‘You’re wearing make-up now?’ Amber asked, astounded. ‘Honestly, at this moment, it would be easier for me to grasp quark nuclear physics than to understand what the hell is going on with my sisters. I’m going to lose the quiz and then get an early night,’ she said, pitifully.

‘Sure . . . you can go to sleep early, but that will only tempt us to shave off one of your eyebrows when we get in!’ Emerald laughed as she layered eyeliner on my eyelids. Amber was right – we were totally regressing. Next it’d be pillow fights and short-sheeting each other’s beds.

I laughed then, too, jerking my head backwards, which caused Emerald’s charcoal eye pencil to etch a bold stroke from my right nostril to my left earlobe, which only made us laugh more. While Emerald fetched a make-up wipe, I slugged down another huge slurp of personality.

‘I’m just window-shopping, Amber, I promise. I’m not going to do anything. So don’t get your horny hopes up about me, okay, Emerald?’ I called out after her. ‘Besides, as if any man would ever fancy me.’

‘You’re still hot . . . it just comes in flushes now,’ Emerald said convivially, returning from her room.

I suspected the only heat I’d feel in the disco would be from blushes of embarrassment. Gosh, what’s that noise? I thought, as my big sister squirted me with perfume. Oh, just the sound of millions of men laughing themselves to death at the thought of Ruby Ryan pulling a toy boy.

In truth, I didn’t think it would be possible to take the amount of drugs required to hallucinate that I was attractive. My sex appeal was so miniscule, it’d take a microscope to find it. When it came to sending out sexy signals, I might as well be relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri.

‘Don’t worry, Amber, my eyes are bigger than my vag, so to speak.’

And with that, before I could chicken out, Emerald ushered me out the door to go double-park in The Erogenous Zone.

10

‘Yugen! Yugen! Yugen!’ was the only word I could summon from my vast vocabulary as an athletic man half my age extracted his tongue from my mouth. I ran my hands over the satiny skin of his muscular forearms and gazed into his dazzling azure eyes.

I rocked back on my heels to examine the hair-gelled Adonis who was pressing his groin up against me – his enthusiastic groin. As a recently rejected wife of twenty-eight years I lapped up the attention as if I were a rescue dog from the pound. He was nearly six feet tall, with a mop of sun-kissed, chestnut-brown hair. His face was a complex geometrical configuration of bronzed bone structure. Basically, the boy had hit the DNA jackpot. Sadly, when he spoke, I realised he was big for his brain, like a dinosaur.

‘Yeet. What a rig,’ he said in a rush.

‘What?’