It took Lena months to learn that Annie had a studio apartment in the city, in a new, prestigious, luxury security building with a basement gym and a rooftop pool. She made this discovery after the two of them had carried their friendship out of the university for the first time and gotten messy drunk in a city dive bar offering three-dollar shots to ladies until midnight. Lena had been too smashed to notice the outside of the building Annie led her to, but sometime between stumbling past an indulgently smiling, avuncular front desk attendant and emerging from an impossibly long elevator ride directly into a room with a view of the Harbour Bridge, she sobered up enough to realise Annie was a fucking fake. What kind she didn’t know. Like, was she an upper-class sex worker or was this a 21 Jump Street sitch?

‘What the fuck?’ she asked, and Annie laughed as though they were both in on the joke. She explained that her parents paid for the place. The family home was only over the bridge, but they wanted Annie to have the independence of living out of home. Without actually living on campus, with all the orgies and drug rings, obviously.

‘Or the cockroaches and lukewarm showers,’ Lena said, and Annie fell about laughing again.

‘God, imagine if they knew I stayed in your res! They’d hold a fricking intervention. They don’t get that you can live simply and be, like, fine.’

And Lena finally understood that she was not the one who had magnanimously befriended the clueless poor girl.

But by then they were involved in joint projects in half their classes and, anyway, really did kind of like each other, and so they’d stayed friends, even though Lena avoided going to the uni pub with Annie so as to never again have to see her soft bare feet with their immaculate—professionally, not home-pedicured—toes padding over Lena’s mysteriously, stubbornly sticky floor to reach the never-fully-dry shared bathroom to piss in the never-not-stale-smelling toilet.

Annie didn’t seem to notice the change in dynamic. She kept being the same friend to Lena she’d always been. Which made sense, since she’d always known who was who and what was what between them. It was Lena who had to catch up, act natural, as though talking about her scummy, desperate college hook-ups to someone who’d lost their virginity to an actual baron while on international exchange in Germany was normal.

But now, Lena felt so fucking good, so fucking right with the world, that she’d happily invite the whole of Annie’s extended family into this shitty room. Who cared what your place was like when you’d just been fucked like a goddamn queen?