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some of the others. This was fine.
    She could get used to this.
     
    Connie came in through the patio doors, hoping to avoid her parents. No such luck. They were sitting at the breakfast bar, a pot of coffee untouched in the space between their hands. They both looked up as she walked in.
    ‘Good day?’
    ‘Mmm.’
    ‘That’s hardly an answer, is it?’
    Connie took a deep breath. Allowed the traces of bitterness left in the air by Anna’s tone to dissipate before she responded. ‘It was okay.’
    ‘What lessons did you have?’
    Her father had evidently been training himself in asking questions that required direct responses. Can’t have two silent daughters. Keep this one talking.
    ‘English. Maths.’ She paused. Tried to pluck something out of the day that would be worth mentioning. ‘We’re learning about energy in science.’
    ‘What kind of energy?’
    ‘All kinds. I’ve got lots of homework.’
    ‘Okay. You’d best get on with it, then.’
    Connie went upstairs, closed her bedroom door behind her, dropped her bag on the floor next to her bed. Went to the mirror that hung above her dresser. She looked the same as she had that morning. More tired, perhaps. She leaned close, examined the dark circles beneath her eyes. Some of the other girls wore make-up that gave their faces a powdery orange tint. Maybe she would get some.
    She could sense her parents downstairs, talking about her. Talking about Lily. Or maybe they weren’t talking at all. Communicating via silent thought-transmissions.
    It seemed that silence was its own mode of communication, these days.
    She went to her bed, knelt down, and reached a hand underneath, fingers tracing the dust on the floorboards until she found what she was looking for. Her hand closed around hard plastic casing. The radio that her parents had given her for Christmas two years ago. That she had barely used since her father had finally relented and bought a television a year later.
    She switched it on. A muted buzz whispered its way through the air. She twisted the dial, and found a voice. A man’s voice, joined a moment later by a woman’s. They laughed. Oh, Jim, you know me so well.
    She turned the volume down low enough that she could hear the voices without being able to make out the words, and placed the radio on her windowsill.
    She hadn’t been lying about the homework, but she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. Her parents wouldn’t check. The teachers wouldn’t comment. She was in limbo, outside the normal rules of society, temporarily. Temporally.
    Lily had never been able to say temporarily .
    Connie lay down on her bed and stretched out as much as she could without touching the wall. Not much leeway with a single bed. Sometimes, when her parents were out, she spread out on their bed like a starfish, trying to touch every corner. It was supposed to be a secret, but she could never make the bed as neatly as they could and they always knew. Her father didn’t mind. It was only Anna who complained.
    She liked their room. It didn’t have the sense of emptiness that hers did, regardless of whether or not they were in it. Perhaps it was the fact that it was shared space, the lives of two people combined in one area. It gave a sense of conversation in the room, even when there was no communication between its living occupants.
    Downstairs she could hear their voices begin to rise. She pulled a pillow around her ears to muffle the sound. Not that she could ever hear the words. But she could make out the vibrations in her mother’s tone that would indicate when she was near tears.
    Through the open window she could hear the birds as they bade farewell to the fading day. The sound mingled with the murmurings from the radio, the low growl of voices from the kitchen. And Lily’s voice in her mind, stumbling over syllables she could not pronounce. Tempery. Temporally. Tempo-rarity.
    Connie closed her eyes and wished: for silence or for graspable