“No!” Sarah called after her, her fingers scratching at the door. “No! Veronica, wait! The door’s stuck! Veronica! Veronica!”

But there was no answer, except for perhaps a giggle, wafting on the wind.

And then, nothing at all – no pulling on the door, no Veronica raising the alarm, no Eliza. No parents coming to help. They were going out, Sarah remembered frantically. For the first time, they had agreed to leave Eliza in charge.

Second by frightening second, the room shrunk to suffocation.

And Sarah screamed.

She screamed until her throat hurt and her voice came out in muffled wheezes. She banged against the door until her knuckles bled. In vain she tried to climb the bunks and squeeze through the miniscule window, but her face scratched against the splintered frame and her shoulders wouldn’t fit. Tears arrived. Great heaving ones that she hadn’t felt since she was much younger, and grabbed at her lungs. She gasped for air. She worried she was choking. Nausea gripped her stomach. Her ears rang. And on and on it went, on and on and on, until so much time elapsed that she collapsed onto the bottom bunk and drew her knees up to her chest and lay there, whimpering, shaking, trapped. As she cried, the sound of her feebleness, the physical proof of it, both angered and disgusted her, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t do anything. This time it wasn’t a consensual dare, this time she couldn’t say no, this time she was truly out of control. A timid sheep leading no one.

The pale light from the window began to fade, panic swelled in her throat, and she trembled more. Because now came the darkness. Not the soft bedroom kind, filtered by street lights through curtains, or hallway lamps. Not the moonlit, stargazing kind. But absolute, devil-shaped darkness, where even one’s own limbs cannot be deciphered, and so detach, like a part of oneself lost. On the bunk, Sarah backed herself into a corner, the feeling of wood against flesh anchoring her at least to existence.

But then came the thirst. And the hunger. And then a need for the loo. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t bring herself to move, so soon there followed a liquid stench that wrapped itself around her legs and turned to paralysing coldness.

Finally, there was a slipping into oblivion.

By the time the door opened, it was light again outside, but the darkness had settled deep within.

“Here you are!” exclaimed Veronica cheerfully.

Veronica led her by the hand up to the house. She kissed her on the cheek as Sarah changed silently for breakfast, neither of them mentioning the ‘accident’ to her parents. All through that meal, Sarah stared with red, sore eyes at her sister and her best friend, their hair freshly braided to match, one dark, one light, both sleek and smooth, her own colour an in-between nothingness, matted with tears.

“I love you Sawah,” Veronica said that night in bed.