TAMARA: Bloke from the army looks you in the eye—reckons he’s summed us both up tells you not to worry too much about study just as long as you finish.

Bloke from the army gives you a go of a gun asks me if I reckon you’d look good in the uniform, better than him but he’s like seventy-five.

Looks at you whispers you ever wanted to drive a tank?

You ever want to get shot in the guts maybe get your head blown off?

He wants to drive a Nissan Skyline not a tank. He told me. You don’t want to kill shit do you?

SQUID: Shut up. Just talking/

TAMARA: He seen us both coming/

SQUID: Just/

TAMARA: Rather work for Subway than that/

SQUID: Not so bad.

TAMARA: Yeah. Whatever. They marked the roll already. Let’s get out of here, go into the city.

SQUID: Want to look around a bit.

TAMARA: At what?

SQUID: Dunno.

TAMARA: Don’t get you. What’s the point?

Kids everywhere carrying showbags wearing new caps some full-on dogs from a private school stare at me and whisper something. Fucking stuck-up cows.

I look around and someone else is trying to con you. Honest Jasyn, you don’t get it.

Fuck it. You don’t want to come. I’m going. Gonna fuck this propaganda fest off.

TAMARA puts on her iPod and goes.

SQUID puts on a cap with a logo on it looks around to show TAMARA, realises she has gone.

PETCHALL: In my handbag—the confiscated iPod.

She takes out the iPod and, as covertly as her students, listens to it.

I turn it up—full bore in the careers show Eminem some gangsta rap—smack up the boy in the baseball cap. A space between me and the expo—and everybody moving in time. It’s like some drug that keeps things out insulates me from the drone of it all and I feel incredible. Invincible.

SQUID: sms

wherd you go?

Pause.

No answer, nothing.

PETCHALL turns off the iPod, puts it back in her purse.

PETCHALL: Near the navy stand I see this boy with ice-blue eyes. He stares at me, look on his face like… Reminds me of Lucas Milakovski—quiet boy who just arrived at the back of my class one day. He never smiled once. Always stunk of smoke. Lucas died. I read it in the paper. Dead before he was twenty-one. High on something, tried to do a runner from a taxi went the wrong way got hit by a truck. Boys you never see again just hear about. Russell Lyndam, Manfred Jacob, Jay Keane, Malcolm Sheenan, Daryl Tapp, Peter Galea, Ahmet Kozkus.

She leaves.

SQUID: You aren’t on the bus back to school.

You aren’t with the other girls.

No sms nothing.

Go to work thinking maybe you’ll drop by.