FOR ABBY



ONE

There is a mouse in the corner of my room. A mouse. In my bedroom. Where I sleep. It’s sitting on its little haunches, frozen in fear. I’m in bed, also frozen in fear.

We are making direct and intimate eye contact.

It’s funny because seconds ago I was so cozy and comfortable in my bed, feeling safe and wrapped up and pleased with myself—here I am, in my new house, an adult at last, independent, free, worldly, some might even say sophisticated—and now, my shaking hand is reaching for my phone, ready to call Mum and say come back and get me right this second.

I don’t know how to end this standoff. Should I lie back in surrender, showing my belly like a dog? Or stand my ground, slowly wave my arms so it recognizes me as a human and backs off? That’s what you do if you encounter a bear, along with blowing a whistle. I memorized how to survive an encounter with a bear when I was ten, for no reason other than that I suddenly woke up one day with a pit of anxiety deep in my stomach about encountering a bear. I was also very worried about quicksand and the fact that I didn’t know how to tie an unbreakable knot or start a fire using nothing but two sticks. My ten-year-old self was earnestly imagining a future in which I would need these skills, even though I was a strictly indoors child who once cried because I was almost stung by a bee.

The thing is, I am a person who prepares. The very essence of who I am is my preparedness, my to-do lists, my thorough research, my above-and-beyond reading, my color-coded spreadsheets, my first-hand-in-the-air-I-know-the-answer energy. Before I moved out, I had a typed, itemized list of things I needed to buy, grouped by store, and then each item assigned to a person, so Mum and my older sister, Lauren, and I could get through the Boxing Day sales with the most efficiency. (Lauren looked at the list when I handed it to her and said, “No. Absolutely not. Brooke, why do you do this? I’m not coming anymore.”) And yet I didn’t research what to do when a mouse appears in the bedroom of your share house in the middle of the night. I should have screamed. But I didn’t scream when I first saw it, and it really feels like the appropriate window of time in which to scream has now passed.

This is my first night living away from Mum, Lauren, and Nanna. The first night of my shiny new university student life in a shiny new city. Is turning on a lamp and seeing a disease-carrying rodent a bad omen? Not necessarily. This can still be a good sign. Maybe the mouse and I will become friends, have little adventures together. He’ll travel around in my pocket, I’ll call him Cornelius, it could be a charming period of my life that I will write about when I’m older.

I shift my arm ever so slightly and the spell is broken. The mouse races off, and even though it’s going away from me, I finally scream. Louder than I thought I could scream. I jump up into a defensive standing position, legs slightly bent, hands in a ready-to-strike pose I vaguely remember from year-seven self-defense class. The mouse has very quickly gone from my friend Cornelius back to foul creature again.

“Brooke?” There’s a knock on my door and Harper pokes her head in. “Are you okay?”

“There’s a mouse. It was in the corner and then it ran out the door,” I say, trying not to sound like I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t have any pants on, just an oversize T-shirt and underwear, and I think the T-shirt is long enough to provide me with a tiny bit of dignity, but I still hope we can both pretend in the morning that Harper never saw the uppermost parts of my thighs.

Harper is a year older than me and her family owns the house. She has a small, lovely flower tattoo on her shoulder, she wears lots of delicate gold rings layered on her fingers, her dark, curly hair perfectly frames her face, her eyeliner skills far exceed anything I will ever be capable of, and she mentioned two bands I’d never heard of in our first conversation this afternoon. I’m hoping this mouse incident doesn’t ruin my already slim chance of becoming her friend.

“Oh. God. Sorry. I’ve never seen one in the bedroom before.” She frowns, runs a hand through her curls.

Which raises a question: Where has she seen them? She can see my face clocking her words, thinking about the possible number of mice she has seen in the house, and she shakes her head.

“No, no, don’t worry. We don’t have a mouse infestation or anything. I saw one in the backyard last week, that’s all. The house is pretty old. Tomorrow we can put foil and steel wool in the floorboard cracks,” she says.

She already warned me that the gap in the back door means the lounge room can get cold but you can plug it with a towel and it’s mostly fine. And that the tap in the bathroom drips unless you turn it so tight you can almost not turn it on again. Also, the back gate lock sticks because the gate is warped, there might be just a touch of mold in winter, the oven rattles and shakes and sometimes turns itself off, the towel rack and the toilet-roll holder fall off the walls constantly and we just need to ignore the weird smell in the hall cupboard that you can never fully get rid of.

All that but she never said anything about mice.

I ignore my pounding heart and smile at her, dropping my hands back to my sides, and say, “Sounds good. See you in the morning.” I lower myself back into my bed, as if I might sleep again tonight, rather than immediately googling “diseases you can catch from a mouse.”



TWO

It’s seven a.m., and the house is silent. I miraculously managed to fall asleep after learning through extensive research that the mouse probably wasn’t carrying any diseases and also that mice can’t see very well, so the meaningful eye contact between us that was haunting me might not have been as intense as I imagined.

Today is the day our other housemate will arrive. His name is Jeremy and I know nothing else, not even his last name, because Harper wasn’t forthcoming and I’m trying to masquerade as a very relaxed, easy-to-live-with person who doesn’t anxiously ask too many questions. Oh Jeremy, no last name, no other identifying details? No worries, not a single worry here, no follow-up questions at all. As if it’s normal to agree to live with a guy—in close quarters, sharing a bathroom—and not have at the very least a short dossier on him, just a brief little overview of his family history, his friends, his past relationships, his school marks, his medical history, his politics, his problematic social media posts. And yet, here I am.

I am debating whether to quickly switch bedrooms before he arrives.

Being the grandchild of the owners and the first one to move in, Harper naturally has the biggest room. It has an ornamental fireplace and space for a queen-size bed and a desk and two bookcases, plus an enormous number of plants and a few other random items that don’t actually fit but she’s squished them in anyway, like an ugly hat rack that is not currently holding any hats and a heavy mirror propped against a wall. Her room is messy and overflowing with clothes, trinkets, furniture, Polaroid photos, vinyl records, jewelry, a bowl of crystals, books. There were four glasses of half-drunk water, two mugs of half-drunk tea, and an open bottle of Powerade on her desk, all dangerously close to her open laptop. It makes me itch to tidy it up. Just a really quick spruce here, a little neaten-up there, and a total and complete reorganization of her closets, that’s all. And I can’t even think about where she’s put things in the kitchen. Mugs and glasses in a bottom drawer, plates and bowls on the very top shelf—it all feels wrong to me, but I am trying my best not to take over.

Harper gave me the choice of the other two rooms when I arrived. I picked the room with better light and fewer ceiling cracks, but it also apparently harbors a mouse. Mystery guy Jeremy has the room next to mine, which is slightly bigger, but it’s a weird shape and has a big, faded stain on the wall that made me immediately think of blood splatter. I started thinking of it as the Murder Room as soon as I saw it, and that kind of name doesn’t just go away once your brain attaches it to a place.

Murder or mouse, it’s a conundrum.

I’m thinking it over in the shower when there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

“Hello?” I call out, my voice high and stressed like I’m answering the phone to an unknown number.

Harper yells something but it’s too muffled to hear. Is she telling me to get out of the shower, to stop wasting hot water, to hurry up? Have I done something wrong, broken a rule? I don’t even know the house rules yet. Surely not. I’ve been in the bathroom for only five minutes. I feel resentful of her possible bossiness, even though I have spent most of my life banging on bathroom doors and yelling at Lauren to hurry up. But that’s different. That’s sister stuff. That’s justified, because Lauren will spend forty minutes in a shower if you let her, using up every single drop of hot water while she treats her hair with fancy products and exfoliates every inch of her body with a skin scrub she paid way too much money for.

Harper being the default leader of the house is disconcerting for me. Lauren might be my older sister, but I was always the one in charge of things at home. I was my school’s arts captain, codirector of our year-ten play (alongside the drama teacher, so I had equal authority with an adult, an unprecedented situation; I even bought a black beret to wear, which, in hindsight, I will concede was the wrong choice), founder of our school’s Jane Austen Book Club, secretary of the social justice committee, leader of our Model UN team. I am very comfortable in leadership roles.

But fine. Harper is in charge here. I’ll settle for being vice-captain of the house, maybe. I won’t say it to anyone out loud, but I’ll definitely be thinking it in my head.

I crack the door and peer out of the bathroom. I left my dressing gown in my room by mistake, because I’ve never had to think about covering up as I go from bathroom to bedroom before, and now I have to dash through the house in a too-small towel.

I hurry down the hall, almost running as I get to the kitchen, but I skid to a halt when I see a man and a woman standing there holding boxes, as well as a preteen boy sitting on the floor in everyone’s way, playing a Nintendo Switch, and a younger girl wailing, “I’m thirsty, Mum!” and a redheaded toddler holding a Barbie doll that is missing its head.

Harper widens her eyes at me, and I realize she had been knocking to warn me that there were people in the house.

“This is Brooke,” Harper says.

They smile and nod and say hello, busying themselves with bags and boxes and crying children, politely averting their eyes from my almost nakedness. I assume they are new housemate Jeremy’s family. Both of the adults look very familiar: I’ve seen them before, but I can’t place them.

I maneuver past them in the kitchen, fake smiling, acutely aware of the towel sitting barely a centimeter below my butt cheek and also dangerously low across my boobs. This is the second time Harper has seen my upper thighs in the space of twelve hours. I am all for body positivity—when you’re the less attractive sister in a family you really need to be across that from a young age—but my upper thighs are the body part I’d rather not lead with when getting to know people. They’re just not opening-act material.

The toddler runs over to me, grabs a handful of towel, and yanks, which makes the almost naked situation even more precarious. I bend down awkwardly to remove his chubby little fingers, which have locked on to the towel with some kind of powerful death grip. I did not know children were so strong.

“Bottom, bottom! It’s a bot!” the toddler yells, pointing under the towel. Oh my God, where is this child’s mother? I look around in desperation.

“Oh, here he is,” Harper says as someone else walks into the house, a teetering pile of boxes obscuring their face. “Brooke, this is Jeremy. Jeremy, Brooke.”

I am too distracted by the toddler’s attempts to humiliate and dominate me to be really paying attention.

“Oh, no one calls me Jeremy,” he says.

My head jerks up. Wait. I know that voice.

The box lowers and a pair of eyes appear.

Those eyes.

Then his whole face. Long nose, broad shoulders, shaggy brown hair tucked behind his ears.

It’s Jesse.



THREE

My heart is pounding and I’m trying to keep my face calm. My jaw suddenly feels locked and frozen. I’m trying to move it and I can’t, but no, I’m not going to panic. It’s fine. It’s fine! Yes, Jesse is moving into my house, but I will process this information calmly and rationally, and my jaw will unlock itself any minute now, my heart will slow down eventually, and everything is fine.

“Jesse,” I say, my voice strained.

“You two know each other?” Harper asks. “I guess that makes sense: my grandmother found you both.” She laughs but emphasizes the word “grandmother” just a little too hard, and I sense lingering resentment that she was not given the choice to find her own housemates. Harper’s grandparents live in my town, and they know my mother. And, apparently, Jesse’s father.

“We went to the same school,” I say, managing finally to get the towel out of the toddler’s tight little fist, but he immediately reattaches himself with both hands and yanks on it even harder. I look around helplessly for someone to intervene. If there was a checklist for the ideal babysitter, I would tick every single box for even the most overprotective parent, but despite this I have no practical experience and I really do not know what to do with small children. Are you allowed to pick them up if they’re not yours? Will they obey you if you speak in a firm, authoritative voice, like a dog might?

“Brooke, of course, you’re Michelle’s daughter,” Jesse’s dad says, seemingly unconcerned about the battle I am engaged in with his child. His tone sounds disapproving, but it’s hard to tell if that is his voice’s natural cadence or a pronouncement on my mother, or both.

“Yes. Michelle’s daughter. Hello.” I’m dripping water onto the floor, and I try to casually wipe it with my bare foot and continue edging toward my room, toddler in tow.

Jesse still hasn’t said anything. He’s just holding the boxes, watching me floundering, an inscrutable look on his face.

“Jesse, for God’s sake, you haven’t even said hello,” Jesse’s father snaps. “How ’bout you set a good example for your brothers and sister once in a while, huh?” That heavy disapproving tone again. I have a sudden memory of Nanna describing Jesse’s father as an unpleasant man. Admittedly, she has said this about at least half of the men in our town (including the lovely local GP who doesn’t charge her for visits, the smiling brothers who run the butcher shop and give us extra meat for her Siamese cat, Minty, and a widower who lives on our street who politely asked her out to lunch), but I think her assessment in this case was accurate. There’s a moment of silent awkwardness.

“Sorry. Yeah. Hi, Brooke,” Jesse says, clearing his throat.

I last saw him maybe three months ago, on graduation night, but he somehow seems taller now.

“Hi Jesse,” I say, trying to look nonchalant and dignified while semi-naked and battling a toddler.

Jesse puts his boxes down and walks over to me. I’m worried about what he’s planning to do, but he leans down, says, “Come here, you,” and scoops up his brother, throwing him over his shoulder in a way that makes the boy scream with delight.

Jesse glances back at me, and our eyes meet. I narrow mine the slightest, slightest bit, a message to him that … what? That I don’t want us to be housemates any more than he does, but I got here first and if one of us is going to leave then it should be him, that what he did to me five years ago remains the greatest betrayal and humiliation I have ever endured, that I still haven’t forgiven him and I never will. That’s a lot for a momentary, barely noticeable narrowing of eyes to communicate, but I feel like he got the general vibe.

I hurry into my room, shutting the door with relief and then putting several heavy books in front of it in case the toddler tries to come in for round two.

I wonder if Jesse is going to back out. Will he turn to his parents and ask to leave? Well, good. I’m not going to leave. I can’t leave. I’ve already paid my bond and spent a night here and made peace with the idea of the mouse and made loose plans to go to the market with Harper and started setting up a vision board and bought a Myki and told everyone in my life that I’m living in an amazing share house in Melbourne while I study economics with the aim of working for the UN while also being a best-selling author on the side and maybe writing an Oscar-winning screenplay.

This is my dream. I’m not giving it up. I spent months searching for somewhere affordable and half-decent to live. I interviewed with an older guy in his midtwenties who described himself online as a “philosopher, feminist, pacifist, entrepreneur, craftsman, communist, artist, lover, soul seeker,” and then he said, when we chatted over the phone, that he liked living with younger women because he felt he had so much to teach them. I talked with three girls who assured me that “the room is small and a bit unconventional but really nice,” which turned out to mean that the room was an area of carpet behind a couch, surrounded by a “privacy curtain” (a sheet pegged to a clotheshorse). Then Mum told me a couple in our town was looking for someone to live with their granddaughter. The relief was overwhelming.

I have nowhere else to go if this house doesn’t work out. I don’t want to live with a creepy guy or behind someone’s couch. And I can’t move home. I can’t fail within forty-eight hours of leaving. I am simply not the kind of person who fails.

I get dressed slowly, automatically thinking, I’ll avoid Jesse until he leaves, until I remember he’s here because he’s moving in. There’s no avoiding. I read a book on my bed for a while, but I can’t concentrate on the words. I try playing on my phone, but it makes me hyperaware of the fact my hands are shaking a little. I start to worry that Jesse will bond with Harper while I’m hiding in here, and they’ll go to the market without me, and I’ll be the one on the outer.

I poke my head out of my room. Everything is quiet. Jesse’s family have gone. I heard them leave not long after I went into my bedroom. Because it’s a long drive back to our town and they needed to get one of the kids to karate and another one needed a nap and the third was crying, they hustled out the door in a flurry of stress and yelling and I don’t think they even said a proper goodbye to Jesse. I try not to compare that to yesterday, when Mum cried three times before leaving, Nanna solemnly gifted me her precious St. Christopher medal, and Lauren pretended she didn’t care but then made Mum stop the car so she could run back in and hug me one more time. My family is perhaps a touch too codependent.

I find Harper in the kitchen.

“I bought bagels if you want one,” she says.

“Yum, yes, please.” My voice is oddly high-pitched. Everything I say sounds just a little bit not right, not me. I need to calm down or at least give the appearance of being calm. A physiotherapist once told me that she had never seen someone as incapable of relaxing their shoulders as me, which I chose to take as a compliment.

“So, do you and Jesse know each other well?” Harper says, cutting the bagels in two on the table, no chopping board, letting the knife scrape the wood, which makes my eye twitch.

Do we know each other well? The simplest question and I have no idea how to answer.

“Um, sort of. Not really. Well enough, I guess,” I babble.

Harper lowers her voice a little, leans forward, ringlets falling across her forehead. Her earrings are gold, in the shape of beautiful tiny little skulls. I have the urge to run to my room and start googling “where to buy gold skull earrings.” As if I could pull off skull earrings.

“So, what’s he like?” Harper says in an almost whisper.

My heart glows a little. The way she says it, inviting intimacy, like we’re already friends. But I need to be careful, I need to stop myself from immediately gossiping about him. Jesse lives here now. Harper doesn’t know either of us. I don’t want her first impression of me to be negative.

“He’s. Um. He’s nice,” I say, still flailing. “He’s fine, he’ll be good to live with, he’s really … nice.” I am acutely aware I said “nice” twice but my mind is suddenly empty of all other adjectives.

“Okay. Yeah, I chatted to him a few times, he does seem nice,” Harper says, looking disappointed at my dull reply. She was probably hoping for a sign that her grandmother hadn’t stuck her with two boring duds. She gave me an opening, and I gave her nothing.

Harper puts cream cheese on the bagel and hands it to me. I try not to worry that she licked cream cheese off her finger and then that finger touched my bagel, and I wonder if she’ll think it’s rude if I get up for a plate. I settle for holding my hand under it to catch the sesame seeds falling.

Jesse walks into the kitchen, looking much more relaxed and happy without his family, and Harper offers him the other half of my bagel. He seems unbothered about her hands or the lack of plates or spilling sesame seeds.

“So I thought we’d go over the house rules,” Harper says.

I sit up straighter. This is the conversation I have been waiting for. I imagine she’s typed them up, laminated them, or, if it were me, put them in a lovely, nonthreatening binder. I’m ready for a deep discussion, possibly a friendly debate. I’m ready to make concessions, to compromise, to be flexible and very accommodating, but also to gently steer them in certain directions, toward a higher cleaning standard, a schedule, and to use the shared shopping list app I researched and have already downloaded onto my phone.

Harper starts talking, and I realize there’s no laminated list, nothing written, just verbal rules. That’s fine. I can take notes. Maybe I’ll make the binder later.

The house rules are: no pets; no romance between housemates; and no unnecessary drama, in general.

She stops, and I wait. Is there more? Surely there must be more? What about division of chores, sharing of food, late-night noise, having guests over, parties, TV usage, sleep schedules, paying bills, checking the mail, bin night, using the dryer, fridge space, communal food, internet usage, length of showers, preferred scent of handwash? And these are just my top-level questions. I have subcategories. And sub-subcategories. Who is in charge of what? How does this household run, at a granular level? What are we each responsible for doing? There are already two drinking glasses and a knife covered in cream cheese in the kitchen sink and we have no established plan of when they will be cleaned or by who. I am sweating.

“So that’s it. Pretty basic. We can figure everything else out as we go along. Any questions?” Harper asks, smiling. She’s warm and friendly, which, for a person with natural charisma, she really doesn’t need to be, so I especially appreciate it.

“What does ‘no unnecessary drama’ mean?” Jesse asks.

“No arguments, no tension, that sort of thing,” Harper says. “Everyone just being chill and getting along.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Jesse says, not looking at me.

My heart is racing. This is going to be a disaster. I am holding my bagel in a death grip. I will my fingers to relax. I am not going to be the uptight one, I am not, I am not, I am not.

“Absolutely,” I say, lowering my shoulders, wiggling my neck a little.

“Oh, and I thought, once you both get settled, we could have a housewarming party,” Harper says.

“Sounds great,” I say. How long will it take us to get settled? Are we talking three weeks, four, five? I need a timeline, a deadline, for this party so I know how long I have to make a lot of new friends, buy some cute clothes, deep-clean the house, and get my whole life in order. I try my best to not let a hint of these thoughts show on my very relaxed, very serene face.

“I can’t wait,” I add.



FOUR

After our house rules discussion, Harper tells us she’s going out to see her girlfriend, Penny. She doesn’t specify if or when she’ll be home, which is normal for housemates, I guess, although I personally would love to implement a system so we can know when to worry about each other, so I don’t have to default to worrying all the time.

Harper leaves, and Jesse and I are left alone for the first time. I walk into the lounge room and sit on the couch. I should get up and go and read. Organize my stationery. Start preparing for my uni classes tomorrow. Finish setting up my room. Make a list of things I need to buy for the house. Pick out my clothes for the week. Go for a walk and fall in love with the city. (Can this be done in one quick walk, or will it take three or four? I’ve never fallen in love with a place before. Or a person, for that matter.) And I’m still itching to rearrange the kitchen and clean the dirty dishes. All these things I need to do, but I can’t move.

I miss home.

I feel like a needy little dog, trembling, huddled in a corner, away from its owners for the first time.

I’m not good when I’m out of my comfort zone. When I couldn’t sleep over the summer, and my heart was beating fast with fear about moving, I would watch old sitcoms, like Friends and New Girl and How I Met Your Mother, to reassure myself. This is what it will be like living with other people. We’ll be instant best friends. I’ll be different from the person I have always been, because no one will know anything about me. I’ll be free to rewrite my own character, pretend I have a whole team of people giving me great dialogue and lots of plot and a roster of romantic entanglements. We’ll have dinner parties and watch horror movies and sit up talking all night, have picnics in parks and start a netball team and go to concerts and restaurants and art galleries. And I’ll be a runner (in these fantasies, I’m always very fit) and good at yoga and playing goal attack in netball. I won’t worry about anything, because I won’t need to: I’ll be too busy and happy and successful.

But now it can’t be like that, not with Jesse here, his very presence reminding me who I was, who I am.

I used to spend a lot of my Saturday nights sitting with Nanna and her cat, Minty, watching British crime dramas while simultaneously creating to-do lists, study plans, meal ideas, tracking books I want to read and the books I have read, and analyzing my sleep, exercise, study time, screen time from the previous week, logging it all into my apps and spreadsheets, making graphs, observing progress. It was a soothing ritual, having the numbers, knowing the data, seeing where I’ve been and where I’m going. I felt better being in control of everything.

I have always been the friend who remembered all the birthdays and organized the group present and paid for it and nervously and politely chased everyone else for their share of the money. I was the helper, the doer, the bringer of positive energy. I was the designated driver, the guarder-of-drinks, the holder-back-of-hair, the minder-of-bags, the lookout-for-parents, the one keeping track of who went where with who and how drunk they might be and when I should check on them.

I knew exactly what to do when there was a knock at the front door late on a Saturday night and two boys were standing there with Lauren. One had her shoulders and the other had her feet, and she swung between them, eyes closed, drunk and limp and dangling like a dead body. Mum at work or asleep, Nanna in the granny flat out the back, it was up to me and the chattering of my familiar internal monologue, I hope nothing has happened to her, I hope these boys are trustworthy, I hope she doesn’t need her stomach pumped, I hope she isn’t going to vomit all over everything, I hope she doesn’t wet the bed. I would get towels, a bucket, a plastic tumbler of water (plastic, not glass, never glass), help Lauren to the bathroom, find her clean pajamas, put her to sleep on her side. Then I would sit in her room and listen to her breathe for hours, and make sure she didn’t vomit in her sleep and choke to death, anxiety shooting through my body like a rocket, zooming up and down my arms and legs, looping circles in my stomach.

I did this so many times. With Mum sometimes, but sometimes on my own.

“You should be studying nursing,” Mum said once, not understanding anything at all. I wasn’t doing this because I loved looking after people, I was doing it because I loved Lauren. I was doing it out of duty. I was doing it because I loved Mum and she needed someone to carry the stress of it with her. I was doing it because we didn’t want Nanna to know. I was doing it because there was no one else. I was doing it because it seemed to me to be women’s work, the intimate work of caring and worrying and touching and looking after someone else’s body. Mum didn’t understand that I actually hated this, I hated it so much it made me feel almost dizzy when Lauren went out to a party or a friend’s house or a concert or just a “quiet” night with girls from uni, and I started anticipating what might happen when she came home. Part of the reason I needed to move away so badly was that I wanted to be free of this responsibility; I didn’t want to see it anymore. I didn’t want to just be the person who cleaned shit up, who saw the worst parts and never the good parts. I wanted to find the good parts for myself, whatever they might look like.

This is the year when I am going to reinvent myself and find the good parts.

Jesse walks into the lounge room and sits on the couch across from me. Both the couches belong to Harper, or her family, I guess, and they’re not new, but they are nicer than I expected. One is mustard yellow, the other faded gray, both very well-worn, but comfortable. I try not to think about when they were last cleaned.

I glance at Jesse and then look away. He’s annoyingly tall. I’m not good at estimating heights, but I would say six two, maybe six three. He has very broad shoulders, and he takes up a lot of space, which makes me feel irrationally irritated.

“So,” he says.

“So,” I say in reply. If he thinks I’m going to do the work of making small talk, he’s wrong. I will give him exactly as much as he gives me. No, wait, from now on I will give him just a little bit less. I will be cold, harsh, I will freeze him out, I will squash every single natural urge I have to fill the silence and be polite and friendly and make a joke. I might be a people pleaser, for teachers, for parents, for friends, for the imaginary person analyzing my social media likes, for my future great-grandchild who might one day unearth my diaries, but not for him. Never for him.

“We’re living together.” He’s tapping the couch with the fingers of one hand and I can tell he’s nervous. He can’t rely on flashing me his dimple-in-his-left-cheek smile, a look that served him well throughout high school—he knows I am impervious to his charm. I’ve seen him turn on his don’t-you-just-find-me-a-little-bit-irresistible persona plenty of times before. Once at a party, he played a few chords on a guitar and held it while looking contemplatively at the sky, and people acted like he was an actual rock star for years after. Guys have it so easy. We’re always looking for ways to find them hot, charming, attractive, interesting, talented. We’ll take one small element, one moment, one single look, and build a whole fantasy around it.

“Look, so you know, I had no idea you were the other housemate when I moved in,” I say, the words bursting out of me. “I had no idea your real name is Jeremy. If Harper had said Jesse, I might have had a clue or asked more questions or something. I mean, since when is your real name Jeremy? I hear the name Jeremy, and I think of a history professor in a bow tie. Saying your name was Jeremy was very misleading. This is all your fault. I would never voluntarily live with you. I had no idea you were even planning to move to Melbourne—you knew that was always my plan. But what’s done is done and to avoid any unnecessary drama, I think—”

I take a breath. Okay, so the ice-queen plan didn’t last long. I’ve gone in the opposite direction, complete verbal meltdown. But, I can recover this. I just need to be firm and take charge. I swallow, lower my voice, bring it a few notches down from hysteria.

“I think we just need to act friendly to each other when we’re around Harper,” I finish, folding my arms.

“Sorry, can we back up a second? You heard the name Jeremy and you thought you were going to be living with a professor?” Jesse says.

“A very young one, yes, maybe.” I really wish I had not said that part.

“Who wears a bow tie?” he says.

“Yes. And a tweed blazer. With those leather patches on the elbows.”

“You spent quite a bit of time imagining this Professor Jeremy,” he says, and I can see a smile tugging at the edges of his lips.

“I was imagining him as a mentor,” I say huffily. I was actually imagining him as a handsome, floppy-haired, bow-tie-clad postgrad student who loves the library and has a posh accent and would bring me a strong cup of tea every afternoon while I was studying and we would make intellectual and deeply insightful jokes about Hemingway or some other dead author I haven’t read yet, but no one ever need know that level of detail.

“Mmmm. I’m sure,” Jesse says.

“Anyway. The plan. We’re nice to each other when we’re around Harper, and we get through this year—”

“I told you my real name was Jeremy,” he interrupts.

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did. We were sitting together on the bus, and you said if you ever published a book, you wanted it to be under your nanna’s name, which I’m pretty sure you said was Evelyn or something like that, because you don’t like your name, even though you have a perfectly fine name, and I said if I ever did, I would publish it under my real name, Jeremy.”

He’s right. The memory floods back instantly. I remember not just the conversation, but the way we were sitting, turned toward each other, elbows bumping, and that it was afternoon and we were heading home. We were fourteen, and our friendship was new and exciting in the way it is when you suddenly and unexpectedly click with someone and you feel like you could talk forever.

I push the memory away as fast as possible. “I don’t remember that,” I say, looking away.

“Okay,” he says.

I’m not sure he believes me.

“So what about when we’re not around Harper?” he adds.

“What do you mean?”

“You said we act friendly to each other around Harper. How do we act when we’re not around her, when we’re just on our own?” he asks. We look at each other, and for a second, just a second, I feel, absurdly, like I might cry. I push my fingernails into my palms, and the feeling passes.

I frown at him. “We ignore each other,” I say.

He nods and tucks his hair behind his ears.

“All right. So if you’re home, and I’m home, but Harper’s out, and I walk into the kitchen, do I literally pretend you’re not there or can I say something?” he says.

“It depends,” I say.

“On what?”

“On what you might say.”

“I will probably say ‘Hi.’ Or ‘Excuse me,’ if I need to reach around you to get to the fridge. Or ‘How was your day?’ if I’m feeling really bold,” he says, and his face is serious but I can see his eyes twinkling a little. This is a joke to him. I’m a joke to him.

“They’re acceptable options,” I say, keeping my face impassive. “But no follow-up questions. If you ask me how my day was, and I say ‘Good,’ that’s it.”

“Should I submit a full list to you of things I might say, for you to approve ahead of time?” he says.

“Yes. You should,” I say, still not giving him a hint of a smile. Let him worry I am being serious. Let him worry how far over the edge I have gone. Let him sweat.

He gives a short laugh and shakes his head. “Come on, Brooke,” he says.

“Come on, what?” I say. I will not let him weasel his way back into my life. We are not friends.

“Fine. Sounds good. We will silently endure living together and stay out of each other’s way as much as possible,” he says, sighing and standing up.

I stand up too, because I don’t like the imbalance of him standing and me sitting, even though he still towers over me when we’re both standing. We hold eye contact for a beat longer than is comfortable. Is this a power play? Am I winning or losing? I need to have the last word in this conversation.

“Shake on it,” I say, holding out my hand, which I immediately regret, because he could refuse to shake it, and then what will I do? Oh God.

But he doesn’t refuse. He reaches out and shakes my hand, lets it go, and then we turn and walk into our separate bedrooms.



FIVE

Jesse and I met when we were fourteen. It was the middle of term three in year eight and my homeroom teacher asked me to show a new student around. This was the kind of job often given to me—look after the new kid, read the book out loud while the teacher had to duck out and get something, collect all the assignments off the desks and bring them to the front.

The new student was Jesse, and he stood leaning in the doorway waiting for me. He was tall, but lanky and thin, in the way of teenage boys who haven’t filled out or got comfortable in their bodies yet and seem kind of permanently surprised about it, like they’ve just woken up in a new stretched-out body. I knew the feeling. I’d had my growth spurt early. I was the tallest girl all through the last years of primary school, which made me feel oversize and on display, under pressure to be a good goalkeeper in netball, bend my knees a little in every group photo, and pretend I didn’t mind when people said, “You’re Lauren’s little sister?” with surprise.

I walked him around the school. He told me he’d just gone from living with his mum to living with his dad, but he said it in a way that didn’t invite more questions, so I changed the subject and gave him my ranking of the teachers from nicest to most likely to say something sexist.

A few weeks after that, we were paired up in English class for an assignment where we had to write a short story with an additional creative component. We spent all of the class talking about ideas, and on the bus on the way home, he sat down next to me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if we’d always sat together. From the day he’d arrived, he’d been welcomed by the various groups that sat toward the back of the bus, so walking halfway down to my spot in the middle was noteworthy.

He said, let’s figure out the plot together, and then you could write the story and I could illustrate it with a map.

He showed me a book full of sketches—houses and castles and towers. When I saw the lines and details and intricacies of his work, I could suddenly see the fantasy world we were creating. I had that itch in my hands, a buzz in my stomach, almost a taste in my mouth, that I got when I couldn’t wait to start writing.

I’d been writing stories since I was little. Mum and Nanna have stacks of little booklets I produced when I was seven, eight, nine. Stories about animals, many about horses, a chestnut pony called Star, specifically, that I thought I could manifest into reality out of sheer willpower. Then, as I got older, I started getting more serious, self-importantly thinking of the stories as “short stories” and plotting out potential novels. When Dad first moved to Perth and Lauren was busy with her high school friends, I would spend whole weekends writing. I instinctively felt I was good at it, but despite this belief, I was too scared to ever show anyone my work. It was my private triumph, too fragile to be entrusted to others.

But planning this story with Jesse gave me confidence. When I showed him what I had written so far for our assignment, he said with real awe and sincerity, “You’re a really good writer.” It sent a jolt into me. It made me feel like I mattered. His map was amazing, beautifully and perfectly detailing the world we created together. We handed in the assignment and got an A+. Our teacher pinned the map up on the class noticeboard for everyone to admire. Jesse was mortified, but I was delighted.

After that, we always sat together in English. Sometimes on the bus home, he’d wait until Frances and Lakshmi, the girls I usually hung out with, got off and then he’d come and slide into the seat next to me for the last fifteen minutes of the trip. If we passed each other during the school day, we’d grin. We texted all the time, jokes and memes and links and random thoughts. A few times, we walked his family’s dog together. Our friendship wasn’t hidden, exactly, but it felt like a little bubble of secret happiness in my day. I would sit in class and look at the map on the wall and smile.

Lauren teased me that I liked him, which made me yell at her, but privately, I wondered. The mechanics of crushes—desire, emotions, lust—were all still confusing to me. Lauren had her first kiss when she was eleven, she’d had three boyfriends by sixteen, and I had just turned fourteen and had never been kissed and it was not something I saw happening in my immediate future. Lauren was the kissable sister, I was the one who read about it in my sister’s diary. Did I like Jesse in that way? How did you know what was just friendship and what was more? No one had ever liked me, so I had no baseline data. I needed a pro–con list, a deep-dive YouTube series, a twenty-page quiz, a how-to guide, and a relationship coach before I could work it out.

Feelings were scary. I knew that much.

One weekend in November, Gretel Morewell invited the whole year level to her fourteenth birthday party. She lived on a five-acre property, and her parents were there to supervise, but they holed themselves upstairs, and fifty or so of us spread out through her house and yard. There was a firepit, and she’d put speakers in her windows so you could hear the music outside. There were endless boxes of pizza laid out on the counter, and we had free rein until ten p.m.

It was the first real party I’d been to that wasn’t a sleepover with three or four other girls, and I went mostly out of curiosity. I knew everyone there, but the air crackled with the thrill of possibility of being with your classmates at nighttime, away from school. I drifted from group to group, until I found myself sitting next to Jesse on the couch inside. We chatted for a while, and when there was a lull in the conversation, I turned to him, about to tell him how much I loved the song that was playing (“Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles, which had come out six months earlier and I was still listening to it semi-obsessively every night). Jesse turned to me at the same time, our eyes met, and he leaned down toward me. It took me a second to realize he was leaning in to kiss me. I was about to be kissed. I sat up straighter, thrilled and nervous, ready for my life to change.

It wasn’t, by any definition, a good kiss. It was barely a kiss. He leaned down way too fast, then hesitated, then kept going at the same time as I leaned in too, so we almost bumped heads. Our lips fumbled together, and the angle of our heads was all wrong. It occurred to me as it was happening that I had no idea what exactly you were supposed to do when you were kissed. One of my hands hovered awkwardly in the air, because I was too afraid to put it down anywhere in case it was wrong.

But still. My first kiss. With a cute boy. While my favorite song was playing. This was the stuff dreams are made of.

After a few seconds, we broke apart. I blinked and looked up at him, willing him to do it again, but slower, so I could improve, or at least figure out what to do with my hand. I started to lean in toward him, then panicked that I looked too eager, so I jerked backward just as he was moving in to meet me. His face went red and he mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

A burst of laughter interrupted us, and I turned and saw Gretel and a bunch of boys from our class standing in the doorway.

“What’s going on here?” Gretel said, her voice both delighted and dangerous. “Jesse, do you like Brooke?”

The implication in her tone was clear. I was not worthy of being liked, as least not by Jesse.

Jesse’s face was very red now. He stood up quickly, without looking at me, which was my first clue as to what would come next. He looked at Gretel and the five or six guys standing behind her, and laughed and shook his head and said, “Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no.”

I stared up at him, shocked.

“No offense,” he said, looking back at me and quickly away again, rubbing his hand over his mouth. His eyes looked desperate, there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. My mouth was dry. I had no idea what to do or say. I felt like my insides were liquefying. I had emotional whiplash. Kissed and publicly rejected within the time span of a Harry Styles song.

“That’s harsh, man,” one of the guys said to Jesse. “She’s not that bad.” But then they were all talking about something else, complaining they hated the song, and Gretel picked up her phone to skip it. Jesse walked over to help her choose another song, leaning his head in extra close to hers, and I was left still sitting there, alone.

I pulled out my phone with shaking hands and texted Mum to come and get me. She would be at least half an hour, maybe longer, and I considered sitting by the dirt road in the dark to wait for her, which I calculated carried about a fifty percent risk of murder but still seemed better than being here. Gretel’s mother came downstairs to get more wine and took one look at me, sitting on the couch pale faced and trembling, and brought me upstairs to sit awkwardly between her and her husband and watch Midsomer Murders with them until my mum arrived.

On Monday morning, I ignored Jesse on the bus. I had thought maybe he would text me over the weekend, but he didn’t. I had typed and then deleted so many messages to him that Mum and Lauren both demanded to know what was going on. I didn’t tell them. Later, I would let Lauren know that Jesse and I had had a fight, but I never gave her the details. It was too personal. It was too humiliating.

I was the last one out of our homeroom after the bell rang for lunch that Monday, and I hovered at the noticeboard, looking at his map—our map. All the effort, all that detail, all those hours of work. I really loved the little world we’d created. I reached out, and I only meant to touch it, but something vicious came over me. He’d ruined not just my first kiss but my favorite song. I pulled the map off the wall and tore it in two. It felt so good, I ripped it again.

I heard a noise behind me and turned. Jesse was standing there watching me.

“Brooke,” he started to say, running his hands through his hair. “Listen.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Do not talk to me. Ever again.”

“I—”

“I said, don’t ever talk to me again.” My voice was as cold and hard as I could make it. I needed him to get away from me, fast, in case I cried. Or in case I changed my mind, because underneath everything, I already missed being his friend, and that made me angrier. I was determined not to show an ounce of weakness. I scrunched his map into a ball, threw it at his feet, and walked out of the classroom. And it felt good, so good, amazingly good. Anger, it turned out, was more satisfying than sadness or humiliation.

I couldn’t resist looking back, though. Just once, just quickly, just in case he was really upset. Our eyes met. He’d picked up the map from the ground and held the torn, scrunched pieces in his hands.

“I don’t care about this. It was a shit story anyway,” he yelled at me.

That was it. I turned and walked away.

The next year, at the year-nine social, I told Georgia Crowley not to kiss him because he was a bad kisser, which was the cruelest thing I could think to do, and she reported back to him that I said that (but she did not heed my advice, because by then he was the boy everyone wanted to kiss). After that, it became a thing, a known, established thing, that we didn’t like each other. “Keep them separated,” I overheard a teacher say once, “Brooke and Jesse don’t work well together.”

That night at Gretel’s party didn’t ruin my life in any measurable sense. It didn’t leave me friendless and alone. I went on to have a boyfriend and a reasonable approximation of a social life. But it was one of those moments that lingered. It lodged inside me like a shard of glass, and if I moved the wrong way, I would feel it, a sharp, unexpected jab.

Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no.

When I finished school, I thought, Thank God I’ll never have to see Jesse again.



SIX

I’m early for my Creative Writing: Ideas and Practice class, which means I am sitting awkwardly alone in the room with our teacher, PJ Mayfield.

This is my heart class, the one I picked with hands shaking with guilt and trepidation, because I was doing it for pure enjoyment and that’s not what studying is supposed to be about. Enjoyment? Enjoyment is frivolous, and I am here to learn, to achieve, to figure out a serious career path. But every time I’ve stepped into the room for our creative writing class, I’ve had to bite back a smile of pure happiness at the prospect of being here, on campus, in a room with high ceilings, big windows, and a general aura of importance and significance, with people who just want to talk about books and writing.

PJ Mayfield is an author. She wrote a very bleak, critically acclaimed book two years ago. I hadn’t heard of it, but I bought it when I saw she was in charge of the course. It’s very good, in that literary way where most of the characters are sad and depressed and say cruel things that are funny but not in a way I am comfortable with laughing at because I’m worried I don’t actually get it. There is a horrible scene in the middle of the novel involving the grisly death of a dog left alone in a hot car that made me put the book down for days and debate whether to keep reading or even take the class. Almost every review alludes to this scene, often with trigger warnings. “IF YOU LOVE DOGS, OR ANY ANIMAL, OR EVEN JUST SORT OF LIKE THEM, STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK!!!!!!” wrote one Goodreads reviewer. I have to agree with them, and I almost liked their review, but then I’m worried PJ might be neurotic enough to monitor this kind of thing and trace that like back to me.

PJ doesn’t seem bothered that I’m here early today. She’s reclining in her chair, eyes closed, her Blundstone-clad feet on the desk, balancing a book facedown and open on her chest. I would assume she was asleep except she stretches her neck from side to side occasionally. She is just firmly determined not to open even the slightest crack of opportunity for enthusiastic early arrivers to engage with her.

I have leaned forward as subtly as I can to try to see the title of her book, but I can’t. It’s slim, with a minimalist cover. It looks European. Maybe something obscure translated from German. Or maybe she’s reading it in German. She seems like someone who can read fluently in German. Or, oh God, Russian. Latin? I’m too scared to take my book out of my bag, in case she judges me for reading a bestseller written in English, even though I’m at a really good part and dying to finish the chapter.

I have a latte on my desk, and I sip it very slowly, playing with my phone, trying to pretend I am possibly taking notes for a novel I am going to write, instead of looking through my photo reel and wondering if it’s true that your nose keeps growing for your entire life and if I can see that growth in photos of me over the last five years. (I think I can.)

I’ve been living in Melbourne for almost a month now. It’s going well, really well. Sort of. On the good side of things, I have successfully managed to avoid Jesse most days (I have memorized his schedule to make sure mine is slightly different and we’re never in the kitchen together or on the same tram in the mornings), I enjoy most of my uni classes, and I have forged the tentative beginnings of a friendship with Harper and her girlfriend, Penny. I think. It’s hard to tell. Harper was very enthusiastic about the chocolate-chip cookies I made yesterday, but she might just love chocolate-chip cookies.

On the negative side, I can relax enough to poop only when I think the others are asleep, so I’ve had to adjust my entire digestive schedule. I wake up every night, heart pounding, convinced the mouse is back. I had a trial at a local café for a casual waitress position and they never called back despite the fact I smiled the whole time, even when a man made me repeat his order back to him twice because he didn’t believe I could remember that he wanted his latte very hot. I bought two tickets to the movies last weekend because I was going to see if Harper wanted to come with me, but then I chickened out of asking her. It felt too presumptuous and cringeworthy, to have already bought the tickets, and the opportunity to just casually ask her never naturally arose, so I ended up going on my own, and I sat in a near-empty cinema and felt like the depressed but beautiful main character of an indie film, which made me feel very adult and mysterious (maybe a cute quirky guy was watching me from nearby, appreciating my haunting allure), but also a little sad.

The things I have learned living with Harper and Jesse are that they’re not as shy about the toilet as me, they don’t mind their clothes sitting wet in the washing machine for days, they will squish things down and jenga a piece of rubbish on top of a teetering bin rather than take the garbage out, they haven’t appeared to notice I do all the vacuuming, and they can’t cook. Harper goes out a lot at night to see Penny, but when she’s home, she eats takeout or plain pasta with cheese. Jesse seems to eat cereal for dinner as his main option, sometimes two-minute noodles, sometimes a banana and a giant tub of yogurt. Occasionally he’ll cook a steak and eat just that, a hunk of meat alone on a plate, sitting in its juices.

When I cook, I put any leftovers in the fridge with a note encouraging Harper and Jesse to help themselves, listing the ingredients (in case of allergies) and the date it is good until, adding a smiley face and an exclamation mark to make it all seem very friendly and relaxed and low drama. I even bought purple Post-it notes because they seem less uptight than the standard yellow ones.

I have the purple Post-it notes with me now in class, because they also seemed the most appropriate for creativity, but now I’m suddenly worried PJ will judge those too. She seems like a strictly no-nonsense yellow-Post-it-only person. I subtly slide them off my desk and push them back into my bag. Finally, other students start arriving, including Sophie, Justin, and Ruby, the three students I sit with every class and who are the closest I have come to making friends with at uni so far. I always have a moment of fear when they arrive, that they won’t sit with me today, and I curse myself simultaneously for putting myself in this position by arriving early and for being so pathetically insecure to even worry about it, but they smile and head in my direction, and I almost slump in relief.

PJ always starts the class with a kind of rambling lecture on her thoughts on writing and publishing books. Today she tells us: it’s hard; it takes years and years to write anything half-decent; if you think you’ve written something great, you’ll come back to it three months later and realize it’s not; there’s absolutely no money to be made, especially in Australia; it’s lonely; it’s a form of torture, really; most people won’t get published; if you do get published, you’ll be utterly disappointed at what an anticlimax it is; writing talent is rare, but even rarer is a talented writer who can take on feedback and actually do the work to make their writing better. But, despite all this, if we want to write, if it calls to us in the dark of night, if it’s in our very bones, then we should face down the inevitable heartbreak and do it anyway, because nothing else will ever feel as nourishing to our souls. Making art, she says, requires courage and fortitude. Oh, and exercise helps. Helps what? someone asks. Helps everything, she says gravely.

I dutifully write it all down in my new notebook: hard, lonely, no money, great suffering but possible happiness. Start running?

Sophie has been making a pained face at Justin throughout this lecture. Justin is grinning back at her. Ruby is sipping on a giant iced coffee, using one finger to slowly scroll through a clothing website on her laptop. Sophie, Ruby, and Justin all think PJ is too cynical and bitter. They roll their eyes and make fun of her in the group chat we set up, while also remaining completely terrified of her in person. Obviously, we are all desperate for her approval. But I like her. I like the way she combines no-bullshit honesty with a flair for the dramatic. I like that she tells us it’s going to be terrible but we should do it anyway because it might also be wonderful.

At the end of class, I say, “See you on Friday,” to Sophie, Ruby, and Justin and then brace myself, because Friday is our housewarming party, and I am expecting the three of them to give me blank looks or make excuses for why they can’t come. But they all cheerfully say, “See you then,” and, once again, I am flooded with relief. I don’t remember ever being this nervous or neurotic about making friends in high school. Back then, I had a group I sat with at lunch, and I had other groups that my group was friends with, friendships that were wide and shallow and safe. Things weren’t perfect, but I knew who I was and where I fit. I am out of my depth here. I’m always on edge that I’ll be exposed as a fraud in some way.

I invited eight of my school friends to the housewarming party. Two said they would try to make it after something else, which means they won’t be coming. The other six are working, or can’t get to Melbourne, or have other plans. The trouble with my school friendships now is that even though we all still talk and text, everyone is so eager to meet new people and forge new post–high school lives, it’s easy to slip away from each other. And when you’re holding a party, and you need to invite people to said party and be sure they actually show up in person, it’s like a friendship exam. I don’t want to fail the exam. I can’t fail the exam. When Sophie, Ruby, and Justin all said yes to the invitation straightaway, I almost cried.

On the tram on the way home, I am gazing out the window when I see Jesse get on. We go to different universities but they’re close to each other, his in the city center, mine a few minutes farther out, but we are on the same tram line home. I glance away, hoping he doesn’t see me. He’s halfway down the tram, and there are five people standing in between us. I sneak a look at him. He has headphones in and a backpack on, and for a brief moment, my heart softens a little. There’s something about him standing there alone, one hand gripping the pole, in a crowd of people, that makes me feel like maybe we’re the same, both floundering a little in a new city, trying to meet people and learn the public transport system and not get lost or overwhelmed or homesick.

He looks up and we make eye contact. Damn it.

He awkwardly raises a hand, and I give a small nod back. No smile. We are not at smiling stage. The people standing between us get off, and now it’s very hard to ignore him. Will he move closer to me, or should I move closer to him? What is the protocol here? I take one small sideways step toward him and then pretend it was nothing more than adjusting my balance. The tram stops again, and several more people get off, leaving a double seat empty between us. A glaring empty seat right there, beckoning, an invitation for us both to sit down. I don’t want to share the seat with him, it’s too much like sharing our bus seat in high school. But if I sit down first, he’ll be the one left with the dilemma of what to do. He seems to be thinking the same thing, as we both make a move for the seat at the same time, bumping into each other.

“Sorry,” we say at the same time. He smiles. I don’t.

“After you, m’lady,” he says, using, for some reason, a ridiculous British accent and giving a grand, sweeping hand gesture.

“Thank you,” I say, frowning a little, because I suspect he did the accent to try to trick me into smiling, and I need him to know I will not be won over so easily. I absolutely do not find him charming or cute.

I sit down and he sits down next to me. I get the sense he’s regretting the fake accent. I would be. I vow not to speak to him, to hold firm, but not speaking to someone is much harder when you are sitting right next to each other. We’re not touching, but I’m acutely aware of every inch of his body beside me. My mind keeps slipping back into memories of us chatting and laughing on the bus in high school. No. Do not think about that. The silence stretches on, and I stare resolutely out the window. Do not make small talk. Do not look at him. Do not.

Jesse clears his throat.

“I know we’re supposed to ignore each other when no one else is around,” he says. “But I have to tell you—”

My heart catches, just for a second, as I wait for him to finish his sentence. Maybe he’s feeling nostalgic too. Maybe he’s going to try to rekindle our friendship. I brace myself for an emotional confession. To coldly remind him we are not friends and can never be again.

“—that your foot is touching something disgusting,” he says, pointing at the floor.

Oh. I look down and he’s right. Under our seat is a discarded McDonald’s bag and my shoe is resting on what appears to be a squashed junior burger, the sauce squirting out and onto my sneaker. I lift my foot, and a sticky mess follows it, with the burger wrapper and a pickle now stuck to the sole of my shoe. I wipe my foot against the wall, but the wrapper won’t come off. Jesse watches on as I struggle with the mess.

Finally, he leans down and grabs the dirty wrapper off my shoe with his hand.

“I didn’t need your help,” I say huffily.

“Sorry. I will never help you with anything again,” he says. He doesn’t visibly roll his eyes but I can feel a sarcastic eye roll in his tone.

“Good,” I say, folding my arms.

“Glad we’re agreed,” he says, folding his as well.

We don’t speak again for the rest of the ride home.



SEVEN

It’s the night of our housewarming party and I am in the kitchen, chopping fruit into decorative shapes and artfully arranging cheeses and jamming toothpicks into rolled-up salami slices with what I am sure an outside observer would describe as a manic energy. I told Harper and Jesse I would prepare the food for the party, because it calms me to have a job and because I like to make things special.

They thought I would dump a few packets of chips into bowls, but I have created fully stylized grazing platters. This just seemed nicer than a tub of hummus and a few packets of water crackers. Although now I take a breath and stand back and look at it all, I’m starting to worry I might have gone overboard. I am putting the finishing touches on my kiwifruit cut into flower shapes when Harper and Penny walk into the kitchen.

“Oh wow!” Harper says, smiling. “You’ve really gone all out.”

I can’t tell if she thinks that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

“It’s no big deal,” I say, hoping they can’t tell from looking at me that I spent all morning watching instructional YouTube videos on how to create charcuterie platters. I want people to be deeply impressed, but I also don’t want anyone to know how hard I am trying for their approval. It’s a complicated balance.

Penny is carrying a bottle of champagne and wearing an adorable jumpsuit and bright lipstick. Her chestnut hair is spilling in every direction, and her chunky heels are so high I want to study the mechanics of how she walks so effortlessly in them. Harper is wearing high-waisted black jeans, Converse sneakers, and a cropped red top with the word “cheese” on it in blocky white type. I don’t know if “cheese” is an obscure reference or if it’s completely random, but I do intuitively know that it makes the top very cool. I don’t know which outfit I wish I could pull off more. I’m wearing a loose black dress that feels very dull in comparison, and now I’m worried I look like a waitress.

“You should start a catering business,” Penny says, which makes me definitely want to get changed. “You have talent.”

Harper laughs and grabs a carrot off my platter. “Stop telling everyone they should start a business,” she says to Penny.

“I can’t help it. I see potential everywhere I go,” Penny replies.

“She listened to one podcast episode on young women launching start-ups and now she’s unbearable,” Harper says, and I laugh. I resist asking which podcast, because I don’t need the pressure of trying to think up a successful business idea right now.

Penny picks up a strawberry and looks at me intently. “How are you settling in?” she says. Her voice is kind, and I worry I am giving off out-of-my-depth-small-town-girl energy.

“Good, good,” I say. “I love it here. It’s—” I pause and try to think of something very Melbourne to say, something worldly, chic, cultured. “It’s a really nice area,” I finish.

“Brooke is so organized,” Harper says to Penny, still chewing on the carrot. A very ambiguous statement. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? A neutral thing?

Harper and Penny smile at me, and my heart is beating very fast in the silence that follows. I feel personally responsible for the lull in the conversation. Why am I suddenly so bad at this? Without the structures of school, the security of a minor leadership role, and the safe haven of my family, I am struggling. I actually had the sad thought the other day that I miss my school uniform. Now I spend hours scrolling through social media to find girls of my body size and type (tall, wide hips, strong thighs, a non-flat stomach, hair that swings between mousy brown and dark blond depending on when I last went to the hairdresser and if I am under flattering light, pink-toned skin with a tendency toward eczema and extreme dryness but that will turn oily as soon as moisturizer touches it) who dress well, so I can copy their style. Penny is tall and about my size, but she’s operating at three fashion levels, at least, above me.

I hear the front door opening and voices in the hallway.

“Oh, someone’s here,” Harper says, and she and Penny go to see who it is. It’s their second year of uni, they grew up in Melbourne, and they’re part of a whole interconnected social group. Harper said she has twenty or thirty friends coming tonight.

Within minutes of people arriving, it’s clear that Harper’s friends and Jesse’s friends are very different types of people. Harper’s friends are artsy, politically engaged, sitting in our lounge room like a big clump of intimidating coolness, drinking wine and debating the merits of a French TV show that I have heard of but didn’t realize anyone my age actually watched, and they all have great hair, somehow, which seems statistically unlikely, but there it is.

Jesse’s friends are a mix of shy and sweet engineering students and old school friends who are living in a share house in Geelong in what appears to be a mostly nocturnal life, where they play video games all night, eat Meat Lover’s pizza six times a week for dinner, shower on average once every four days, and recently started a small fire by putting a pizza, cardboard box and all, in the oven to reheat it.

I fuss around, putting food out, tidying the kitchen, refilling drinks, trying to look busy while I anxiously wait for Ruby, Sophie, and Justin to arrive. I’m sweaty and flustered. I stand in front of the open fridge for a second, trying to cool down.

In the lounge room, Jesse is sitting on the couch next to one of Harper’s friends, a pretty girl with waist-length caramel-colored hair and a nose ring. They’re deep in conversation, leaning toward each other, knees almost touching. It makes me feel a little bit sick. And betrayed. Here I was thinking we were both nervous and tentative in this new life, that we were equals, both in between, but he has so many friends here, old and new, and now he’s casually flirting, and he’s never looked more relaxed in his life. He cannot integrate into Harper and Penny’s friendship group before me.

I approach them with a tray of food.

“Hi, I’m Brooke,” I say to the girl.

“Amber,” she says in return. She looks at the platter of food I’m offering and exclaims with delight, “Oh my God, the detail! This looks like the kind of thing my mother spends all day making for her book club.”

“Oh, um, thanks?” I say. I don’t really know how to respond to that.

Amber smiles at me cheerfully as she piles food onto a napkin. “You know what? I think my mum actually owns that dress too!” she says, gesturing to my clothes.

I am really hoping her mother is very young and very fashionable.

Jesse has just put a chip in his mouth while listening to our interaction, and he wrinkles his nose.

“What am I eating?” he asks.

“A turmeric-flavored lentil crisp,” I tell him.

“Ugh,” he says. “It is not good.”

“It’s an acquired taste. For a sophisticated palate,” I say, trying to sound worldly and disdainful. In truth, I bought them because they were on special at the supermarket.

“How long does it take to acquire a taste for it?” he says.

“For you? It’ll take a while,” I say.

“Brooke!” a voice calls.

I turn, and squint. I don’t immediately recognize the girl walking toward me. But I can’t really concentrate on her face because she’s wearing an animal onesie. One of those all-in-one animal-patterned onesies that have hoods and are sometimes sold as costumes and sometimes as novelty pajamas. I think this one is a cow because it’s white with big black patches and, I think, yes, definitely, there are pink udders hanging off her stomach, and a little cow face on the hood, and a tail trailing at the back. Is that Ruby? Why is she wearing that? Oh God.

“Hey, Brooke,” Ruby says, walking over to me.

Her voice is slightly slurry. I am an expert in knowing when and how drunk someone is, and I would say Ruby is currently happily buzzed but heading toward the unsteady and messy phase.

“Hey!” I say. I give her a quick hug, even though we’ve never hugged before, but the cow onesie has thrown me. Her soft udders squish against me in a disconcerting way.

“I like your place.” She waves a hand around vaguely.

“Thanks. Thanks for coming,” I say. I pause and wait for her to explain the onesie, but she’s been distracted by the food and is busy picking at the grapes.

I can see Amber and Jesse taking in the costume, Amber with raised eyebrows and wide eyes and Jesse looking like he wants to laugh.

I frown at him. Grow up.

If my friend wants to dress like a cow at my party, well, she can. I’m interested to know why, of course, but really, it might be none of our business. It might be a very personal emotional situation.

“Hey guys, over here!” Ruby yells as Sophie and Justin walk in. They are also wearing animal onesies. Did I tell them it was a costume party? No, I didn’t. Did I? No. Definitely not. Of course not. Is this a … sexual kinky thing, maybe? Or a Melbourne thing? A creative thing? Or is it a joke? An ironic joke or a prop comedy joke? Am I the butt of the joke or am I in on it? My hands are clammy. I’m definitely not in on it.

Sophie is in an orange kangaroo onesie, and it has a little pouch with a joey poking out. Justin is in a lime-green dinosaur onesie, with felt spikes all down his back and a long tail. He is pink cheeked and sweaty and looks like he might be overheated. His suit zipper is pulled down a little and I can see a patch of bare chest. He’s wearing underwear, though, surely. I don’t dare look down at his dinosaur crotch.

“Hey, hey, hey, girl,” Sophie says, shimmying up to me.

“Hi! I’m so glad you came. You all look so fun!” I say, my hands clasped tightly together. I sound like an uptight fifty-something-year-old interacting with the local neighborhood teenagers for the first time. Or Amber’s book-club-hosting mother.

“Oh yeah. We had pizza and pre-drinks at Ruby’s before we came, and she has a bunch of these onesies because her school had an animal-themed muck-up day, and we put them on as a joke, and then we thought, why not keep wearing them, you know, I mean, when you think about it, why do we, as a society, even wear clothes, they are just a social construct,” Sophie says.

“Sure, sure, that makes sense,” I say.

“We are no longer going to conform to society’s arbitrary, bullshit ‘beauty standards,’” Ruby says. “Well, at least not tonight. I do have to look good tomorrow morning in case that cute barista is working at the coffee shop.”

“Fuck society and fuck society’s expectations,” Justin says, vigorously fanning his hot face and unzipping his suit a few more centimeters. “But yes, that barista is hot. You should wear that cute skirt you just bought.”

“Oooh yes,” Sophie says.

“Can I get you all a drink?” I say.

“We’re good. We brought our own. And we drank quite a bit at home,” Sophie says. She has the soft, gooey eyes of an emotional drunk who’ll start crying later.

“Oh wait!” Ruby yells. “I forgot. We brought you a onesie too!”

“Yes,” Sophie says, clapping her hands, and together they rummage through a grubby bookshop tote bag filled with clinking bottles until they pull out a bundle of cheap, fluro-yellow material with a flourish.

“Ta-da!” Ruby says. “It’s a chicken!”

“Oh,” I say. “Thank you.” I hold it in my hands and consider what to do next. I am touched and pleased that they thought to include me, but the chicken suit looks pre-worn and I have no faith that Ruby has washed it since someone from her school might have worn it last year. Also, it’s a chicken suit.

“Put it on,” Jesse says gleefully from behind us, where he has apparently been listening to everything from the couch with great amusement. That makes me determined not to put it on.

“It might not fit,” I say. I think I see some sweat stains on the fabric.

“It’s one-size-fits-all,” Ruby assures me.

“You don’t have to,” Sophie says kindly, touching my arm. “You look quite sober.”

“Yeah, what are you drinking?” Justin says. His hood has fallen forward and the stegosaurus eyes are goggling at me.

“Oh nothing. I mean, nothing right this second.”

“You need to catch up. Someone get this girl a drink!” he shouts.

“It’s fine.”

“No, no, you need a drink.”

“I’m fine, truly.”

“It’s your party. You have to drink.”

“I will, I will,” I say.

I lead them to the corner of the room, where there are two beanbags. They recline on them and laugh and throw their legs over each other with a comfort that makes it seem like they’ve been friends for years. When we all first met in class, they asked me what school I went to (the first question everyone asks in every single class, I discovered), and when I told them, they all nodded politely, having obviously never heard of it. They went to big Melbourne private schools and had mutual friends and experiences and jokes, because Justin’s ex-boyfriend was friends with Sophie’s sister and Ruby had hung out with Justin’s best friend one time, and they had an instant built-in scaffolding for their friendship. They were a threesome and I was an outsider from day one.

I perch awkwardly on the edge of one of the beanbags, still holding the chicken onesie, now folded neatly, in my lap. Do I sit with them for the rest of the night? Am I in charge of them, like a babysitter or a parent or, let’s be generous, a fun, young aunt? I’m starting to think I would actually feel better if I was wearing the onesie.

Jesse comes over, holding the Polaroid camera that Harper told us was for taking photos of the party. That she insisted we use and take lots and lots of pictures.

“We’ll put them all over the fridge,” she said. “It’ll be our house’s thing!” She’d tried to take a photo of Jesse and me, but we both backed away.

“Let me get a picture for the fridge,” Jesse says to us now. I am immediately suspicious that he’s making fun of me, even though his tone is mild and friendly.

He holds the camera up and Ruby, Justin, and Sophie pose in increasingly silly ways against the wall, completely at ease in their costumes and with each other and the world, giggling joyfully at half jokes that make sense in their drunken minds, and I am filled with an overwhelming desire to be part of the group. Or part of Harper and Penny’s group. Any group. I wish for anything other than what I have: my three new sort-of friends laughing uproariously while I hover anxiously to the side.

I think of Lauren saying to me once, “But don’t you want to let go? Don’t you want to unclench, just once?”

Unclench, unclench, unclench, I tell myself, but saying those words makes me clench my insides, my stomach, my jaw, my eyeballs, my mind, harder.

“Brooke, get in the picture,” Jesse says, his eyes shining and his dimple-smile working overtime to charm everyone.

“Oh, no, I think I’m okay here,” I say, fake smiling at him.

“Brooke, get in!” Sophie shouts. “Put the onesie on and get in.”

“It’s important for the future of this household that I get a shot of you in the chicken suit,” Jesse says, grinning.

I narrow my eyes. Does he think I’m afraid to wear the costume? That I’m scared of the judgment from him, and Amber, and his school friends and everyone else here? That I take myself so seriously I can’t wear a chicken suit in front of strangers at my first party in Melbourne? Well, I’ll show him. I determinedly haul the chicken onesie on over my dress and zip it up. I expect my self-consciousness to magically disappear once I am standing alongside the others in costume but, unfortunately, it doesn’t. I can’t let Jesse see that, though. He’s only going to see the most carefree version of Brooke ever.

Justin, Ruby, and Sophie surround me and make funny faces for the camera and I smile wide—unclench, unclench—being a good sport, laughing along, and hamming it up. But secretly, I’m hot and itchy and overstimulated and a little bit tired, and I want to rip the suit off, go to the kitchen, and start tidying up while listening to a long podcast about a random topic like medieval nuns or the history of bread. A deeply absorbing activity where I can just relax and forget I even have a body or a to-do list or a “things I want to achieve this year” plan or big friendship-shaped holes in my life or sharp spikes of anxiety that I keep catching myself on or the memory of Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no. I just want to sink deep into my brain like it’s a pristine empty swimming pool.

I’m not Fun Drunk Chicken Suit Girl, I will never be Fun Drunk Chicken Suit Girl, I know that, and everyone else here probably knows it too.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A huge thank-you to my brilliant editor, Sarah Barley, and the wonderful team at Flatiron Books, including Sydney Jeon, Maris Tasaka, Cat Kenney, Devan Norman, Megan Lynch, and Malati Chavali. I am eternally grateful to have found a home with Flatiron. Thank you, also, David Forrer at Inkwell and everyone at Text Publishing, especially Jane Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Julia Kathro, Sophie Mannix, Ariane Ryan, and Anne Beilby. Thank you, designer Imogen Stubbs and illustrator Kitty O’Rourke, for the cover of my dreams, bringing to life one of my favorite scenes in the book.

Thank you to Emily Gale and Bronte Coates, for not only keeping me writing but making it a hundred times more fun than it would be on my own. Our writing group sustained me through the roller coaster of writing my second book—the panic, doubts, and second-guessing my ability to write anything at all, plus a pandemic, six lockdowns, early motherhood, toddlerhood, one hundred day care colds and viruses, Covid, and all the anxiety, joy, rage, gossip, kindness, and laughter we shared along the way. Forever my first and best readers, cheerleaders, book recommenders, and dearest of friends.

A huge thank-you to all my friends and family for your never-ending support and enthusiasm and love, it means so much. An extra-special thank-you to Mum, Dad, Carla, Andrew, John, Liv, Laura, Tom, and Maeve.

This book would not have been possible to write without paid childcare, so thank you to the excellent childhood educators who cared for my daughter so well through the last several years, including Zoe, Gaetana, Katie, Purti, Naama, and more.

Thank you to all the readers of my first book, It Sounded Better in My Head. Every review, every social media post, every lovely email, I have treasured them all. A very special thank-you also to the glorious booksellers around the country who hand-sold and promoted it, I am indebted to you all.

Thank you to Taylor Swift for releasing two very good albums in 2020 that helped me find Brooke’s voice. And to everyone who ever worked on The Vampire Diaries, for giving Brooke and me the Salvatore brothers to enjoy.

Thank you to Dan, who, when my day job, parenting, the pandemic, and writing were all too much, encouraged me to take a risk and helped me rearrange our lives to create the time and space I needed to write this book. And asked every day with cheerful enthusiasm, “How’s the writing going?” even though I never responded well to that question. Love you.

Finally, thank you to my daughter, Abby, who—while I can’t say made writing easier exactly—has brought so much love, joy, humor, chaos, and happiness to my life. You’ve made my world more interesting, more intense, more wonderful than I could ever have imagined.



ALSO BY NINA KENWOOD

It Sounded Better in My Head



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nina Kenwood is an award-winning author living in Melbourne, Australia. Her debut novel, It Sounded Better in My Head, was a finalist for the American Library Association’s William C. Morris YA Debut Award, has been published in six languages, and was optioned for film. Unnecessary Drama is her second novel. You can sign up for email updates here.


UNNECESSARY DRAMA. Copyright © 2022 by Nina Kenwood. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.