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down the highway ahead of you like a glittering string of jewels. Wendy, driving next to you, smells beautiful, is beauty.
    The world is so splendidly splendid you want to gather it in your arms and gobble it all up. You smile. Wendy smiles at your smile. You cannot begin to explain the deep peace you are experiencing so you just blink at her like a sleepy lizard, like a lizard-God. Godlike.
    The car crunches into your gravel driveway and you wake. You look up at your little wooden house settled in its untamed garden and feel enormously grateful for the enoughness of your life: a partner you still want, children in good health with all their fingers and toes, two cars, three bedrooms, taps with running water.
    You just turn on the tap and the water comes! And electricity! And appliances!
    How many people get to live like this? You live in the top—what?—ten per cent? of the world’s privileged. How fucking lucky is that? How lucky are you!
    Dizzy with gratitude, you almost topple backwards so Wendy takes your arm and leads you up the front steps. Egg leaps at you joyfully and you want to hug him but you poke him away from your bad leg with your crutches. The house feels cool and smells uniquely O’Dell—a barely discernible but distinct combination of wet dog, apple-scented washing powder, dirty socks and freshly cut grass.
    You stagger down the hall and haul your enormous aching leg into bed. As Wendy fusses in distant rooms, you become aware of other areas of pain, a symphony of minor and major chords playing through your body. You are mega-alert, alive to every note and nuance, things terrible and splendid. And now you are aware of something. You are aware that something is coming.
    You are waiting.
    What are you waiting for?
    An epiphany!
    In a flash you realise that there is a grand purpose to being run over by the blue Toyota. You are going to Learn Something. The Universe has a Lesson it wants to teach you. At some point over the next days or weeks, Knowledge will be revealed to you.
    You are at the beginning of a Hero Journey. You have been Called to Adventure. And although you have no idea what the journey entails or where it will take you, you feel honoured, thrilled to the core that you have been Chosen.
    In your mind you fast-forward to a little café where you sit opposite Frannie Prager, laughing about how unevolved you both were before the fates threw you together and set you on that ridiculous, rocky path to glory those many eons ago.
    Rosie bursts through the door and throws her arms around you. Her school uniform smells of stale bread.
    ‘Daddy!’ she cries.
    ‘Mind his leg,’ says Wendy and you realise she is sitting on the bed next to you and you wonder how long she’s been there.
    Rosie’s distress eases as she sees you are in one piece and her story tumbles out: Mrs Rich, the art teacher, found her and told her you had been hit by a car.
    ‘Found you where?’ says Wendy, leaping in from left field.
    ‘At the bus stop,’ says Rosie, tackled before she can make her run.
    ‘Why were you at the bus stop?’
    ‘I ran away from school.’
    ‘Why?’
    Rosie zigzags through the big beats of the narrative with little regard for traditional story structure. The salient points appear to be these:
    (a) Mean mother tries to exclude girl from trip.
    (b) Mean daughter supports mean mother.
    (c) Rosie outraged.
    (d) Rosie confronts mean daughter.
    (e) Untoward language employed by both parties.
    (f) Rosie accused of racist jibes.
    (g) Rosie employs physical violence.
    (h) Rosie in deep shit.
    The phone rings. No one in your household likes talking on the phone (even Rosie, who rarely engages in the typical adolescent telephonic marathon) but, for some inexplicable reason, Wendy answers it.
    It’s the headmistress. Principal is too benign a word for the woman in charge of an institution like Boomerang. Christina Bowden, however, isn’t exactly the scary Margaret Thatcher protégé one might expect.