My brother Sam slinks into the room and crouches in the shadows next to the couch. Our Jack Russell, Arnold, lifts his head from the rug to look disapprovingly at him.

‘Yeah. Not in my class though.’

The scene doesn’t look real.

It looks like a Bill Henson photograph, one of the barely lit landscapes I saw at the National Gallery on first term’s Art excursion. I’d never seen photos that looked so painterly. They featured beautiful young bodies and ancient sculptures and mammoth rocks and the ocean sliding in and out of shadows, night-time scenes barely lit in ways that made them unsettling, enticing, mysterious.

I stayed and looked at the exhibition for so long the bus almost returned to school without me. I drank in the photos like they were water. I wanted life to be something like those pictures: dark, raw, significant.

But not like this.

When I decided to take the scholarship to Balmoral Ladies College, my Morrison High friends called it the Kidnapping School.

This isn’t the first time this has happened.

‘When?’ Mum says.

‘This morning.’

‘Ransom?’

‘Don’t think so. Not yet.’

I catch myself playing with the dangly jade charm on Mum’s bracelet, a childhood habit.

The Mitchell family property has a six-foot-high wall, and a video intercom on the front gate. It’s a fortress—so how did someone break in?

‘Her parents must be frantic.’ Mum always gets upset when bad things happen to other people, even though she never gets that upset for herself.

The view switches to a helicopter shot, showing the blue and green shapes of swimming pools and tennis courts, driveways as long as airport landing strips, avenues of trees and cream-and-yellow Lego mansions. So this is where my classmates live. I’ve never been to a Balmoral girl’s house; I’ve never been invited.

‘I’ll cancel my shift. Where’s my phone?’

‘No.’ I nudge her phone under a cushion.

I’m not scared to be at home alone. Not very, anyway. Not enough to lose money over.

‘I’m not leaving you by yourselves.’

‘No, Mum!’

Mum’s manager is a real knob. He hates giving her time off or letting her swap shifts. It’s probably because he asked her out in her first few weeks at the hotel and she said no.

An identikit portrait fills the screen—a man wearing a balaclava and sunglasses, his whole face covered. A ridiculous thing to show because it could be anyone. Generic bad dude.

‘Whoa,’ says Sam. ‘Freaky.’

Mum starts like she’s only just realised he’s in the room.

Sam crawls closer, his mouth rapturously open in the television glare. It’s probably the same as the opening scenes of CSI to him. Arnold pedals his tiny legs against Sam’s encroachment and whines.