2008.

The dress Tia Toni knitted was pink and grey like the galahs outside near the parking lot. I was standing holding the bar above my head, two metres high, looking at the planes and not understanding. The photo shows the dress hugging my strong little body as I look out, uncertain about everything.

I used to think I could hear heartbeats in trees. Jodie and I would climb up to the tallest branches and look across to the hills, and I'd put my ear to the smooth bark and not hear a beat but wish I did. I knew they were alive somehow, and that they were important and felt pain. Years later when I heard about the kooky experiment that found plants screamed real high so people can't hear it when plants next to them were hurt, I smiled and thought to myself, I knew it.

Me and Pauline used to play netball after school. I ran fast to get the ball but we weren't allowed to play in school shoes not runners because the ground was bitumen and the shoes had no grip. I was wearing school shoes and shouldn't have been playing, and when I slipped and skidded on the little tiny rocks, and I was still pulling my stockings out of my leg an hour later, I wanted to know whether you could see bits of me left on the ground but I had nobody to ask. I think I went maybe fifty metres far, it was really far. Pauline had to sit out because her knee was sore. She went to the doctors and found out she had cancer, then she stopped coming to school. I looked inside her desk and there were still books. When she came back she walked funny like her leg was a stick or she was a robot. They took her hair and then they took a bone out, you know the sticking out flat one at the front that makes your knee bend, so she really did have a stick inside her leg to keep it straight. She couldn't run around anymore so we talked instead. Nobody talked as well as Pauline did.

When I threw the rake at him, I didn't think I'd hit him. I was angry because he said something mean and I was far away and I couldn't throw perfectly that well but I hit him perfectly. It scraped the skin on his back and he yelled loud till mum came out. I told her it was the pool water that made it hurt but she hurt my arm when she pulled me out. Mum shouted kind of quiet that I could have killed him and sent me to my room. I cried till it hurt because I thought God would make me die. He wasn't allowed to come to my house again.