The dream always starts out the same way.

It's late in May and the sidewalk is drifting with the slow heat of an early summer. Terry Byrne walks down Macarthur Street to school with some of his friends; they're talking about Friday's game and sipping lemon frosties. Except the time is all mixed up: they never buy frosties in the morning, and school isn't at the bottom of the hill, it's up the top of Chamberlain Heights where all the football ovals are. His dreams are usually like that; all off-kilter, inside-out and upside-down.

They pass by the old Myer place (a burnt-out haven for burnt-out drunks and winos according to local legend) and suddenly, inexplicably, they were walking along Norton Avenue. Terry couldn't understand this part of the dream; Norton Avenue lay in the wrong direction completely, and worse still, it was lined with Dutch elms. Hornets nested in Dutch elms, nested by the thousands, everybody knew that. But Terry couldn't tell his friends, couldn't warn them. That's how it was in dreams.

So they saunter along beneath the trees, chattering in boytalk and sucking lemon snow, when Paul Drayfuss (or Russ Gilbert or maybe Jinx Howard) turns around and asks him why he was dressed like that. Terry would feel a momentary confusion: What do you mean? Dressed like what? And although he'd had this dream at least a thousand times before, he could never remember what came next. The boys halt one by one, pausing in a rough semi-circle, eyebrows raised.

Then Terry would look down at himself, jaw dropping in astonishment.

Because somehow he's left home dressed like a girl. He's wearing a short, blue sun-frock, something soft and sheer that fluttered like a flag in the breeze. He looks around in disbelief, wondering how this could have happened. It didn't seem possible. Why hadn't he noticed until now? Why hadn't his friends noticed? They hadn't said a word all the way down Macarthur Street. Not until Paul had asked his inescapable question, setting the dream into its final, unavoidable configuration. And now they were all staring at him. Not laughing, not pointing or jeering. Just staring.

From that point on, events grows progressively worse. Mortified beyond description, Terry starts pulling at the hem of his dress, desperate to remove the incriminating article before it could infect him. The trees begin to hum with cicadas (only they weren't cicadas were they? Cicadas don't hum - they drone), Jinx Howard says something to Ronnie Waylan. Both nod in a kind of tacit disapproval.

Terry rips the frock over his head, already knowing it's too late, that it has contaminated him. A downward glance comfirms his wosrt fear; he's no longer a boy under the dress, not any more. It's crazy, irrational, but he's a girl; a pretty young girl with curly blonde hair and huge, serious eyes. The boys gape in mute fascination, because she just threw away her shift, and underneath she's wearing nothing but her socks and panties.

The humming in the trees grows louder, more menacing. Terry tries to cover himself with his hands, unexpectedly conscious of his semi-naked state, his smooth white torso, his slender coltish legs. Russ Gilbert steps forward to say something, but Terry can't hear what he says. His words are drowned out by the incessant buzzing. The air seems to be swarming with bees, their busy, restless hum filling his ears.

No. Not bees. Hornets.

Hornets: millions of them, descending from the trees in a black, angry cloud. Terri - because that's who she really is - opens her mouth to scream. The hornets are coming for her. She can see their dark, bloated shapes surging along the footpath, ignoring Paul and Jinx and Russ and all the others. They don't want the boys, they only want her; want to sting and prick and pierce her tender white skin, make her shriek in agony and terror.

She casts an hysterical glance towards her friends, but it's out of their hands, they can't help her now. In fact, they don't even want to. She's different. She's an outcast, an alien, that's why the hornets are after her. She's done something wrong, fundamentally wrong, and now she had to be punished. She knows what she's done, knows she deserves it. These revelations come in the closing moments of the nightmare, as the insects fall upon her in a writhing mass, their glittering eyes flickering with lethal, mindless hate.

Sobbing with shame and fear, Terri spins on her heel, but her feet seem welded to the sidewalk. She runs with the slow-motion panic of dreams, but her steps take her nowhere; the hornets are crawling all over her, their needle sharp stingers buried in her flesh. She tilts her head back in a long, silent wail, and the sun winks out, plunging her into a clawing, vicious darkness she knows can only be hell. And when she finally falls through the tenuous membrane of reality, clutching hopelessly at the void ...

she falls forever.