While Lydia was cooking breakfast, Jamie walked into the kitchen wearing a T-shirt and a pair of board shorts, rubbing his eyes and then stretching.

‘Frying bacon. Maybe that’s the only thing that will wake a teenaged boy,’ Lydia joked, looking in my direction.

‘You okay?’ Jamie asked, mid-yawn.

‘Yes. Thank you for last night.’

‘Don’t worry about it; it wasn’t that big a deal. It’s kind of a rite of passage to throw your guts up at Caroline and Mitch’s. But that other stuff, that was really horrible and I’m sorry.’

‘What other stuff ?’ Lydia said, placing some toast on plates.

Jamie looked at me, giving me the space to tell his mum, or not, about what had happened.

‘Matilda from our class has just been a bit hard on me,’ I said, because really, it was true.

‘Right,’ Lydia said, not asking anymore questions.

As we ate, Jamie said, ‘Do you want me to take you back to Caroline’s after breakfast?’

That was exactly what I wanted. I needed to grab my gear and get Dad to pick me up as if nothing had happened.

‘That’d be good,’ I responded with a smile that hurt my face, my brain and everything else.

When we’d finished the delicious food, I thanked Jamie’s mum several times and said goodbye. Then Jamie led me down the side of his house to the bike shed. He started dusting off what I assumed was his mum’s bike. ‘You can ride, yeah?’

‘Yeah. But how are you going to get the bike home?’ I said.

‘I’ll ask Caroline if she can ride it to school. Mum doesn’t use it much anyway.’

‘Right.’

My stomach did backflips as we started riding, and by the time we were a little out of The Village, riding through the vineyards, I started to feel better. I was actually enjoying getting my pulse up and breaking a sweat. The exercise felt like it was doing me some good.

‘What are you up to today?’ I asked Jamie.

‘I’ll try to avoid homework for as long as possible, and then I’ll hopefully do some homework,’ he joked.

There’s no way that I could do any homework with the state my head was in. While my body was feeling a little better, my mind was racing with both anger and embarrassment about what had happened with Trent, and my drunken state and the spewing. I couldn’t remember feeling so much shame.

When we got to Caroline’s we jumped off the bikes and walked around the back. Seeing the yard reminded me of Caroline pouring me my first drink, and then the warmth of it in my body. As I looked down between the rows of vines, the physical memory of my head spinning and the spewing returned to me and I felt a little faint.