‘So you’re an Austen or you’re a Brontë,’ our lecturer said.

Dan had laughed unpleasantly – this ultra-severe man who had shown up for the first time at the tail end of week five, presumably after submitting our developmental assignment without having met the person who would be assessing it.

‘That’s funny?’ said the lecturer.

‘That’s messed up,’ Dan said. ‘They’re lady novelists, so of course they have to be in competition. I’m sure the Brontës weren’t embarking on their literary careers just so someone could tell them they were better than Jane Austen.’

‘No,’ frowned the lecturer. ‘I’m sure they were not, but people actually say this about other writers too. You’re a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, for instance.’

‘Oh, women and Russians. Thanks, McCarthy. They’re all the same to you.’

At this time I was still living at home and commuting to uni, taking the last possible hour-long train back to Geelong Station that would still get me home, by bus, another hour away. Although my family saw me as a vague and dreamy person – this seemed to be the main reason my coming out ‘made sense’ – I was also prone to a particularly gross kind of grade-grubbing that meant I was both horrified and weirdly turned on by the idea of swaggering in and picking a fight with a teacher, especially over something both dangerous and petty. I judged Dan’s greasy hair to be ‘intense’.

But he never showed up in that lecture again. I refreshed every hook-up application in which I was then enrolled, in Brunswick, Fitzroy, Carlton, uni, on all public transport, in the hope that I would see him, somewhere, and then – what?

Instead, one day, he found me. A Tuesday afternoon, in swot vac. I was in the library, reading about Harold Holt and the Easey Street Murders when I was definitely meant to be reading about something else. ‘hey’, he wrote. ‘looking for?’ His main picture was a shirtless blur, caught like a bedroom yeti. When I sent back several photos of me with friends from school, smiling in our sheeny ways at formals and sports days, he unlocked a set of pictures that I have since tried to forget, but which were indelible in the details.

I had on my mind the losses of my several virginities, not being old enough to know it is not a cat; you can kill it nine whole times and it will still come back, it always has some dumb unfinished business. I thought it would be romantic to make out in the stacks, but this was a modern library, its metal shelves low and cold, leaving us at constant risk of discovery. He also wasn’t up to being subtle. He kept kissing my arms and stroking my face, and this was exciting, but he kept stroking it, investigating the same unmoving grooves.