Cara and I are sitting by the river on top of the old Dights Mill turbine house, our legs dangling over the edge of the platform. It’s heritage-listed, but it’s really just a slab of concrete, three brick walls and a nest of rats. We’re stuffing our faces with churros and coffee (the breakfast of champions).

Cara’s got goose bumps up and down her bare legs. She hates the winter uniform and wears the summer dress year round. It started in Year Eight when I made a bet that she couldn’t do it; I lost my best New Order poster that year.

I wipe the sugar crumbs off my jeans. ‘America. Your turn.’

Cara shakes her head. ‘I know what you’re doing. And it’s not happening.’

I try looking at her with a mix of confusion and indignation, but her don’t-even-try-it glare trumps mine.

‘I told you everything already. Quit bitching.’ I’ve just spent the past half hour blabbing on about Xavier – what more does she want? ‘It’s a straightforward story: girl meets boy, boy turns out to be a thief, girl attempts to kick boy’s criminal mate in the balls. The end.’

‘Nah-uh,’ she says. ‘You told me facts. The second I ask you something that involves feelings, you stuff your face with donut, and voila – suddenly we’re playing the countries game. If you were a superhero, you’d be Distractacon.’

‘Well, you’d be my sidekick, Nag Girl.’

She chucks half a churro at me. ‘You’re disappointed Xavier turned out to be your mum’s mini-me.’

She’s right of course, but if I keep talking about it then how am I going to bury it way down deep and pile the shit on top?

God Knows Who has left tonnes of messages but I haven’t listened to any of them. Well, when I say tonnes I mean seven, and he hasn’t called today. Or yesterday. Guess seven’s the limit.

I’ve been thinking I might call him back. Just to yell at him.

Or he can explain everything and I’ll be able to breathe easy because he’s not Juliet’s mini-me at all. I’d really like that.

‘Cut Break-lines,’ says Cara.

I look sideways at her, frowning. ‘Huh?’

‘That’s what you can call him,’ she says. ‘Cos that’s how you’re going to –’ She slices her throat with her finger, tongue rolling out the side of her mouth, eyes crossing.

I laugh and make a mental list of the things I’m grateful for:

Churros.

Coffee.

Cara.

Not necessarily in that order.

I’m glad Cara’s mum decided to stop being a cow and finally let my girl out for our morning ritual. I’m nothing without the three most important c-words in the world.

‘Albania.’ Cara rocks to her right, bumping my shoulder. ‘Your turn.’

Distractacon strikes again. I lift the lid on my takeaway coffee and peer inside. ‘Armenia.’ I upend the cup and out dribbles the last of my latte.

‘Stop with the frigging As.’

Early morning joggers pass on the track behind us, talking, panting, thudding.

I push myself up and then head down the steps. The entire west wall is missing; you can see through to Dights Falls, which aren’t really falls. Not in the Niagara sense of the word. They’re more like stumbles. A bunch of rocks and man-made concrete walls that the water sort of trips over in a slightly embarrassed way.

Above my head, iron beams crisscross. I reach up and brush my fingertips along one of them. Rust comes away, falling onto my face like diseased snowflakes. Gross. I brush down my jumper with fingers stained rust-red, like they’ve been dipped in henna. ‘How many drug deals do you think have happened here?’

‘And how many infectious diseases have been passed on?’ Cara brushes past me. She heads to the edge of the slab and leans against the railings. ‘How many cherries . . .’ She sticks her finger in the side of her mouth and ‘pops’.

‘Gross.’

‘This is what happens when you live in a house full of boys.’ She pulls her hair into a top-knot. ‘Afghanistan.’

‘Nigeria.’

‘Screw you. Argentina.’

I lean against the brickwork. Right over some guy’s tag – ‘Jonza’ in bright yellow-and-purple paint. I reckon if you’re going to deface something then at least make sure your art doesn’t look like some toddler ate a litre of paint and vomited it up. Like the purple-skinned girl in the alley. That piece was good.

There are voices above us, someone walking out on the concrete platform on top. Cara and I stay silent until they leave. We listen to them complain about the cold.

‘Azerbaijan,’ I say.

‘Sorry. Did you just sneeze?’

‘Don’t be racist. It’s a legit country. And it doesn’t end in “A” so be thankful.’

‘Oh shit,’ says Cara. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve got the best story.’ She bends back over the railings, swinging like she’s on the monkey bars at school.

‘I was in Specialist Maths, which is currently in the portables near the tech building. You know that splashy Science centre the school got a grant to build? Well, it means we get shunted to Antarctica – I’m talking distance from anywhere and temperature – and we get the awesome soundtrack of grinders and jigsaws screeching all lesson. I swear, Dunbar is one hacksaw away from a mental breakdown. Oh. Norway.’

‘Y. Great. Last time I gift you, bitch.’

She smiles. ‘So last Friday, Dunbar left us on our own – he had to go to the staffroom for his afternoon medication break. But it’s cool because there’s only eight of us and we’re all pretty focused. Plus, we love not having a teacher eyeballing us – why can’t they all be high-functioning alcoholics?

‘But this time, Mark – yes, I said Mark – chose to sit next to me. That’s weird because Mark normally sits next to Eden Kyles-Tewolde because she’s the smartest chick in school. I’m good at Maths too but I’d stab my HB through his cock before I gave him my answers, you know?’

I laugh. I know.

‘As soon as Dunbar splits, Mark starts talking to me. First it’s all, what did you get for question eight, why did I even take Specialist Maths, are you going to Truc’s party this weekend, blah blah blah, bullshit bullshit bullshit. I can tell he’s got something he wants to ask me because he never talks to me. So I say, spit it out, Mark, what do you really want to ask? And he’s all like, what, can’t we just have a conversation? So I’m like, no actually, unless you’re keen to explain why you cheated on my best friend. So he gets all sulky and stops talking to me and I’m like, suits me fine because now I can get on with my work. But after five minutes he finally spits it out. Wants to know if I’ve heard from you. She’s my best friend, I tell him, of course I’ve heard from her. And he’s like, well, what’s up with her? Are they going to kick her out? And I’m like, you just saw her the other day and he’s all like, I didn’t really get to talk to her, did I? So I tell him you’ve joined a cult, and he laughs and says, no seriously, and I’m like, seriously, she’s joined this cult and she’s only allowed to wear hessian and they worship a turtle god who carries the world around on his shell and they can only eat peas. Frozen peas. And he looks at me for a second like, really? And I’m like, no, you dick, she still works at her aunt’s kebab shop and if you want to know how she is and if she’ll go out with you then you know where to find her.’

Cara swings back over the railings. When she pops up again her cheeks are flushed with the blood rush. She’s grinning. ‘So the moral of this story is that lover boy still has a thing for you.’

‘Maybe he’s one of those people that get all revved up over criminals.’ I jab at the dirty concrete floor with the tip of my boot. ‘You know, they write letters to people on death row. Maybe he figures I’m a good one to bet on.’

‘Even in Texas you wouldn’t get the death penalty for breaking a dickhead’s nose with a book.’

‘Yemen,’ I say. ‘It’s in the Middle East.’

‘I know where Yemen is. I’m not a total dummy.’

I inspect my rust-stained fingertips. ‘So what about Ava? I thought her and Mark were all Brad and Angelina.’

‘I think they just hook up. Apparently it’s you he’s all happily ever after about.’

‘He cheated.’

‘True. And then he apologised about fifty gazillion times and talked Square-Tits into playing your favourite song over the loud speakers at lunch and wrote you a gag-worthy poem and got all puppy-eyed whenever you walked past. So I guess he tried to win your forgiveness.’

The bricks are cold as I press against them. I frown deeply; Cara watches me with her know-it-all eyes. She’s cat-like in her intensity. The kind of intensity Buttons reserves for his surprise attacks on my bare feet. ‘You think I should forgive him?’

She tilts her head. ‘As if. He’s a bona fide douche. The question is: could you forgive him? I don’t think you know how to forgive.’

‘I take it back – you’re not Nag Girl, you’re Bitch Girl.’

‘Says Queen Bitch-face of the Bitchi-Bitchi tribe of Bitchlandia.’ She blows me a raspberry and then checks her phone. ‘I got to go. School’s almost starting. If I get another detention for being late, Mum will flip. Nepal. Walk me?’

We run up the steps, two at a time.

‘I’m not really allowed near the school.’

‘So wear a hessian bag over your head. People already think you’re in a cult that only wears hessian. It’s karma. No, I mean fortuitous. Do I mean fortuitous?’

My phone vibrates. ‘Wait up.’ I hang back a couple of steps from the top. The screen is cold against my ear. ‘Yeah?’

‘That shit turned up?’

Ugh. Bill Green.

Cara waits at the top of the stairs, looking down at me. Her dress is so short I’ve got a good view of her pink knickers from here. She motions for me to hang up.

‘How much does he owe you, Bill?’

‘He’s my son. I’m concerned about his welfare.’

‘Oh yeah, you sound all broken up.’

‘You’d be all broken up if someone stole your credit card and maxed it out at some bloody record store you’d never heard of.’

And there it is. A hot, niggling sensation deep in my chest. The same feeling I got when I hid beneath the cubby house eating Gregory Vu’s lunch because he’d laughed at me for being relegated to the stupid table in Maths. He deserved it, but those spring rolls sure tasted bitter.

I grip the railing. ‘Record store? You mean Vinyl Underground?’

‘How’d you know that?’

Shit, shit, shit, shit.

Cara is giving me big eyes and even bigger hang-up-the-phone charades. I wave at her in a way I hope approximates ‘I’m coming – take a chill pill’. She gives me the finger.

I hold a hand over my mouth and the phone, and turn away. ‘I just . . . I mean, when you say “maxed out” you mean . . . ?’

‘Four and a half.’

Shit. ‘Hundred?’

‘Try thousand, little girl. So you can tell that shit-for-brains kid of mine I’m going to wring his bloody neck when I see him. And he’ll be paying me back every cent.’

Beep.

I stare at my phone, chest and throat burning.

I think there’s another c-word I might be about to use.

‘Who was –?’

‘Latvia.’ I wonder if my face is as flushed as it feels. I hurry up the last couple of steps.

I mean, holy shit just doesn’t cover it.

Cara wiggles her eyebrows at me. ‘Latvia? That’s an expensive call.’

I give her a weak smile.

FOUR AND A HALF THOUSAND? Did he mean Australian dollars or some foreign currency where four and a half thousand is equivalent to five cents? Now I want to take a sledge hammer to my brain and punish it for being stupid enough to think Xavier was an innocent kid who’d been led astray by mean old Shia LaBeouf.

Four and a half thousand.

That’s an overseas holiday.

That’s two MacBook Pros.

That’s a whole wardrobe of fancy clothes with change left over for about a hundred churros.

That’s Juliet Vega.

‘Are you listening?’ Cara tugs on my arm. ‘I’m going to be late. Do you want me to get a detention? Oh, and Algeria.’

I let her pull me along but I can’t even fake a smile right now.

I’ve got four and a half thousand reasons why not.