The Gaps Leanne Hall (readict books .TXT) 📖

the camera store I look at digital SLRs I’ll never be able to afford, not even if I take off a hypothetical $500 won hypothetically in the non-hypothetical art prize and then add all the pocket money I can save this year. Mum’s old camera is a dinosaur compared to these muscly black models. I wish I’d thought to sign out one of the school’s fancy cameras for the weekend, so I could have practised with it. Brooke and Audrey take all their photos on film and use the darkroom to develop and print them, but we didn’t have a darkroom at Morrison, and I don’t have time to learn how to do it well enough for my project.

When I’ve looked at every camera in the shop, I retrace my steps to the games store to collect Sam.

The corner where he was sitting is empty now. I scan the store, looking in front of each shelf and bargain bin. Everywhere I look there are rows of browsing backs. Sam’s not at the info counter, or hiding behind a cardboard cut-out display.

I go to the front counter.

‘Have you seen a little kid? He’s ten, about this tall?’ My voice sounds normal even though my insides don’t. The sales assistant stops pricing games with a sticker gun.

‘Oh, hey,’ he says, as if he knows me. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘My brother. He’s wearing a purple jumper and jeans, maybe?’

‘Sorry, no. Nick, you haven’t seen a kid on the loose have you?’

His work colleague shakes his head.

The assistant puts down his gun. ‘Do you want some help looking for him?’

‘No, no thanks.’

I exit the store and look both ways up the aisle, a frantic feeling already coming on. I look at waist level among the crowds of shoppers. No Sam.

I turn to ice. My fingers, toes, all the way to the ends of my hair, and especially my heart.

I walk to the end of one aisle, look up and down the next row of shops, then go back to the other end and robotically repeat the action.

Sam is gone.

The next obvious place to check is the large entrance to the shopping centre. To the right is the food court where we ate dinner, to the left the gates to the subway.

I consider the sliding doors to the underground platforms. I picture a man holding Sam’s hand and leading him down the escalators, onto a train, and away. Forever. In my chest is a cold fist.

‘Chlo? Chlo?’

I turn so quickly I get vertigo.

Sam stands five metres away, holding a plastic bag with his precious games inside. He’s wearing his orange hoodie, not a purple jumper, and cargo shorts, not jeans.

‘There you are!’ I swoop, and in the time it takes me to reach my brother, I melt into fury. ‘Where were you? I told you not to move from there. You know to stay put! It’s the first rule.’

‘I was looking for you! I was trying to find you!’

Sam keeps repeating these meaningless words over and over as I grab his wrist and drag him towards the doors. I’m hot all over; something flutters around my body, something has been let loose. I keep moving to disguise it.

‘Chloe!’ Sam pulls away until I stop. He pulls his hand free and rubs his wrist. ‘You’re hurting me.’ His lower lip is suspiciously trembly. Then—whispering—‘I couldn’t find you.’

I look back at him, and he looks so confused and indignant, and little, really. A little kid. And I haven’t been thinking clearly, because the guy doesn’t snatch boys from shopping centres, he goes for girls in their homes.

I remember the quad last week—which already seems eons ago—and Milla repeating the police’s questions: Was she scared of anything?

Yes. I can almost hear the thoughts of every single girl in my year level. We’re all scared, of almost everything.

DAY 18

The library doors are so heavy it’s no wonder that I only go in there when I’m forced to. There’s a schunk as the doors come apart, as if I’m stepping into an airlock, shortly to be sprayed with disinfectant and handed a Hazmat suit. Our school librarians give off the very strong vibe that they would prefer students to stay out of their facility.

I shoulder in like the brave pioneer I am, keeping my head down, and I swear there’s a pause in the beep-beep of the barcode scanner when I walk past the loans counter. The library smells different, a foreign country that I barely realised existed. There’s a row of girls along the far wall, glued to computers, and a cushion pit full of people reading.

‘What is this mystical language?’ I ask the neat laminated signs taped to the end of each row of shelves. I tap the Dewey Devil number 666 and abandon the non-fiction section, prowling up the alphabet in fiction until I find my prey.

Eight identical brown spines line up next to each other on the shelf, which I guess is because we were supposed to be studying this book in English. Supposed to be, because the teachers have changed their minds: as of this morning it is off our reading list. Of course I asked why, and of course Ms Clarke was super vague. So here I am, in uncharted lands, looking for a verboten book.

‘Hello, my forbidden fruit that tastes all the more sweet,’ I whisper to the paperback as I remove it from the shelf.

Picnic at Hanging Rock looks boring and historical, with a pretty blonde girl on the cover in a ye olde white flowing dress.

‘Hi, Natalia.’ A tiny mousy voice.

Grace Chapman hovers nearby, cradling a stack of books. She always has her head in a book, usually a novel featuring a supernatural love triangle, although in a change of scenery I accidentally saw her with her head in Andrew Taylor’s crotch behind the pool house last Friday night. Which is a bit weird, because it was her birthday party, so whose head should