I check the bus timetable. I don’t think the 3.50 p.m. is coming, so I decide to walk to the next bus stop. I’m hauling my second-hand Maths, International Studies and Biology textbooks home and my bag straps cut heavily into my right shoulder. Once I’m far enough up the street, I slip my backpack on properly, both straps, a proper dork.

I realised two days into my new school that no one uses the green Balmoral backpacks; they all use the green duffel bag instead. There is no way I can use anything other than this perfectly good new backpack that Mum bought, though. When I got the scholarship it felt like a free ride, but it turned out that there were plenty of extras apart from the fees. Summer uniform, winter uniform, sports uniform. Straw hat, school swimsuit, textbooks, excursions.

The air is thick with exhaust fumes at the next intersection. Cars fly by; one driver wolf whistles. I have no idea why school uniforms do this to men, they’re literally an advertisement that I’m underage.

A new billboard looms above the crossroads. A pale girl in a silky cream slip lying on the ground, her sleeping face surrounded with a bright red blot of hair. Her legs cross at the ankles, her wrists turn soft side up. Her skin is dirty and scratched.

She might be selling perfume or shoes, but that can’t be right.

The girl looks damaged, and sexy. Something crawls deep in my gut.

Around the fallen girl everything is dark and foreboding: the thin silhouettes of trees, a shadowy, indistinct figure hiding behind one of them. The half-seen figure is bulky and powerful; the girl so beautiful and bare. The photographer has managed the lighting perfectly, illuminating the crumpled figure of the girl and then letting patches of darkness take over.

I think of the police and rescue service workers walking methodically through the parklands next to school, and imagine them finding a discarded body in the creek. Should an assaulted girl look this sexy and glamorous? I flash back to mum saying that the community cares more about some women than others. What is wrong with people?

I squint at the text in the bottom corner.

Who Killed Emily Blake?

Much later that night, during the late news, I figure out what it was that Natalia and Ally were watching at the bus stop.

The police have released CCTV footage of Yin from a convenience store close to her house. They don’t say what day it was taken, only that it was in the week before the attack. The footage is grainy, but you can still tell that the short girl with black hair is her.