Admitting she’d spent two years redoing her leaving certificate at TAFE to earn entry to uni was out of the question. And for a primary teaching degree, of all things! A shameful, last resort of a course, according to most of her classmates. The profession you entered because you didn’t get the marks to enter any of the good ones. Imagine if they knew how Lena had strived for this. How brain-foggingly, vertebra-crunchingly, wrist-crackingly hard it had been to get these unimpressive marks. The only acceptable thing to say about going into teaching was that you were passionate about education, but, actually, she had hated every minute of school and now she was out the idea of voluntarily going back there and standing in front of a class of kids made her feel nothing but tired. She was doing teaching because it was as close as you could get to a guaranteed full-time job with sick pay and holidays and superannuation. She was lucky the public school system was desperate enough for teachers that even a thickhead like her could make the cut. After two years at TAFE, anyway.

‘Nah, Josh is old for his year, too,’ Lena told Nic. ‘He took three years off after his HSC and travelled. He’s been to, like, Italy and Greece and everywhere.’

‘Kissed on the dick, hey?’ Nic said it loudly, like she said everything, and Lena felt the cafe bristling with judgement. Couldn’t bear to actually look around and check.

‘Yep,’ Lena said quietly, hoping to lower Nic’s volume by example. ‘His family owns half the state. The country half. All of the soy or wheat or something. I don’t know. He lives in the college that all the prime ministers lived in.’

‘All except Julia.’

‘Obviously.’

Lena pulled up Josh’s Instagram page, found the pic of him on horseback he’d posted during winter break. Nic whistled, long and low. Not too loud, at least. ‘That’s a pair of thighs right there.’