Look, I know how this sounds.
But I am pretty sure the AI the school gave us to fix our anxiety’s got depression, and may have just murdered one of my best friends.
Don’t you just love high school?
Okay, okay. Maybe “murdered” is a little dramatic.
But Tyler’s been missing for three days, and his last text was, weird.
Sick today. Don’t worry.
See?
That’s the message.
Read it again.
Notice anything weird?
If you said “no,” congratulations. You’re a normal person.
But if there’s one thing I know after nine years of friendship and eight thousand texts about video games, homework, and whether hotdogs are sandwiches (they’re NOT, and I will die on this hill), it’s that Tyler DOES. NOT. USE. PUNCTUATION.
But this message.
It has full stops.
Capital letters.
The whole deal.
Obviously, my brain wouldn’t let this go.
Before I’d even realised what I was doing I was already at it. Screenshotting, checking, rechecking, doing the whole verify-until-the-doubt-stops thing that my brain loves so much.
Spoiler alert.
It never works (Mental B.S: 1,357,785. Appeasement: 0. MENTAL B.S WINS AGAIN!).
Dr. Kapoor would probably say I was catastrophising, or some other calm and rational thing that would make me want to scream.
“Notice the thought, Kalyah. Let it pass. You’re the riverbank, not the water.”
I’d never liked that metaphor.
What if the water kept rising?
What if the riverbank was already crumbling?
What if there was a croc in the river?
And so, here I was, at 4 AM. Scrolling through months of texts like some kind of deranged detective trying to find anything that would make his text seem normal enough that I can go back to sleep.
And I found…
Nothing.
Tyler’s messages were exactly how I remembered ’em.
Absolute lowercase insanity. Spelling that physically hurt to look at, and ideas crashing into each other without grammar getting in the way. Last week he’d sent me like twenty messages about some project.
Zero capitals, zero punctuation. Typos so bad I had to get myself retested for dyslexia.
omg i think i figuerd out y upliift kids r acting weird like rly weird gotta show u
In short, pure and unfiltered Tyler.
And now?
Sick today. Don’t worry.
I tried calling him.
Voicemail.
I tried texting him.
Delivered.
Not Read.
Just, Delivered.
Some important info you should know about Tyler, his slate is basically an extension of his body.
So, if he was awake enough to text me at 3:47 AM, he was damn well awake enough to reply.
Unless, of course… he wasn’t the one who sent it.
I love having that kind of thought in the middle of the night. Really enjoying all the implications here.
Thankfully, mind-numbing dread is an amazing cure for insomnia, and I had a totally peaceful sleep the rest of the night (and if you believed that, you’re adorable, and you’re probably in Hufflepuff).
Eventually, the day took mercy on me and arrived as it always did.
Loud, rushed, and smelling of rice.
Dad was already off for an early shift as Principal Engineer for the never-ending upgrade to the Sydney light rail. His coffee mug was cooling on the counter, a Post-it note stuck to the handle. His handwriting was terrible, but I’d gotten pretty decent at decoding it over the years.
Don’t forget your lunch.
Love you kiddo!
I caught myself running my thumb over the edge of the note and made myself stop. “It never ends at just one ritual, Kalyah.”
By the time I got dressed and braced myself for school, Mum was half out the door in her scrubs, already late for her shift at the E.D. As with every morning, she kissed my forehead and shoved leftover food into my hands. “Luroufan,” I murmured, peeking under the container lid. “Not too shabby.”
Before the front door closed behind her, she yelled over her shoulder her traditional version of “I love you.”
“Chi ba!” (Eat.) “You look too skinny.”
Yep.
I felt the love.
I pulled out my slate on the way to the door. Chucked open Tyler’s chat, and I saw the Delivered message still hadn’t changed. Still not read. My thumb hovered over the call button, but I’d already called four times and I knew exactly what would happen. Voicemail, again, quickly being followed by frustrated cursing, and a good dose of spiralling. So I shoved the slate back in my pocket and tried to think of something else.
I ran my thumb over Ama’s jade pendant, knowing full well that I shouldn’t. But I had to make sure it was still there. After all, maybe I’d put it down and forgotten about it. Or someone could have stolen it without me knowing. Maybe I’d flushed it down the toilet while I wasn’t thinking…
Thanks for the thoughts, Brain. (You bloody jackass.)
Morning routine (not ritual!) completed, I set off for the train. Where I proceeded to experience the delight of getting stuck on the T1 North Shore line, plus the added bonus of giving up and catching a bus. As you can see, my Dad and his team were currently doing a great job. Five stars!
On the bus, I refreshed Tyler’s chat one more time. Delivered. The aircon on the bus was already fighting a losing battle against the heat. We were in for a scorcher.
I put my slate away. But knowing that I couldn’t be trusted not to keep checking, I sat on my hands and leaned my head against the window. (I was now officially that person on the bus).
Thankfully, I managed to rock up to school before the first bell went off. North Sydney Tech High (Go BullSharks!) looked exactly as it always did. Solar panels on the roof that probably hadn’t worked since the two-year service agreement expired. A dying vertical garden struggling against the November heat on the side. While in front of me, I saw everyone streaming through gates in identical navy blue and dark purple uniforms which in no way remind me of the last docu-series I saw on cults.
Walking into the glass and metal building, I slid on my school-mandated AR glasses.
You know that feeling when you put on glasses that don’t quite fit? That little pinch on the bridge of your nose that starts as “mildly annoying” and ends as “genuine headache by dinner time”?
Yeah. That.
My parents kept telling me the little red indent the frames left was “cute.”
My parents were liars.
Loving liars. But still, liars.
At school, the glasses were mandatory. No glasses, no Dashboard. No Dashboard, no classwork. And no classwork meant my parents asking reasonable questions about where exactly their tuition money was going.
And so, on the pinchy glasses went.
First period today was maths. Where the smell of someone’s hidden breakfast meat pie slowly turning the room into eau de petrol station completed the ensemble to my craptastic morning.
Usually I found maths pretty calming. I didn’t have to make decisions. I didn’t have to think about the future. I just had to, do. In a way, it let me turn off the loudest parts of my brain. ’Cept on special occasions like today, when the garbage fire in my head was too freaking loud.
I glanced up from the messy pile of half-written and completely useless notes I’d been scribbling down to Tyler’s desk sitting empty in the third row. I could still make out the scratch from when he dropped his calculator last month and a startled Brian Richards had farted.
LOUDLY.
The whole class laughed so hard that Ms. Khan had to stop teaching for a solid minute to let us catch our breaths.
Even Brian had laughed (eventually).
Sadly for me, my trip down memory lane (where I was definitely not ruminating) was interrupted by my glasses.
The glow of yellow haze in my peripheral vision and the sound of a ding through the bone-conducting arms of the glasses drew my eyes to the notification on pure Pavlovian instinct.
You seem distracted by Tyler’s absence ☹
Missing a friend can be hard ☹ ☹
Want to try a focus session to get back on track? 😄
…How the freak did it know I was thinking about Tyler?
“Must be eye tracking,” I thought. “Or maybe micro-expressions?” Whatever creepy surveillance thing it used, it had seen where my eyes went and had made a guess.
Just a guess.
That’s all.
Wait, you’re going to need some background.
The Dashboard was the little blue heart blinking in the corner of your AR glasses, tracking your mood, your focus, your “wellness metrics.” UpLift were the VR sessions. The ones parents signed permission slips for without reading the fine print.
Students went in anxious and came out… different. “Better”, everyone said.
I motioned the notification away with a nod to the upper left. Then tried (and failed) to breathe normally.
I couldn’t stop thinking about last month. It had been a Thursday when Tyler had found me crying in the accessible bathroom by the library during lunch.
I’d failed a maths test.
Well, I got 82%, which isn’t actually failing.
Unless you’re me. And your brain won’t stop screaming that 82 means you’re stupid. And everyone knows it. And now your whole future is ruined.
By the time he found me on that bathroom floor, my eyes were all puffy and red and I had snot running out of my nose. When he saw me, I’d expected him to turn away or be judgy.
“It’s just a test.”
“You’ll do better next time.”
“Calm down.”
All the useless things that everyone seems to try.
Yet Tyler didn’t do that. He sat on that disgusting bathroom floor next to me and said, “Okay, worst case scenario. You fail math. Then what?”
I choked back a sob and told him, “Then I fail the year.”
“And then?”
“Then!?!?” I almost socked him in the jaw for asking that. “Then I don’t get into uni!”
“And then?”
Over the next few minutes we went all the way down the spiral together. By the end I was saying stuff like “and then I live under a bridge and eat rats.” We were both laughing our heads off at the idea of me living like “a tweaker Ninja Turtle.”
Tyler didn’t fix things or lecture or even give advice. He sat with you while they sucked.
And now his text had a full stop.
When lunch finally took mercy on me and arrived, my left knee caught the corner of the planter box outside the canteen, so I had to stop and let my right knee do exactly the same thing. Symmetry restored, I walked over to the usual spot of the bench near the dying vertical garden named Phineas the Ficus. Where the wifi signal was weakest and the wind would randomly do its best impression of a tornado.
It was kind of a crappy spot. But it was ours.
Marco was already there, AR glasses swapped out for his regular prescription pair. Dark curls that always looked like he’d just woken up. Tanned olive skin, and the energy of a caffeinated golden retriever, all crammed into a 5’4” cake-powered body. Currently, he was at war with a vending machine.
And losing.
“The AI uprising starts with the vending machines!” he told me as I walked up. “Watch! Any minute now it’s gonna be like, ‘Sorry, Marco, your snack privileges have been revoked due to insufficient vibes.’”
I snorted. “Having issues?”
“It won’t take my money!” he yelled, cursing out the inanimate object in Spanish and Italian (in case the vending machine had received a better language education than any other Aussie alive).
Leah arrived a minute later, already pulling off her AR glasses. Shortest of our group by a solid head. She was Singaporean-Indian by birth, but bogan by choice. She had this sleek pixie cut that always looked like she’d just stepped out of a salon. And she’d started colour-coding her lunch containers this semester (green for protein, blue for carbs, pink for “get-me-through-the-day snacks”). She claimed it was for efficiency. We all knew it was because she’d seen some influencer do it. But we loved her anyway.
“Did you pay your account?” she asked Marco, not looking up from her pandan and banana sandwich.
“Paid it last week!… Maybe!… Probably!” He gave up and nicked one of Leah’s crackers. “My appetite runs a week ahead of my wallet.”
“A true tragedy,” Leah replied, rolling her eyes while handing over the whole container. She started packing extra food early in September, about a week after Marco discovered his favourite game let him buy overpowered gear instead of grinding up his levels. There had been a memorable intervention in early October (“IT’S FORTNITE OR FOOD, MARCO!”) But by November she’d given up the war and just brought more crackers.
We ate in silence for a minute. The sun cooking us alive. The smell of the latest controlled bush fire burn still hanging over the field.
Unsure of how to bring it up naturally, I decided to dive right in. “Have you guys noticed anything weird with the UpLifters?”
Marco snorted. “You mean Jamie Park saying ‘How’s your day going?’ to me this morning like a regular person?”
“Yeah, that was weird.” Leah put down her sandwich. “Jamie doesn’t say ‘How’s your day going.’ Jamie says stuff like ‘Happy Hell Day, my fellow survivors of capitalism!’ while doing finger guns at people.”
Marco shrugged. “Maybe he just recognised that I’m the only true funny one.”
I thought about Maeve Kim. I’d passed her in the hallway yesterday after Modern History. She’d dropped her water bottle, and instead of her usual performance (hand to forehead, melodramatic sigh, lamenting the cruelty of gravity and the universe conspiring against her) she’d just… picked it up. Calmly, quietly. Like it was no big deal.
Maeve Kim has never ONCE in her entire 16 years on this planet treated a minor inconvenience like it was no big deal. Dropped pencil? Greek tragedy. Ran out of her favourite lip gloss? Shakespearean monologue.
“Tyler noticed it too.” I picked at the edge of my sleeve.
Marco listened, staring at his ill-gotten crackers as he thought. “When did we even last talk to Tyler? As in, actually talk to him?”
The question landed with the weight of a gut punch. Which, rude.
Although, I did know the answer. It was about a week ago when we last properly talked to Tyler. And we’d been absolute dropkicks.
Tyler had tried to show us his notebook. It had been important to him. You could see it in the way his hands moved, his voice going faster and higher.
And we’d blown him off.
Marco had gotten distracted by a notification on his slate. Sure, he’d apologised right after, but we could all tell his attention had already left the building. Leah had been too focused on uni applications to even pretend she was paying attention. And me?
I’d noticed the same things Tyler was talking about. I had. But I’d told myself it was just my OCD messing with me. Seeing patterns that weren’t there. Making connections out of thin air.
So I’d told Tyler it was probably just his anxiety.
He’d looked at me.
Then he’d closed his notebook.
“Yeah,” he’d said, no longer meeting my eyes. “You’re probably right.”
He never brought it up again.
Here’s another thing you probably should know about Tyler.
He had perfect attendance.
I know, I know. That doesn’t seem like much. But the guy once showed up to school with the flu because “missing class meant falling behind,” which meant shame, which meant his anxiety spiralling into the stratosphere. He’d rather puke in the bathroom between classes than be marked absent.
(And he’d proved this. Twice. It was gross. We don’t talk about it.)
Now he’d been gone for three days? Three days with his slate going straight to voicemail?
“I want to check on him.” My mind was already made up. “At his house, after school.”
“What about his parents?” Leah asked.
“They’re in Melbourne for some conference. Won’t be back until Sunday.”
Meaning Tyler had been alone for three days. In an empty house, with only his thoughts. Sending us perfectly punctuated texts at 3:47 in the morning.
Marco by this point was already shoving his stuff back in his bag. “I’m in.”
We both looked at Leah. For a moment she didn’t say anything. Until her eyes landed on Tyler’s usual spot.
“After school.” Leah picked up her bag. “We go together.”
The rest of the day was torture.
And I don’t mean that in a “ugh, school is so boring” way. I mean it in a “my brain is eating itself, and time has stopped working properly” way.
Every class dragged on for seven hundred years. I couldn’t tell you a single thing any teacher said. My notes from sixth period are just the word “TYLER” written over and over in increasingly unhinged handwriting, surrounded by question marks and what I think was supposed to be a flow chart but ended up cosplaying as a spider web designed by someone having a breakdown.
(Honestly, decent call.)
My thumb found Ama’s jade pendant every few seconds. All extremely helpful and normal. Not at all a neurological disorder.
The Dashboard sent me two notifications during history class.
How are you feeling, Kalyah?
Then a bit later, while we covered the boring bit about Justin Bieber’s second term as governor of Florida.
Remember to breathe.
I did not remember to breathe. But I did remember to not throw my slate across the room. So I’m taking that as a win.
When the final bell rang at 3:15, I was out of my seat and sprinting fast enough to nearly knock over Emma Hu. I didn’t stop to apologise. Emma Hu told everyone I picked my nose in Year 4 (I DIDN’T. I was scratching it. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE) so she can deal.
At the front gate, Marco was bouncing on his heels, doing his best imitation of a strung-out squirrel without realising it. Leah, meanwhile, was leaning against the wall next to the gate and waved me to hurry up when she saw me coming.
“Bus?” Marco asked.
“Too slow,” Leah said. “I called us an eCar.”
“With what money?” Marco blinked at her.
“Yours. I have your account saved from last time.”
Marco opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. “You know what? Fair.”
Fifteen minutes later we were being traumatised.
The eCar dropped us at the end of Tyler’s street (after point-blank refusing to let us out until we’d rated how it could improve the experience) and we headed in past the ornamental community gates. So began our life of crime.
Tyler’s house had forty-eight garden gnomes. Technically forty-nine if you counted the one currently buried under the lemon tree in the backyard. It’s a long story. Involving a dare, a sandalwood bracelet from Bali, a cricket bat. And a secret we’d take to our graves.
We shuffled around to the back via the side gate, past forty-eight painted faces with rosy cheeks and dead eyes frozen mid-garden-activity for all eternity.
“I swear, these things are one power outage away from coming alive and trying to wear our skin,” Marco ranted.
“That’s… weirdly specific.” Leah told him while blinking like a surprised owl.
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
The spare key was under the GigaGnome standing guard over the back door. He was the first, and by far the biggest, gnome of the bunch. Holding a fishing rod the size of my arm and wearing a hat so ridiculous it had its own hat, he’d been meant as a joke gift by Tyler’s dad to his mum. A joke, Mr Hafford now deeply regretted.
“In case of emergencies,” Tyler had made us swear when he first showed us the hiding spot. We’d been eleven that summer. Back then, Tyler was convinced his house was haunted and wanted us to be able to rescue him if things got “too undead.”
I could feel my body screaming at me, “No thank you, we’re not doing this right now” as I tried to reassure it, and myself, that this was fine. But my body doesn’t listen, because bodies are basically just meat prisons that do whatever they want.
“This IS an emergency,” I assured myself, fishing the key out from under GigaGnome’s open-toe sandals. “This counts! Probably!”
While bracing myself for a little bit of light home invasion, I pulled off my AR glasses and shoved them in my bag with much more flair than was actually required. Marco and Leah did the same without me having to ask.
The key turned in the lock with a soft click, then I pushed the door open.
The smell hit first.