It’s pointless even thinking about any of this police stuff. What can we do with the profile anyway? They don’t want us to discuss the case online. The teachers won’t tell us anything, and our parents don’t seem to know. Would they even listen to us if we went to them with information? I picture telling a teacher or police officer about Mr Chapman staring at my tits and emitting sleazy vibes and even I can acknowledge how tenuous it sounds.

The Hanging Rock cover girl stares at me from my bedside table, ethereal, blonde and disappeared. Miranda. She acted strange right before she went missing.

I saw Yin in the hallway on the Friday before she was taken. Normally we ignore each other—so studiously, so completely I’m surprised no one notices—but this time we stood and looked at each other, eye to eye, for a few seconds. It was odd. Had she been trying to tell me something? Did she have a premonition that something was about to go wrong?

If Yin had been trying to send me a message that day, I didn’t receive it. Sarah came up behind me and leapt on my shoulders, and we both turned away slowly, Yin and I, like ships trying not to collide.

DAY 20

Ally stands on Marley’s bed and reads from a phone.

‘Number one: reach ten thousand followers. Number two: make out with someone famous. Number three: take Luca Henning-Smith to the formal. Number four: win Regatta.’

As per usual we are getting ready at Marley’s house because her parents are the slackest and her room hangs right off the back of the warehouse, almost like she has her own apartment.

We’re not being quiet enough, because Ally gets pissy, or as pissy as Ally gets, which is not very. ‘Shh, you guys! Listen.’

‘You’re not going to do any of those things,’ I say from my position at the mirror. Ally has a floppy headband on that definitely has to come off before we leave the house. Her legs are still covered in bruises from self-defence class. Ally has tissue-paper skin, she’s as delicate as the princess lying on the pea.

Even though I’m here in the room with my friends, my mind keeps wandering back to Wednesday in the library and wondering what Chloe thinks of me. Few people can make me that off-kilter.

Why did I even go up to her in the first place? She likes it at the bottom of her lagoon and I came along and disturbed her moss, her leaf litter, her driftwood, her algae.

‘Tal, are you even listening?’ Ally puts her hands on her hips. ‘It’s not my list, it’s Sarah’s.’