Welcome to Wonderland, the pink-and-green banner hanging over the Oceanside Hall entrance read. A gaudy Cheshire cat grinned down at the students passing through the balloon arch. I thought the school social committee could have picked something a little further along the shelf, but none of those kids spent their lunchtimes in the library, so I supposed I should be grateful the event had a bookish theme at all. Of course, I’d rather have been at home reading a book, but apparently I could do that any old night, and you only got one Year Twelve ball.


Thank goodness for that.


Mrs Johnsen, our English teacher, nodded with a rare twinkle in her bespectacled eyes as we presented our tickets and walked under the banner. I had the distinct impression that she enjoyed watching us stumble and falter our way through the formalities, stripped of our familiar boundaries. No school dress code, no rows of desks to sit behind, no lack of completed homework to defend.


Tonight, we were as adults, ostensibly at our first formal outing. Ms Box, our year coordinator, had given us a half-hour speech yesterday about how we ought to conduct ourselves for the evening. Through the arch, students milled in strange groups, the usual popular-girl and footy-boy cliques split by random dates and teachers in dinner suits.


Thunder rumbled outside, an unseasonal Perth storm. Walking through the balloon arch seemed to take longer than it should, as if my nerves stretched the time. I wasn’t sure why I was nervous. It was just a dance.


Oh, right. It was a dance.


I paused on the other side of the arch while a woman I didn’t know tied a ribbon around my wrist. She wore a long black gown, her dark hair pinned into an updo, her glasses catching the purple and green party lights.


‘Down the rabbit hole,’ she said with a smile, securing the black satin in a deft bow.


The fabric shivered against my skin. I stepped forward, then turned, because I’d forgotten –


Nothing. I hadn’t forgotten anything, except perhaps my resolve. My dignity, which I’d given up when I agreed to come. But my phone was in my clutch, I was definitely wearing knickers under my borrowed dress, and Cecelia and Zenna, my two best friends, were already two steps ahead and scanning the seating arrangements, so I had everything I needed.


What I needed was to be curled up with a hot chocolate and a book.


What I needed was for time to stretch forever, for the end of the year to remain on the horizon, just out of sight, until I decided what to do with my life.


What I needed was an epiphany nothing short of magical.


Or, in the short term, for my friends and me to be seated together. Cecelia was on table nine with the rest of the Calculus crowd, while Zenna and I were across the room at table one with a list of names I recognised from Zenna’s theatre shows, right in front of the stage with blue lights rippling over the curtain.


‘How long do we have to stay?’ Cecelia whispered, her gauze wrap brushing my arm. She was a fairytale vision in a long periwinkle gown that flowed over her slender figure and made her light blue eyes pop.


‘This was your idea,’ I replied. ‘I’m at least getting dessert out of it.’ My magenta dress didn’t make my eyes pop, although I had grey eyes, so I couldn’t imagine what would. I shifted, tugging at the off-the-shoulder sleeves that dug into my arms, and tried to be thankful that I had a dress to wear at all.


This afternoon had been a different story.