When I inch closer my feet knock into a pile of paper held together with a plastic clip in the shape of a frog. I bend down to see equations and symbols—Petra obviously couldn’t hack the heat and dumped Yin’s borrowed physics notes here.

I straighten up and I’m surprised to see Yin’s locker door is open a crack. She’s got a sticker of a sparkly clarinet on it so it’s easy to find and the darkness inside pulls my attention—come closer come closer come closer—like a black hole or a portal.

The silence in the abandoned school building is total.

I flick the door open.

A short stack of textbooks. A lone scrunchie. A neatly folded school scarf. An orange box of clarinet reeds. One picture of Yin, Claire and Milla stuck to the inside of the door.

The locker is too empty, too tidy. Yin has had a lifelong stationery addiction, so where are the sticky notes and the cute notepads and the patterned washi tape and the glitter gel pens? Where are the tablets she takes for hay fever? If the police searched her locker, why wouldn’t they have given the rest of her things straight to the Mitchells? And what did they take as evidence?

I put my head close to the square dark hole, reaching to touch the cold back wall. The wall gives way, something catches my hand, tugs my arm, dragging me along a cramped metal tunnel, no bigger than an air duct. I’m squeezed in a tube, tighter than a water slide, darker and more sinister. Gravity pulls me through time and space, down down, through to another place, the other place, the other side.

I step away, breathing hard.

I look around at the cack-green carpet, pocked with old chewing gum. The lemon-vomit walls, the dusty windows high up. The row of gunmetal grey lockers. Everything ordinary, nothing changed.

The library is the only warm bright spot in the early-morning school. Mrs Lithgow lifts her head and smiles when I enter and I think about if she only knew about the overdue copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock in my bag that I have no intention of returning.

The other librarians gather in the inner sanctum of the back office, plunging coffee and loading croissants into their mouths and talking about the wild orgies they participated in on the weekend.

A group of international students are already hitting the books and a poor Year Nine waif is curled up, asleep, in a beanbag.