Bochen is almost asleep in a pile of leftover toy limbs, while Natalia holds up a circular gold reflector to get the light on Cherry’s face. She’s biting her lip in concentration, working her arms hard to ping the light just right.

I take a moment in between clicks to check on Natalia, her dark under-eye circles, her bare head. She doesn’t look like she’s been eating much, but her focus is strong, the misery isn’t hanging over her so thickly as before. She might have even laughed a few times.

I’m going to find a way to do the photography elective next term. And maybe we’re all going to be all right.

NATALIA

DAY 79

I finally go back to school and it’s not the big deal I thought it would be. The thing about the Balmoral prison schedule is that you have to keep marching to each class at the appropriate time and sit still and not talk and wear the regimental uniform of the regimented and that leaves no time for drifting, no time for wandering off in your head and slipping off the face of the earth.

By lunch it’s apparent that spring has sprung at least for one day and there is actual blue sky and swords of sunlight piercing the atmosphere. Instead of skulking in the quad like we did last term we bleed out onto the oval and you couldn’t make grass this green in a factory.

Our year level loll about in small groups, sunbaking, gossiping, filming each other, making daisy-chain headpieces and other childish pastimes, I kid you not, and exams and final assessments are so many weeks away and not a bother at all and the official memorialising is over which means we can be sad on our own timetable now.

In a satellite city clump by the trees are Audrey and Petra and Brooke and the other boarders. Chloe wants me to shake hands make up with Petra, but I won’t. Milla, Claire, Lisbeth and the good girls sprawl near the goal posts, Sarah poses next door, Marley is asleep, Ally sings to herself.

Bochen and Cherry and Mercury and some other international students have pooled their food and laid out a picnic and there is unspoken respect between Bochen and Cherry and me now because those girls are wilder than you’d imagine.

Somewhere in the middle, pretending she is nowhere in particular at all, Chloe is sunk like a happy stone in the grass.

We made it. We survived.

There’s still a Yin-shaped gap in the world, there always will be. A Yin-shape in the clouds, in a passing shadow, in the shape of a tree.