stop her,” she whispers when I reach her.

My mum whacks the wooden legs of the bed with a hatchet.

“The frame was broken,” she calls, breathless, words punctuated by axe strokes. “Been broken for years. Too much weight on the bed.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Kate calls back, but our mum doesn’t look like she’s about to hurt herself. She’s got that Red-Riding-Hood woodcutter stance, wrists braced on the handle of the hatchet like she knows what she’s doing. Every strike lands true.

I pull my sister back into the house with me.

“I’m worried about her, Sarah,” she says.

The neat chop sounds of blade hitting wood follow us through the kitchen. Outside the window, my mum’s face is all rapture.

“Honestly,” I tell Kate. “It looks like she’s having the time of her life.”

“I’m not sure…”

“Don’t you wish you could just hack at something with an axe sometimes?”

My sister considers it. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”

“She’s just letting it all out. Best thing we can do is keep out of her way.”

Kate still looks uncertain so I throw her jacket at her and say, “Come into town with me and I’ll buy you a Butlers hot chocolate and the latest Stellar.”