‘Wait—what?’ Henderson, the kid with the fancy haircut, looked appalled. I remembered his full name: Zac Henderson. Casting my mind back to Shaun’s notes, I couldn’t recall much else about Zac, except that his parents had sent him.

‘You can’t take my phone!’ he yelped, clutching his Kathmandu rucksack.

‘You were told not to bring a phone,’ Shaun replied. ‘You were told it would be confiscated.’

‘No, I wasn’t!’

‘Well, it was right there in the brochure. You should have read the brochure.’ Before Zac could speak, Shaun addressed another kid in the front row. ‘Mr Bosanko, I need you to empty your bag. Right now.’

Bosanko. I remembered that name. Nathan Bosanko had been referred to Vetnet by the police. He’d already been formally cautioned for carrying a spray can in public. He also seemed to like wandering around other people’s properties, though he hadn’t been charged with trespassing.

He was small and slight, with little dark eyes like kalamata olives and a tattoo on his wrist that looked home-made. A slightly eerie smile was plastered across his face.

‘Okay,’ he said. Then he upended his backpack, which disgorged—among other things—a tape measure, a hair ribbon, a tube of icing, a mascara wand and an eraser shaped like a sushi roll.

‘Do you have a phone?’ asked Shaun. When Nathan produced one from his pocket, Shaun took it and said, ‘Good. You’ll get it back before you leave.’

Over by the women’s bathrooms, Rhys was locked in a standoff with Dean Hoegel. Warren was using the sheer force of his stare to make the older kids shake out their packs. Flynn, the boy who’d jumped overboard, was wailing, ‘This is so unfair! I can’t do this stupid camp! I have a condition!’ Zac Henderson was muttering something about human rights as Joe Malouf stooped to pick up a tattered porn magazine that had tumbled out of a bag in the front row. The owner of this bag was smirking gently; I wondered if the magazine was his way of saying ‘fuck you’.

Darren King looked sullen when Shaun finally stopped in front of him. Peering at the veteran through a lank curtain of hair, the teenager offered up that familiar scowl again. But other things about him weren’t familiar. His pimples. His chin-fuzz. His shoulders—wide shoulders that stood out like the wings of a coathanger. The rest of his body seemed to dangle off them in a boneless kind of way.

Was he really the same boy? It was hard to tell. Ten years can totally transform a child.

Then he emptied his rucksack. Tumbled among the clothes were a pair of cheap sunglasses, an empty chip packet and an iPhone.

There was also a brown Swiss Army knife. When I saw that, my stomach seemed to do a backflip.