The small country town of Devil Creek—where everyone is suspiciously buff and good looking and totally not inbred or married to their cousins—is rocked by the murder of the prettiest girl in town, Emily Blake, and of course she’s the nicest person too. Only after she’s dead do her secrets come out—and not just hers. Everyone in town is a suspect and the police still haven’t found the murderer, and conveniently probably won’t until the very last moments of season one.

Mere hours after the first season of the show dropped, Yin went missing.

I’m pretty sure they’re setting it up to reveal that lovely dead ginger Emily Blake was slutting it up with both of the two hot-but-ignorant brothers, each without the other knowing, and if they’re thinking that has anything to do with anything in the real world then they need to get a grip.

Yin doesn’t talk to guys. Maybe she talks to them once a year when our orchestra joins our brother school’s orchestra for two weeks of orgiastic rehearsals and they compare their reeds or work on their embouchures or whatever.

I feel sick all of a sudden and that’s not only an expression, because bile rises up into my mouth, acid and putrid, and I have to bend at the waist to stop things going further.

I’m a terrible human being for entertaining myself with thoughts about a fake show about a fake murder while Yin was getting ripped out of her ordinary life. When I try to imagine the first moment she realised there was a strange man in her house, I can’t breathe.

I pretend to be sure that she’s gone for good because isn’t it better to think the worst? Deep down, though, there’s stubborn hope that I wish I could wipe away forever, just for some certainty.

I push it all down and straighten up, once I’m sure I won’t puke.

‘Hello, are you listening to anything I’m saying?’ Sarah waves her hand in my face. ‘Are we going to Moose Juice on the way home?’

We’re the only three people left in the hallway, but pre-weekend electricity still crackles in the air; the normal kind plus extra nasty electricity because girls go missing on weekends and don’t come back to school on Monday morning. I realise that I don’t want to do anything this weekend but lock myself in my bedroom and stay in bed.

‘Maybe,’ I say.

We get the announcement at lunchtime that they’ve cancelled our classes for periods five and six and instead our entire year level crams into the gym and we spend the final hours of the school week trying to maim each other.