Eden knew there was no way she could get served, or even let in considering she was in her school uniform, but she didn’t want their date to end. She said yes.

David got her into the pub. A smile at the doorman, no need even for an explanation. Two hours later she was drunk off her ass and David was kissing her. He was older, she knew that, but it wasn’t until he took her back to his place, a townhouse he shared with three friends, that she asked how exactly old.

“Twenty-three,” he told her as they lay on his bed. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

It wasn’t to her. Not then.

“I love you,” David said, kissing her forehead. “I want us to be together.”

A few weeks later the Melbourne Youth Orchestra held it’s season-opening gala. Her parents came and after the performance, she introduced them to David. It turned out they already knew each other. Her father and his were MCC members, they’d all been watching cricket games together for years. As her parents stood chatting to David, he took her hand. Her mother had smiled, and Eden’s heart had almost burst with joy. They approved. Everything was going to be okay.

And everything was okay. David picked her up from school and they drove around, smoking weed and listening to Bombay Bicycle Club and Cosmic Gate. They went to house parties, and she joined his electronica band, The Winged Hedges. She would have dropped out of school to play the keyboard for them if she could.

“You’re too good,” David  said whenever he turned her down. “You make the rest of us look like shit.”

David was always welcome at her parents’ house, especially for Sunday dinner. Whenever he came he always stayed the night in her room. Eden was blown away by how cool her parents were about everything. The year before, she hadn’t been allowed to double pierce her ears, but she and David were free to fly to Byron Bay and go to Splendour in the Grass Festival, no questions asked. David even talked her mum into letting her use one of the spare bedrooms as a recording space. Being with him was the happiest Eden had ever been.

Then Sienna came home.

For three years her sister had been living in New York, modelling, but one Sunday she showed up out of nowhere with just a handbag and a copy of some indie movie she’d appeared in. Her parents shat themselves with excitement, running around making up her room, ordering oysters and roast duck and apricot tart. That night, after they’d eaten, everyone piled into the theatre room to watch Sienna’s movie, ‘Lights Over Manhattan.’