Like Xavier said, the house is stunning. Built into the cliffs above the sheltered bay at the eastern fringes of Carúpano, the villa has several levels, with two separate rooftop pools. There are people everywhere, dancing, laughing, openly doing coke. One couple is clearly making love in a dark corner of the main living space. You walk through the room on Xavier’s arm and take the beer he hands you. You begin to sway to the music when you reach the dancefloor outside. You’ve never been anywhere like this before. This is what you dreamed of, all those long months dragging past during your final year of school in a safe, underwhelming suburb of Oslo. You look at Xavier. You smile. You get high.

Occasionally, you scan the crowd for Elisabeth and Trine and spot them both on the dancefloor, moving energetically with a couple of guys, the usually reserved Trine pumping her fist in the air. You laugh and Xavier closes your mouth with his own, playfully touching the tip of his tongue against yours.

After a while, you edge towards the edge of the crowd, time for a break. Xavier takes your hand and leads you through the main space, down a flight of stairs, then another, along a long corridor, to a bedroom. The crowd is thinning, some must have left, some might have retreated to the bedrooms on the lower levels. The heavy bass throbs through the house like a pulse. You don’t need me to tell you what happens next. When you emerge from the bedroom, your hair messy and your eyeliner dragging sweetly upwards at the corners of your eyes from laughing so much, you seamlessly rejoin the others on the dancefloor and they pretend like you’d been there all along. Elisabeth and Trine are red-faced from all the dancing, beads of sweat running down the sides of their faces glinting in the white light of a high, full moon.

Let me show you somewhere special, says Xavier. Come. The three of you walk behind Xavier and one of the other guys who’d danced with Elisabeth and Trine, away from the house, away from the beach, into the jungle on a narrow track. Perhaps he senses a change in atmosphere, a charged current of beginning fear, because Xavier turns around and smiles widely, pointing up at the hillside, clearly visible now after a sharp turn. Up there, nestled in verdant forest, is a wrought-iron gazebo. It’s beautiful, like something out of a fairytale. You step inside and settle in a circle on the floor, around a large round mirrored table. The other man, Xavier’s friend, plays tinny hip-hop music on his phone. You look out over the gently rippling Caribbean, then back at Xavier. You can’t stop smiling. The other man pulls a little Ziploc bag from his pocket and cuts five long lines of coke on the table clearly intended for this purpose.