I already need to pee, but I don’t want to go through ‘the carwash’—the narrow corridor to the bathrooms where boys congregate on either side and try to grab parts of your body.

Shelter is almost over, let’s be honest. There are some kids who look barely thirteen and we’re definitely the oldest ones here. If you turned on the lights and turned off the smoke machine and the music, all you’d have is a bunch of loser teenagers sitting around drinking coke.

Liv has offered to get me a fake ID so I can go to real clubs. But when I think about hauling everyone around town with me, pantless and tipsy and way-too-excited, it exhausts me. Maybe all my friendships are dissolving right before my eyes, maybe the group is too hard to keep together, maybe I can’t be bothered anymore.

The dance floor is aquatic, with purple-tinged arms waving in the air like seaweed. I keep my eyes on Marley in the middle, happily drowning, and I smile a little. The girl can dance, I’ll give her that much.

In Picnic at Hanging Rock you never find out exactly what happens to the girls, but there are hints. That’s probably why it was on the English list in the first place, so the teachers could wring the joy out of it with endless theories.

I don’t need to theorise; I know what happened to those girls.

They followed vixeny Miranda through a crack in the rock, through an almost-invisible tear in the fabric of the universe.

I imagine the cracks that might exist in our daily lives, in ordinary places. Secret doors at school, jagged edges of air that don’t match up at the train station. Fractures leading to another world. Where do they go, those girls that accidentally fall through a gap in the universe? What’s on the other side?

I blink. The lasers sweep across the dance floor and I can’t see Marley. It takes me a few seconds to locate her again. My heart keeps beating.

There’s a boy standing at the edges of the dance floor, watching me. He’s tall, with a shaved head.

His friends orbit around him in a way that suggests he’s the male version of me. You can tell they’re not private school boys, because they don’t look like their mothers have dressed them.

I pull the V of my bomber jacket down until it sits in a better place.

Their tall leader pushes off the wall and saunters towards me. I do the same and meet him in the middle.

In unspoken agreement, we make our way to the multistorey car park next door.

The car park is open at the sides, the concrete floors and pillars recycling the cold, whipping it down ramps and slaloming it through rows of parked cars. I’m forced to zip up my jacket.