What the hell? I thought, following Caroline to her room with Ashley, shitting myself that we’d get busted.

Caroline’s room was a huge space with a king-sized bed in the centre and a big tallboy on one side. On the other side there was a desk with a mirror next to mirrored built-in wardrobes. Caroline put the bottle and glasses on the table, and I just wanted to hide it. I wondered why she wasn’t stashing it in her ensuite or under the bed or something.

Caroline turned to undo the lid of the bottle. ‘Do you want a drink?’ As I was searching for the right words to reply, she said, ‘Oh. Best we get high first, hey?’ She pulled a joint from her shirt pocket.

Ashley’s eyes lit up. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘Trent,’ Caroline said. ‘He’s always good for it.’

And then Ashley got off of the bed and followed Caroline through to the ensuite. Caroline switched on the exhaust fan and I hung back at the bathroom door, both to stay away from the smoke and also to create a screen between me and parents that could walk in at any second. Caroline lit the joint and breathed it in deeply before passing it to Ashley, blowing the smoke up towards the exhaust fan.

Ashley did the same and then passed it my way.

What the hell do I do? I thought.

Dad and I had talked about drugs a lot over the years. I remembered one day just before I started high school, he’d said, ‘Have they talked to you much about drugs at school?’

‘Not really,’ I’d told him.

He’d grabbed his laptop, then. ‘It’s pretty important you learn all about them and what they can do to you.’ He ran me through everything from heroin to marijuana. ‘Without a doubt you’re going to be offered things. It’s part of life.’

I’d said, ‘I’ll never do drugs.’

To my surprise, he’d replied, ‘Some drugs can be fun, like smoking a bit of weed, but you need to learn how to be safe with it. I hope you never do drugs – life is much better without them. But if you do, I hope you can wait until you’re much older – until your brain and body have fully developed and you’ve worked out life a bit.’

Now, I looked at Ashley and the joint in her hand. When Dad and I had that first conversation about drugs, I thought there was no way that I would try them. Why would I do that? I wanted to be great at school. I wanted to go to university and be a great baller, maybe get a scholarship through basketball to study at a university in America. Why not? One of Dad’s cousin’s daughters had got a soccer scholarship in America. I still wanted to perform my best at school, now. I still wanted to give myself the best chance of playing top-level basketball. But I didn’t want to look deathly uncool in front of Caroline, my new friend. How the hell could I get out of having to accept the joint?