It was Misrak who wanted to go to Myrtle Beach. Four years in America, with graduation looming, and she still hadn’t taken a proper break. Always sleeping on Ethiopian couches on cheap road trips or tagging along as a nanny with a white family to go on holiday with other white families. ‘I want to stay in a proper hotel and have fun!’ she said. ‘Come on. Don’t you think Chichi is ready for it?’

Chichi had burst onto the scene a few months earlier at a party, where he had impressed Misrak with his agile shoulders and silver Maserati. He was studying pre-med at Chapel Hill and had so far proven that few things had the potential to animate him: the sight of Misrak’s chest was one; a series of cocktails, preferably Long Island Iced Teas, was another.

I remember him sitting in the back of Blake’s car, staring glumly out of the window at the parade of flowering trees down I-74. Everywhere – bullets of colour. An upheaval of brown, like skin turned inside out to expose festering wounds of purple and pink. All those flowering trees, the names of which could compete only with the names of the seemingly make-believe towns we were passing through. Darlington, McBee, Monroe, crape myrtle, magnolia, redbud. Perfect little explosions.

In Myrtle Beach I found out more about Chichi. That he was an Eritrean; that he’d been taking care of his mother and sisters ever since his father deposited them in the United States in 1986. That he had drive – not immigrant drive, which was shabby and somewhat sycophantic, but entitlement drive, the same kind of drive Blake had.

Misrak and Chichi fought constantly in Myrtle Beach. They may have spoken the same language, but they came from different sides of a disputed border. When we came home to Woodland Apartments she said, ‘It’s never going to work with us. I just don’t see it.’ And just like that, Chichi of the agile shoulders and silver Maserati was out.

I too should have seen clearly the incompatibility of our spirits. Blake and I, holding hands, walking along the scummy seashore. Him thinking that we were moving atop some giant swell of togetherness in a cheesy Richard Bach kind of way, calling me Ducky, saying things like, ‘You and I aren’t going to be one of those couples who fight or have secrets,’ and me hating it, hating him for not realising that I hated him. Hating my dearest friend because she knew exactly what she was and what she couldn’t abide, whereas I, whose life had been constructed from all manner of flimsy things – I was malleable.

I would have a moment of clarity in Myrtle Beach, of understanding why I didn’t belong in America. All those orange umbrellas dotting the beach, and the grease of so many baking bodies slathered in tanning oil. The combined exhalation of all that burning fat.

It reminded me of Jesolo, the seaside of my father’s childhood – a bleak port town on the Adriatic.