‘Are you sure you’re all right though, love?’ Mum reaches out and strokes my arm. ‘Do you want to speak to anyone about all this?’

I brush her aside. I don’t want her to start on one of her ‘you’ll feel better if you talk about it and you know you can tell me anything, anything at all’ spiels.

‘Should I go upstairs and see if Dad needs anything?’

‘I think he wants to be on his own,’ says Mum, and I’m relieved.

DAY 43

Something bizarre happens as I’m standing on the Mitchells’ doorstep. I shrink, like Alice after drinking from the bottle, and then I’m twelve years old and my hair is long and snarled and my boobs have just come in. I’m allowed to spend all afternoon and evening at Yin’s house and all I want to do is watch dance tutorials on YouTube. All Yin wants to do is read, hold her guinea pigs and tell me about orchestra camp, boring boring. There’s smoke in the air from the bushfires and we are already splitting apart without really knowing it yet, the way tectonic plates move away from each other minutely, breaking up continents.

The door opens a crack, Chunjuan looks through and the spell is broken.

I’m still drained from the photo shoot yesterday and the tote bag full of Yin’s things is a burden and my head spins from the time travel.

If I was scared that Chunjuan wouldn’t want to see me, I needn’t have been. Welcome marks her face.

‘No one there?’ Her eyes dart over the garden.

I remember that they’ve been at the centre of a media circus for six weeks now and you’d think they’d lock their front gate, but they don’t. They’ve always been hit and miss with it, that’s the bit no one ever mentions in any of the TV reports about their supposed fortress, and also that the video intercom has never been wired in.

Chunjuan ushers me in and she doesn’t hug me, she grips my arm in that way she’s always had and leans her head into mine. The smell in here, the rose-scented cleaning spray and something pungent simmering on the stove, makes my head spin through layers of time again and I have to breathe to bring myself fully into the here and now.

‘Ice tea, juice, Ovalteen, Pepsi?’ Chunjuan says when we are installed in the kitchen.

‘Ovalteen?’ I didn’t know you could still get it. Chunjuan moves to make it. I let my bag slump to the floor. There are bits of dried grass on it, from where I hid it on the banks of the oval during classes.

I looked through the stuff from Yin’s locker properly at home, finally, and what do you know, there was nothing to worry about, nothing too sinister or heartbreaking and no reason to avoid it. I held her things and I couldn’t tell if she was still the Yin I knew.