Excerpt from Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'll never forget what she did then. She stood and took a step back. I waited for her to scream or make fun of me. Instead, I saw amber liquid trickle past the hem of her netball skirt and down the inside of her long leg. The white skin was bruised: dusted with little purple and brown marks like the rump of a dappled horse. Her white school socks bloomed with a stain the color of her kitchen curtains—a buttercup yellow.

She grinned and grabbed the hose, turning the tap on full bore and weaponizing the stream with her fingers. We wrestled for it, squealing. My embarrassment washed away, dust swirling on the surface of the spreading pool of water before it soaked into the earth.

Esther's mum, Constance, made us strip at the back door, shaking her head. She gave me one of her shirts to wear home. It was so long it reached past my knees, like a dress, and I wore no underwear beneath it. Constance hadn't thought to lend me some of Esther's, and I hadn't asked. I remember the shuddering thrill as I sat in the back of Esther's dad's ute, nothing between the seat and me but thin white cotton. I always loved being driven home by Steven, as he insisted I call him. When I was alone with him, I could pretend I was his daughter and we were going somewhere. He never talked that much, but he seemed to enjoy listening to me. I'd have done almost anything to make him laugh. I could never tell my mum how much I liked him; she always seized up when I asked who my father was. It was something else Esther had pulled off that I couldn't—a father—but I didn't begrudge her. She deserved a dad who was strong, who'd lift her up and spin her around. A dad who loved her like I did. .

* * *

My best friend wore her name, Esther, like a queen wearing her crown at a jaunty angle. She only ever called me Ronnie. I didn't fit the grown-woman name I'd been given. The glamorous syllables of Ve-ron-i-ca had nothing to do with me. We were twelve years old when she went missing. I was bossy and solid, shorter than Esther but determined to dictate the terms of our play, the kid who would assign roles when we pretended to be Power Rangers at recess, stomping off in a huff if other kids had their own ideas. But a lot of the time, I wasn't getting my own way with Esther so much as saying out loud what she'd already decided she wanted to do. She would hurtle into a room, tongue sticking out, and leap so she landed with her knees bent and legs wide apart. She'd roll her eyes into the back of her head and say, "Rah!" at peak volume before streaking out of the room again. I needed things from people, and Esther didn't, not really, and I think that's why I was drawn to her.

It was no surprise Esther's mum thought I was a bad influence. But anything cheeky, and everything funny, started with Esther. Sometimes I only had to look at her—from the corner of my eye at an assembly, in the changing room of the local pool, from across the low tables we had in kindergarten—and I would start laughing. We were always laughing, and I was always running behind, trying to make it look like I was the leader.

* * *

That last Friday afternoon in November, the day Esther went missing, I was supposed to be doing my homework at the desk in my bedroom. We finished early on Fridays—at two thirty—and Mum liked me to get all my work done before the weekend. Everyone in the class had to make a poster about a South American country, and I'd managed to nab Peru. It had been a close thing: one of the Addison twins had gone for it, even though everybody knew how much I loved llamas. I had pictures of them glued to all my schoolbooks. Now, I couldn't seem to get my pencil drawing of a llama right. He looked cross-eyed, and his legs were stumpy-in-a-bad-way, though I'd copied as carefully as I could from the old issues of National Geographic Mum had brought home from the news agency next to her work. Our fat orange cat, Flea, wound himself through the legs of my chair. I slipped the magazine under the poster paper, but it was too thick; I couldn't trace the line of the llama with my pencil. Giving up, I headed to the kitchen for a snack.

Excerpted from Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor. Copyright © 2022 by Hayley Scrivenor. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.