EGG TIMER

It was important that no one took your photograph because you didn't want to end up a rude picture for bad men to download. We were very sure of that, very certain in our certainty. “Noah Potnik has a program,” Felix and Otis swore, “that strips the clothes from any photo to show what the person looks like underneath.” Noah Potnik had nude pictures of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson and Gigi Hadid, and Felix and Otis told how he'd flashed these images to them with a horrible grin on the bus one afternoon, their eyes growing as big as paper plates because with this power a person could X-ray past the clothes of anyone they wanted, but that meant that even though for some reason Noah Potnik didn't have any pictures of boys it must be possible that they, too – Felix and Otis – could end up flying around the internet where people would stare at them with their clothes off.

We all nodded and pretended to know a lot about that, because at nine it was important to pretend to know a lot about the internet.

We were suspicious of nice people photographing us too, actually, especially our parents, due to another thing we pretended to know about the internet. Indigo Munro's brother had let her use his laptop to watch YouTube but left the kids lock off, so she decided to search Google to see if anyone else shared her name, and if so would they like to be her pen-pal.

What she found instead was herself. All over Instagram and on her mum's Facebook she saw her own face gazing back, shiny and peach-coloured, smiling in every shot, at beachside kiosks or in front of waterfalls or waiting in line for underage concerts she couldn't even remember, and she said she felt this sickly hot bubble rising in her throat because she had finally gotten onto the internet only to find that she was already there.

The photos weren't really her, though, because Indi didn't like big crowds whereas the girl in these photos beamed confidence and pride and was totally happy being on the internet where anyone could look at her. Even Noah Potnik, said Big Vivaan, with a concerned stare. Indigo scowled. She said it was like when something you thought you knew really well suddenly feels strange. Do you mean like when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth? asked Luna but that wasn't what Indi meant. She said it was more like if you snuck into your parents' room and found a secret cupboard where they kept another version of you but it was a robot. Whenever they went to parties they would bring this life-sized doll version of you and show how it could do all of the Fortnite dances and it never got grumpy even when the parents teased it and they definitely never caught it eating dried flies off the windowsill. We all imagined our own parents with such replicas, this secret army closeted away in every home across the globe. It was a horrible thought, and we banished it by teasing Indi mercilessly until she cried, which only made things worse because it meant she really did think there was a robot Indigo Munro somewhere out there, because if she really didn't think so then why did she get so upset?

At the same time we all began to shy away from cameras. So many images from that era are of smeared cheeks caught mid-turn, eyes dipped or shoulder raised in defence, some instinct for self-preservation forcing us into retreat.

Another one of the things we all pretended to know about was bloody bodies.

We lived dangerous lives back then. The perils we faced daily were many. Peanuts, which could murder your friends. North Korea. The one percent. Anti-vaccinations. Spiders were deadly but also needed saving (most really deadly animals needed saving). Bad men.

Despite all of this we never saw properly bloody bodies. Minecraft and Star Wars didn't have blood. We'd all had cuts and scabs and Luna had some story about her sister wearing a jumper around her waist, but the closest we had come to a real visible reminder of death was Jack Lumm because he smoked so many cigarettes that people called him Black Lung and everyone said he would die coughing up blood.

If we'd been allowed to play football we might have had the chance to see some real bloody bodies. That was the best place to see someone really hit someone else and pretend it was an accident. It was hard to figure out why hitting was bad but smashing was good. Smashing avocados made them really expensive. Big Vivaan's older brother was always trying to make him jealous with tales of all the things he smashed. He smashed burgers. He smashed boxes. He smashed pussies. But somehow even Big Vivaan's big brother didn't seem to get bloody.

I had one story about blood I told frequently, and it had even more currency because it involved Noah Potnik. We were all scared of Noah Potnik, not just because of the nude photos. We'd find his name all over our suburb, carved into benches, burnt into the backs of bus seats. He was everywhere and nowhere, which was doubly scary because he also lived next door to me. One evening I slid out the back door, careful not to let our new kitten Cirocco escape, and leapt up to dangle from the lemon tree in our backyard. I was hauling myself up onto the branch when the crash of a screen door flung shut yanked me from my reverie. From my elevated vantage I could see over the side fence to the Potnik yard. The place was waist-high with grey-yellow grass, interrupted by an occasional island of sun-faded lawn furniture or plastic toys from back when Noah was little. He was in his teens now, and I watched as he slunk across the yard in the growing purple gloom to the corrugated iron shed with the drooping roof. He stepped into its shadow and pressed a small black gadget to his pursed lips, and moments later his entire head disappeared into a roiling grey nimbus.

I looked back at his house. It was a double-storey place like ours except their hospital green weatherboards were coming away in places. Some of the windows were covered by yellowing newspaper, but through the nearest I could see into the Potnik's kitchen. Mr Potnik was standing at the sink, grating cheese onto a plastic board, and when he was done he swiped the cheese onto a bowl of something steaming. He then lifted the board to his face and even at this distance I could make out his tiny pointed tongue stabbing at whatever cheese remnants clung to it. On his shoulders danced the blue light of a TV glow. A vase of dying flowers squatted on the kitchen table. There was always a vase of dead flowers at the Potnik's house, which is why to this day dead flowers make me think of when I was a kid.

I looked back to the garden to find Noah regarding me with a snarl. His face was tight. His nostrils flared like a camel's. And almost as if he willed it, a single prick of red appeared from one of them and slowly began to descend towards his mouth.

I released my grip on the branch and dropped to the decking. I tried to find wellness because wellness was important.

A thing we universally did was pretend not to be upset. That's how Indigo Munro made things worse for her, by getting so visibly upset.

Kyle McFerrell could walk into a room and immediately know if someone was the sort of person to get upset. We knew other kids who would corner you in the toilets or the bike lock-up and give you paper cuts or threaten to shave your head, but these kids kept their torture practices to the shadows. Kyle McFerrell was one of the few who openly paraded their villainy. He'd ask you if you were a virgin in front of all of your friends, and of course you didn't know what to answer at nine. He waited until the hallway outside homeroom was crowded before tripping you up so that your books went flying, and then ask loudly why you were throwing your stuff at people. Sometimes Kyle's punch-ups actually came with a schedule, and if you didn't turn up at the designated time you'd face an even worse fate.

No one was ever bullied, to be clear. To us, bullying existed exclusively in the world of children, the same world that claimed exclusive custodianship of Babybels and toy libraries and Ninjago. When an adult accused you of being bullied they were reminding you that you had so much growing up to do.

There was also the fact that bullies didn't think of themselves as bullies, or we would all have behaved pretty differently at one point or another. And then there was the sad truth that bullies could at least claim relevance.

Everyone laughed at Kyle McFerrell's jokes, because they didn't want to be his next target. Kyle's power was publicity, and some kids responded to that power by pretending Kyle was really tough and funny and original, when really he was probably just repeating lines he'd endured from older kids or siblings or possibly even his own parents.

Mr Otomo was always trying to high five kids. He would get snarly if you left him hanging. When he noticed that other kids treated Kyle McFerrell as if he was the coolest member of their year, however, he directed his high fives exclusively to him. Even when we were communicating via video link from his house stuffed with ferns he would always pause after reading Kyle's name in the roll call and raise his hand to the camera. When a teacher sides with Kyle McFerrell, you might as well give up. To this day, there's little that inspires pity in me so much as a grown up aching for a child's approval.

Anyway, when someone Zoombombed a grade nine class with video of a penis, a rumour began circulating that the police had tracked the video to Kyle McFerrell. Nothing ever came of the rumour but it was enough to completely vaporise his power. From then on when we logged on for homeroom Kyle's bedroom was dimly lit, and his silhouette was so still that I would wonder if his feed had frozen until some tiny shiver would give away life.

We all pretended to be relevant. I thought having a new kitten would make me relevant but everyone was getting cats or dogs, and having Cirocco meant we had to keep all of the doors of the house closed so she wouldn't escape and run under the wheels of a car.

Over time we did begin to feel relevant, though. We were discussed. Our parents sometimes referred to us as a 'wartime generation.' They said we were being forced to endure the kind of suffering and shortages faced by their great-grandparents and while I'll grant that there were echoes between our lives, you have to consider that the greatest generation didn't have Animal Crossing.

Of course, we attained even greater relevance later. Our emotional health has been monitored like radiation levels. We were worried over. It was worried that we would be an anxious generation, and we worried about our anxiety. It was very important not to be anxious, too, which only compounded the situation.

Being on the internet, that was something we all pretended to do. We boasted about downloading and status updates and likes as if we knew what we were talking about. At the same time we worried that we were on the internet, zooming around as naked photos or robot versions of ourselves or just from all the surveillance, which we heard our parents talking about a lot. There were invisible cameras in the streets that could take your photo. When my mum said that, I said well Jack Lumm must be a celebrity because he lives on the street and there must be a billion photos of him. My mum looked like she'd been stung by an insect and said what a terrible thing to say, Jack Lumm was homeless and I shouldn't make jokes.

I couldn't see how I was the bad person. Jack Lumm used to do jobs for people all around our neighbourhood but now nobody wanted him in their house and he didn't have his own house any more for some reason. Now that Jack Lumm was on the street all day he would drink alcohol and wet his pants and weep openly. I once asked my mum why he was crying and she said it was because he wasn't believable. Believable? I asked. I said 'grievable,' she replied. When he died no one would care. I thought about how my friends would care because of the coughing blood, but I held my tongue. She said it all in a very matter-of-fact way, like she was explaining how Tap and Pay works, but beneath her words I sensed deep reservoirs of feeling I couldn't name. I was very attentive to feelings I couldn't name.

Once I waited until the backyard was fully dark before climbing the lemon tree, hugging the branches tightly. I knew Noah Potnik regularly waded into the sea of dried grass to suck on his vape thingy and if it was dark enough I sometimes hid in the tree to watch him. As if I was a hidden camera too.

That night Noah wasn't vaping but was instead pulling faces. Thinking himself unobserved, he rearranged his features into a series of increasingly exaggerated scowls and grimaces. I couldn't understand why he would be practising different expressions, some of which bordered on the comical, but none of us even pretended to understand teenagers.

We pretended to understand grown-ups. Until a certain age they'd represented a united front. Then we were told we were not to talk to Jack Lumm, even though he had been in most of our houses. It made us realise that maybe grown-ups aren't all on the same team.

Luna's dad started up his own YouTube trying to pioneer double-style pasta, which is where you use two different kinds of pasta in the same dish. I spied on my parents prancing around our kitchen copying him. “Forty-eight likes can't be wrong,” they chortled. And he was supposed to be their friend. I wondered if it was possible to fully understand anyone older than you. Then again, they didn't seem to understand me at all, and so I wondered if it was possible to understand someone younger than you. Or to understand anyone, really.

We pretended to understand a lot but didn't realise how much the grown-ups were pretending to understand too. I didn't much like the music my dad played so I asked him if he had heard about Tupac and he said “Here we go, what's he done now?” Which proved that he hadn't heard about Tupac, because the one thing everyone knows about Tupac is that he got shot dead.

Then there was the time Mr Otomo was acting really weird in a Zoom class and without warning started singing a funny song about being all by yourself and when we all laughed he got a bit teary and said “Do you like it? Do you really think I'm a real cool teacher?” When I told my mum she went quiet and chewed her lips and after a while said that Mr Otomo's partner had decided to stay at someone else's house when all of this started.

Going to other people's houses had taken on mythical status. It might be why mail carriers were treated like angels, as if their ability to move from home to home, pausing on each threshold, was evidence of some higher level of being. It feels connected to the way we still revere delivery people and couriers, the bringers of stuff, the only people who could convey to us the spoils of toy stores, game shops, all of the forbidden places. It could be why so many of us still harbour the desire, again well researched, to screw a postie.

Cirocco was scratching at the back door but I ignored her. I was busy seeing how high I could throw my Bumblebee without it breaking on the deck when I misjudged my footing and could only stare in horror as the Transformer arced up and over the fence into the Potniks' domain. With a blazing fire in my cheeks I scrambled up the lemon tree and surveyed the yard. It was empty of life. The house was dark. I could have left Bumblebee to his fate but I'd borrowed him from Otis back before all of this began and as soon as he was able I knew he'd be over to demand it back.

I clambered up onto the barbecue in its grey plastic raincoat. From here I could hoist myself onto the fence. Eyeing the house for any motion, I dipped my runners into the grass.

Ducking low I began to search among the tall blades, heart louder than the techno the Petronas boys blared when cruising the street. At times I reached clearings where some discarded toy had kept the grass from growing – a pink plastic shopping cart on its side, a T-Rex missing its forearms, a shredded paddling pool – but grew increasingly certain that Bumblebee would never be found. I almost headbutted the two skinny legs wrapped in black denim.

“Well well well well well,” said Noah Potnik. “Guess I picked the wrong day to quit murdering people.” He took a long hit from his vaporiser as I backed away on all fours.

“Are you going to take my photo?” I whispered.

He wrinkled his nose. “Why would I want your photo?”

“To take my clothes off with your computer,” I murmured.

His confusion only deepened and I worried it would give way to aggression. I hastily explained how Otis and Felix had seen his pictures of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson and his eyes widened in alarm as he asked if they'd been peeping over his shoulder and no no no, I said, he'd showed the pictures to them and then he was back in his bewildered state asking why the hell would he show sexy pictures to little kids, and anyway that app that can take people clothes off was just a myth, nobody had anything that could do that and I clocked that he was being very serious, very sincere, and I asked how could he be sure though?

“I am extremely online,” he said.

Just then came a sound like a walrus giving birth and both of our eyebrows shot skyward. He turned to look back at his house and then flashed me a mischievous face. “Do you want to see something funny?”

I nodded in abject terror.

Noah took my elbow and guided me towards the back of his house. “Have you noticed how everyone's constipated?” he asked.

Constipation we were all interested in.

“It's because everyone's at home,” he went on. “Some people's bodies just aren't programmed to shit within earshot.” A thrill rippled up my spine at his choice of words.

He pointed to a window whose flyscreen flapped slightly. I lifted myself onto my toes and peered in, hands cupped around my eyes.

In the dim light a figure bowed low, hands dangling by their ankles, and as another seismic groan erupted I recognised it was Mr Potnik on the toilet. Almost as if I'd said something out loud he suddenly shot up and his jowly bulldog face was staring directly at my own. With a start he began blustering about and yelling worse words than Noah had said and I dropped back onto my heels and sprinted for my fence, thoughts of Noah and Bumblebee and Otis and Felix's lie whisked away in the afternoon wind.

When I pulled the back door of our house open I saw down the long corridor that our front door was open as well, my parents framing the rectangle in which Mr Potnik was waving wildly. What kind of peeping freak are you raising, he screamed, what the fuck is going on, distancing, educate your child for fuck's sake, there's a three-year-old on our other side who gets it.

My dad sensed my presence and asked me to join them. I slunk the length of the hallway, staying just shy of the square of light that fell in from the porch.

“Did you go next door?” asked mum.

“But mum,” I pleaded. “Noah let me.”

All eyes turned to Noah. He shook his head, even though his eyes gave away the truth. I realised at that instant that ever since he'd confronted me I'd been able to read everything Noah was feeling, that I'd never seen a face that so blatantly gave up all that was going on behind it.

And I knew that Noah had been on my side out there in the yard, but that Mr Potnik was the person he had to share a home with, and so I decided that his betrayal was at least understandable.

“Jesus shit!” my dad yelled as Cirocco cannonballed out the front door and into the night.

The next morning I stepped out into the backyard to find Bumblebee sunbathing on the deck with a little bandanna parachute tied to his shoulders. I climbed the lemon tree. Noah was sitting on a plastic fold-out chair among the grass, earphones trailing down his shirtfront. He was staring towards the back lane, mouth occasionally twitching as half-formed words struggled to escape.

“Have you seen our cat?” I called.

He reacted as if I'd fired off a shotgun. Regaining his composure, he shook his head. “Not a fan of the whole animal community.”

Oh, I said. “What are you doing.”

“Just stuff and stuff.”

“What are you listening to?”

He shrugged. “Just sad Soundcloud rappers.”

I looked down at Bumblebee and then up at the Potnik residence.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“Everyone's in trouble,” said Noah. He was about to continue when a colossal crashing of glass somewhere nearby drowned his words. “There didn't used to be so much recycling, have you noticed? But to go back to your question,” he exhaled, “if you want to know if my dad's forgotten your very existence, then it's thumbsy uppies for you.”

Something beneath my ribs unwound itself.

Noah exhaled a puff of gas and then sucked it up his nose. He smirked, satisfied. “That's French,” he said, and then puffed Frenchily again.

I thought about things to talk about. The things I talked about with my friends didn't seem relevant. I asked him if he had any models I could look at, like model airplanes or tanks or anything. No, he said. I don't think I do.

Oh, I said. I couldn't think of anything else so I just stared around his yard. There was grass growing from the guttering of the house.

After a while he removed his earbuds. “I've been told I'm hard to read,” he said. “But I've always loved a closed book. So many possibilities.”

I felt awkward about the fact that Noah was the opposite of a closed book, and so I said “okay, well, bye,” and slid down the branch.

But the next day after class I leapt up onto the barbecue to see if Noah was there again. This time I found him sitting on a pile of bricks just below me, writing in a notebook. I caught a glimpse of the page, on which he'd written his full name dozens of times. I thought about how he'd done the same thing on buses and train platforms and park benches all over our neighbourhood, and for a second wondered why a person would want strangers to happen upon their name.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He snapped the book shut and looked up, embarrassed. “Studying.”

“For what?”

“Exams.”

I remembered that Noah was in Year 12. My mum had said something about how hard it must be for kids his age, because the whole last year of school should be something special that bonds people together for life. Instead he would spend a vital rite of passage alone.

“Do you miss your friends?” I asked him. His face clouded, brows furrowing up.

“Being my age isn't really working out so well. I'm eager to move forward.”

I didn't understand and I told him so.

He looked as though he'd eaten something that didn't taste the way he'd expected. “How can I put this? I just don't know if I can trust you, kid.”

I was stunned. I racked my brain. All I could come up with were the times I had watched him without him realising.

“Is it because of the hidden cameras?” I asked. “Are you worried about facial recognition?”

He laughed, his mouth wide. “If you're worried about facial recognition you should wear Juggalo makeup.”

“What's a Juggalo?”

“Insane Clown Posse. Their fans wear crazy makeup that can defeat facial recognition.”

That's how we began wearing elaborate and slightly scary clown makeup whenever we met. “Losing my entire mind,” Noah laughed the first time he saw me with the face. “I am extremely here for this.”

Over the weeks I learned that Noah's dad had lost his job and was home all the time now, and that it made life hard for them both. They didn't have much of an internet connection - “we don't even have a YouTube in our house,” he'd joked – and Noah had to use his dad's old work computer in the living room to study. If Noah complained or asked for help, he always faced the same response:

“Not my circus, not my monkey.”

When he said that, I spent a long time reading Noah's face. It was the hardest I'd ever had to try, but then again there was a lot to take in. I felt that he wasn't angry at his dad, or blaming him for anything, that he knew his father was doing his best. But I also felt that some part inside of him couldn't understand why his dad didn't notice that his son never looked really happy. That there was some broken little kid in there who couldn't make sense of the fact that his dad didn't notice his sadness, or worse, that he noticed and didn't care, or wrote it off as a character flaw for which he held no responsibility.

Noah saw me looking and turned away.

I tried to change the topic. “Did you hear about Mr Otomo?”

His eyes creased at the edges. “Did he really reinvent himself as a rapping grandpa?”

“Yes!” I shrieked. “His channel is so good!”

“Who would have thought that business model would take off?”

“Well, that generation are heavy users of the internet these days.”

Thinking about my old teacher reminded me of something.

“Can I ask why you don't like school?” I said.

He sighed. “It's not that I don't like school... I don't think school likes us.”

I didn't know what he meant by 'us'.

“We're always told that it's ok to be vulnerable, like we shouldn't be afraid to admit weakness. But I don't think that's the problem. I think that people are more afraid that if they try to be strong they'll get be laughed at. So nobody tries to do anything hard.”

But now we all had to do hard things, I shot back. We have to stay at home and not go to our friends' houses, and we can't borrow things from each other or spend our money at the shops, and my mum was saying it's even harder for teenagers because that's when people want to go on dates and fall in love-

I cut myself off with the sudden thought that Noah might not find any of this hard at all. Maybe the end of the world was just business as usual for him.

Around that time someone spread a rumour that birthdays didn't count that year because we couldn't celebrate them together, and everyone I knew died inside thinking that we would have to be nine for two years. But as it turned out most of us got to have people at our birthday parties. The minute the floodgates were opened we raced to each other's homes, we couldn't get there fast enough, and somehow my catch-ups with Noah became something that happened before, frozen in time, just like a photograph.

Except for this one afternoon when Otis was over and we were firing our Avengers from slingshots we'd made from rubber bands and coathangers and Otis accidentally sent Iron Man hurtling over the fence. We looked at each other in horror and he mouthed Noah Potnik's name. I looked back to the fence just as Iron Man made the leap back over to the safety of our side.

We stood in hunched silence, frozen. I heard a faint mechanical hiss and saw a pale plume rise up past the afternoon sun.

“Thanks,” I said in a small voice. There was no answer.

We left the action figures where they lay and raced back inside. A startled Cirocco leapt onto the kitchen table, almost knocking over the oversized vase stuffed with gladioli, geysers of scarlet and purple and orange just stinking of life.