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It might have been the videos playing on the screens, but Charlotte was pretty sure she was being watched. For chilly August, federation square was packed. The rain was coming in sideways, and still the whole place was a buzz - people marching from venue to venue to watch flicks as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. There it was again, the strange little flicker at the corner of her eyes. She was making it up, surely? All around them temporary screens and stages had been set up to play trailers of the movies they could go see. Projectors had been set up to beam light across all the strange corners and edges of the architecture behind them. Federation square was, for sure, strange. The building were all uneven shapes and there wasn’t a straight wall in sight. The stone floor all the buildings were standing on wasn’t really straight either, but there were heaps of places to sit and it had become one of those handy meeting spots if you were in the city. The weird buildings looked awesome that night, lit up with swirls of bright color and quirky animations of Australian animals chasing each other. Was that a tail? No, a shadow. Just too much noise, too many people, and not enough sleep. Her dad told her she could only catch the train in with Ollie if she did all her homework, and honestly, she hadn’t been doing much. She’d had to stay up the whole previous night - not that she’d let her dad know - to make sure she’d finished all her math. It was worth it now. She’d been to Melbourne earlier in the year with her school class, spending a week up in the city with maps and teachers learning how to orientate herself, and ever since then her Dad had started allowing her to come up on weekends, but only if she took a friend and kept her mobile phone on and in her pocket. ‘Time for Churros?’ Ollie asked her, snapping her attention away from what seemed to be a tiny claw hanging over the roof of the 7-Eleven where you could buy massive soda slurpees on sunny days. ‘Yeah,’ she replied, turning to Ollie and looking where she was pointing. Along the side of Flinders Street Station was a shop, Spanish Donuts, which sold hot cinammony churros and little pots of melted chocolate you could dip them into. ‘What are you going to get?’ Ollie asked her as they waited for the lights to turn green at the tram track. ‘I’m getting the hot churro fillers.’ ‘Urgh,’ Charlotte looked at her. ‘Really? The original hot churros are the best.’ ‘You just think that cause you’re boring,’ Ollie winked at her. ‘Sidenote,’ Charlotte listened to the ticking of the traffic lights. ‘At the risk of sounding crazy, I could swear there’s been something following us tonight.’ ‘Following us how?’ ‘Like, I keep thinking I can see something out of the corner of my eye. Like a little.. Hand or a foot or a shape or something.’ Ollie laughed. ‘Okay, it’s definitely time for a churro. You’re clearly over-tired and under-sugared.’ They ate their churros on the steps of Flinders Street Station. It was a grand old building, made of yellow and red stone, with green curved roofs on top which, Charlotte had heard, contained secret abandoned ballrooms. From the steps, you could look straight out onto federation square, and they found themselves licking the sugar off their fingers as they watched the crowds throng under the flickering screens. ‘I don’t get why people think it’s so ugly,’ charlotte said. ‘What is?’ ‘Federation Square. I found out during our city-bound camp that people think it’s really ugly.’ ‘Huh. I guess just because it’s a funny shape?’ ‘Yeah, Maybe.’ ‘I reckon it annoyed people because Flinders street station is so old and Fed square is so modern and it’s kind of strange to put them next to each other.’ ‘Yeah, I guess that’s true, but I think change is good?’ ‘Yeah, I think so.’ The girls looked up at the row of 13 clocks above them. Under each clock was the name of a train line, and each clock was set to the time of the next train. They found the one that said Frankston, had a fright when they realized the next train was in only three minutes, and then ran, laughing, down to the platform to head back home. The churros hadn’t helped. Charlotte found herself looking out the window and swearing she could see something jumping from tree to tree alongside the train. ‘What did you think of the movie?’ Ollie asked her. ‘Huh?’ ‘Why are you so spaced out? What’s going on?’ ‘No, I just still have that feeling. That somethings following us.’ Ollie raised an eyebrow. ‘Ok,’ she said, ‘I’ll bite. Try and point it out to me.’ All the way from Toorak to Moorabin Charlotte pointed out little strange things in the trees and the roofs that lined the track, but Ollie could never see them. ‘You’re starting to creep me out now,’ she said, ‘why don’t we just talk about the movie?’ ‘Yeah, you’re right. It was great.’ And it had been great. Charlottes Dad was a volunteer firefighter and worked in a nature reserve during the day, so he constantly brought home little injured animals to rehab and loved teaching the two of them all about the stuff that lived down on the Mornington peninsula. They’d had sugar gliders in the living room, and little possums, and one time he’d brought home an enormous cocoon, that they hung from a string in the kitchen, that eventually turned into an even bigger moth. Each one of its wings had been the size of one of her hands when they’d let it go in the backyard. She’d been a little grossed out by bugs and spiders and animals as a kid, but it was hard not to see how cute and incredible they were when she lived with a dad who loved them all so much. Then, she’d met Ollie at school, and the two had become fast friends. Ollie, who was just a year younger than she was, loved bugs as much as Charlotte's Dad did, and ever since she’d been surrounded by the two of them (who got along like a house on fire) she’d started to become obsessed with every animal on the planet too. When one of her Dad's friends, a penguin researcher who lived in St Kilda and helped look after the fairy penguin colony that lived there, decided to make a short film about them, they knew they’d have to go see it. They’d learned a few good things: They’re the only penguins that aren’t black and white, Both the mums and the dads sit on the eggs, And you can train sheepdogs to look after them. That had been the focus of the film, really, all about a sheepdog called Kevin who helped protect the penguins from cats and dogs. Something that had really surprised her though, from one of the underwater shots, was that the coast was filled with squids. She’d eaten calamari before in restaurants, little bread-crumbed squid rings, but she’d always assumed they come from somewhere… else? Somewhere like Queensland maybe, where it was warm all the time. Ollie had been surprised too. ‘What time of the year do you think they’re out and about?’ She asked. ‘Let me check my phone.’ Charlotte pulled up australian squid on her mobile. ‘Now, apparently.’ ‘What, really?’ ‘Yeah, it says August is a good month for squid catching.’ ‘You’re kidding.’ ‘No, look, right here.’ ‘You know what this means right?’ Ollie laughed, her face split with an enormous smile. Her red curls toppled over her freckled face as she petted her cheeks with both hands. ‘There’ll be no sleeping tonight,’ she said. ‘We’re catching squids!’ The sun had set around 5.30pm, so when the girls arrived at Charlottes that Friday night at 9pm, it was pitch black. Tony, Charlotte's Dad, had picked them up from the Frankston Train station in his beat up truck. He was a skinny man, tanned like a walnut from his days walking outside, with small blue eyes that sparkled in his face. Always he had oil or pen lines or dust smeared across his forehead, from absentmindedly pushing the hair out of his eyes as he worked. They lived just by Frankston beach, on the cliff road, above the petrol station. It was a really beautiful spot to live, and honestly, they couldn’t have afforded to be there if it hadn’t been for her uncle. After Charlotte's mum had run away with her new boyfriend, her uncle had let them live in the extension of his house. It was small and spiders got in easily, but they didn’t mind. It was home, they were better off without Charlotte's mum anyway. The location was great and it was nice living so close to her cousins. Her bedroom, just like her dads, was filled from the floor to the ceiling with posters of bearded dragons and bugs and glass tanks full of snakes and insects. One of them, which was convenient for Ollie's plan, was brand new. Charlotte had been thinking about getting some stick insects, but it was a glass tank after all, so there was no reason they couldn’t put a squid in it. Besides, she had a whole box of spare equipment under her bed, including a pump they could use to keep the water clean. And if she needed new water, she figured she would just walk down to the beach and grab some. After all, there was a wooden boardwalk that went straight from cliff road down to the highway, and right behind that were the waves hitting the sand. It was that boardwalk they snuck down at midnight, buckets and nets in hands, after they were sure Tony was asleep, and after the last lights in the main house had flickered off. Charlotte had all but forgotten about the strange feeling she was being followed, right until they were half way across the highway and she got the feeling something was sat on the petrol station behind her. She turned her head sharply, but there was nothing, again. Always nothing. So why was she so sure? Why were the hairs on the back of her head standing up like that?