By comparison, I’d once ruined a date by saying I would eat a person – only if they’d died already, and only if they’d asked, but these nuances were lost in the ensuing commotion. Dan and I were quite different kinds of hard-to-be-with people, the main difference being that his positions had a point.

When I pictured Dan dating someone – and I often pictured this, because I knew that he wanted it, and I was a pessimist – I pictured him with exceptional people, maybe a hectic twink, or one of those north-side guys who are both scholarly and piggy, which somehow evens out into a fixation on the moon. Instead it was Lachlan, who was just nobody. And I’d thought I could out-nobody the best of them.

At his job in Abbotsford, Dan was exposed to all manner of ideas and pressures and vectors, none of which I seemed able to parse. The onset of Lachlan was no exception. On the day in question Dan got out late (!) and had to come home via the Woolies in Abbotsford, which made things worse, because he did not like to shop at the big two.

He was scanning his items thoroughly and the equipment jammed, and when he looked around to hail a helper, Lachlan was there too, trying to hail the exact same person. It was hell, then it was late, then he was simply coming over, and just like that, my friend had been substituted with a boyfriend, while the real Dan was drip-fed nutrients in some basement cocoon, swaddled up in bodysnatcher ooze.

The other month, I’d come down to the kitchen as per normal and heard Dan and Lachlan discussing their new business shirts, whether it mattered that you could see their nipples through them. ‘I used to think about the nipple question all the time,’ said Lachlan. ‘But these days, I just put on my shirt and go to work.’

I just couldn’t compete on the level of nipple questions. After they left, I went into Dan’s room and put on one of his shirts, but if the nipples were under there, I couldn’t spot them.

Before I’d let my membership to Brunswick Baths expire, a trainer had written on the whiteboard: ‘Remember, summer bodies are made in winter.’ It sounded like an old saw trotted out by some Scandinavian detective, waiting for the lake to thaw and divulge its many bodies, creating a grisly wealth of summer overtime.

Now though, climbing the bleachers at the Fitzroy Pool, I saw it had a troubling meaning of a different kind. While I had been imagining this Scandinavian detective, other boys had been taking the advice as it was meant, girding themselves against sagginess and scrawniness and readying their bodies to greet the sunny world.