Yellow by Megan Jacobson

of them. Enough to prove it’s me. Maybe they’ll catch him then.’
    I bite the nail of my left thumb. This seems less scary somehow. I don’t know how to explain it. The bones picked clean, all white and calcified and poking out crisply like a picket fence. Not having to dig through broken-down bits of him.
    â€˜Please. I don’t want to be here all alone anymore. I can’t stand it, Kirra. I can’t cope.’
    It’s the way he says please that tears me open. I imagine if it were me, stuck in that ghost space, what I would want. There has to be a reason why I alone can hear Boogie. It’s not like I’m remarkable at all, except for my eyes, and they’re not remarkable in a good way. People say that they look like cat eyes, and maybe that suits me, because cats, they can see in the dark. I live in the sunniest place in the world, but that’s never stopped me from feeling like I’m drowning in the darkness. I can almost feel it gurgling in my lungs. I get why Boogie is desperate to be freed. I get it.
    â€˜Okay. I’ll do it.’
    I speak the words into the receiver, and they climb out to wherever Boogie is.
    â€˜Thank you,’ his voice crackles back. ‘I knew as soon as you answered the phone the first time that we’d be friends.’
    The way he says that, it’s so needy, and his loneliness clings to me like I accidentally stepped into a spider’s web. I want to scrape it off my skin. I’m about to hang up when he speaks again.
    â€˜You have to fight back.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The first request. To be popular. You have to fight back.’
    I look down at my skinny monkey arms. ‘Everyone’s bigger than me. I can’t.’
    â€˜Well then punch twice as hard. Carry a bigger stick.’
    â€˜Girls don’t fight with sticks. They fight with words.’
    â€˜Same thing. Those words you don’t use because you’re afraid of hurting someone, it’s like that punch you don’t throw because you’re afraid of drawing blood. Draw blood, Kirra. Draw blood with your words. Blood’s the only thing that’ll stop the bastards.’
    A crow calls nearby, and Boogie goes on.
    â€˜But learn to punch too. Just in case.’

Lark has skinned the sheets from Desiree’s bed and he’s shaking them from the front patio when I arrive, flicking away the sand he carts from the beach to the bed each day. He never did this at home, it’s something I can imagine Desiree insisting on, her cat’s bum mouth pursed as she picks the sand from the corner creases of the fitted sheet. The sheets make that cotton
whump
sound as Lark flicks them with a casual violence, the wind swelling their bellies so they look like sails.
    I whistle up to him and he whistles back at me.
    â€˜One Moment or It’s Your Lucky Day?’ he calls out.
    He has his ear resting sidewards against his shoulder as he reads the sports section of a folded-up local newspaper that is sitting on the railing. His words slant down at me from the patio.
    Once a week Lark meets up with all the guys at the local pub. They squirrel their coins for happy-hour beers, make cheeky banter with Tina, the middle-aged topless waitress whose reconstructed breasts are pretty much the only things about her that don’t droop, and most importantly they all have a punt on the horses. This is where I come in. Lark reckons I’m his lucky charm. I have no idea about jockeys or statistics. I just go on names. This infuriates his mate Macca, who approaches these things with a scientific rigour that could really get him far if he chose to apply it to something useful instead of sitting around, swelling the ranks of the unemployed. He can tell you every horse’s vital statistics, how they go on different courses and what their lineage is. I’ll just scan the list of horses and choose the name that has the nicest ring to it, and more