Of course I have nowhere to go at all because South River is an inherently boring place, that’s why people pay so much to live here, so that their boredom is assured for the rest of their lives and also so they don’t have to see nasty poor people in non-designer clothing.

I traipse to the reserve under skies that threaten rain and the playground is deserted and the oval is fenced off to coax the grass back so that as soon as summer hits the sun can fry it all back to dry husks.

I run on the cross trainer, I do crunches on the tilted bench, I dip on the bars and thank the lord that no one is here to see me use the public exercise equipment. All of that takes up around five minutes and then I’m alone with the bugs and my bad thoughts and the memory of my dream.

I sit in the big whirly teacup and tilt back to look at the clouds. I’ve even done all the homework I was assigned for the holidays instead of saving it for the last minute so it turns out Mum is probably right, I’m not myself right now.

The glum grey sky whirls into a spiral as I turn the teacup steering wheel faster and faster and my thoughts wander off into the washing machine spin cycle distance and then Yin is there again. She’s on the other end of the phone and she’s saying:

‘I can see if Milla can get a spare ticket?’

She’s off to see some amateur symphony orchestra at the university recital hall with her classmate Milla, who plays the French horn and is also in the junior wind ensemble. They are friends who hang out on a Saturday even though it’s only four weeks into Year Seven and Yin says nothing about the fact that we were supposed to go to the mall to buy me new swimming goggles and as much makeup as Mum will let me wear because she’s already forgotten that we always hang on the Saturdays that our families aren’t dragging us off to do something else.

I blink blink blink my way back into the cold metal present and my fingers itch and twitch to go back to the Cold Crimes website and my phone is out of my pocket before I even know what I’m doing. I scroll through some of the same stuff I read at home, then I click through to the Doctor Calm forum, that black internet spiderweb that infiltrates my brain like a weed.

The top thread is about a tabloid article published in the last few days: ‘Secret Suspect Tops the List’. It’s behind a paywall but someone has copied and pasted the full text of the article into a comment.