Even as she thought all that, Lena was taken in. Annie might have been the most beautiful person she had ever seen, but she was also clearly a poor person who didn’t know how not to show it. She wore the kind of thin, white cotton t-shirt you bought at the supermarket in a pack of three for fifteen dollars. Her jeans looked like she’d dug them out of the reject pile at the Salvos: early nineties marble-wash and two sizes too big so the waist had to be pulled in like the top of a paper bag. She carried a canvas knapsack that looked like it had been with her right through high school, and used the embarrassing uni-logoed water bottle the student union handed out for free during Orientation Week. Her yellow thongs looked like freebies, too: there had once been a brand name emblazoned in white down the side but the rubber had worn away too much to make it out.

All this gave Lena the confidence to approach her and ask if she wanted to grab coffee between classes and compare notes from week one. During that first conversation, Lena commented on Annie’s perfectly painted toenails and Annie said she felt feral if she went more than a week without a pedicure. Lena told Annie that her aunty was the same with her fingernails; she’d go out with no make-up and unwashed hair, but never, ever without polish on her nails. Lena had never understood why she cared so much about that one detail, but seeing how Annie’s immaculate grooming made her clothes and shoes into necessary but irrelevant wrapping was revelatory. Perfect nails on top of an expensive outfit made you look like you were trying too hard, but on someone who clearly didn’t care about (or couldn’t afford) nice clothes they gave a touch of class, a promise that this was a woman who took care of what mattered.

After that first meeting, Lena and Annie often sat together in class and at lunch, grabbed coffee between lectures. When they had to work in pairs or groups in tutes they looked to each other at once. Several times they’d hit the uni pub together, and on two of those occasions chucked up almost in unison on the way home. Home being Lena’s shitty room, which was where Annie crashed on the pub nights, complaining that it was too far to her own digs.