I rolled my eyes at Chris L.

‘It’s nice to meet you,’ I said, and Chris L said, ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ at exactly the same time.

‘Oh —’ I said.

I squinted.

His unreadable, sunglassed face.

‘Did you do that on purpose?’ I said.

But Chris L only watched me, then detached fully from the wall and walked past me towards the mouth of the parking garage, stalking in his shawl into a group of three tall women who closed ranks around him like choreography.

‘You met Chris L,’ said Lachlan.

‘I think he’s high,’ said Dan.

‘Oh,’ I said again.

‘Your mouth is slightly open,’ said Dan.

‘I know,’ I said. I hadn’t known.

I am not going to use this space to complain about my looks, because even though I was not the sexiest nut on the gumtree, you can do a lot with anything, actually too much, and in my case, being sickly, sort of starey and inert, did not stop me from getting rides to Fitzroy with random strangers, which was enough to make you wonder. But I knew that it was easy to invent connections when no connections are there; such is the fate of homosexual boys in every high school, who lock eyes with boys across the room and think they like them back, when all those boys are doing is sensing movement in the room and responding in accordance with their instincts.

This knowledge of what was possible, of our susceptible hearts, was what stopped me from following Chris L into the crowd – even when his face appeared through the tall group of strangers, directing its glassy circles back towards me.

It took a minute of listening to a deep, dull conversation between Lachlan and Dan, who were planning a weekend trip to country Victoria that I wasn’t invited to and would not have gone to anyway, before I looked over at Chris L again and saw he was still there, still alone, possibly having just looked away.

‘I’m just going to go talk to Chris L,’ I said.

‘Great,’ said Dan.

I walked towards the strangers, and around them, and through.

‘Is this okay?’ I asked Chris L.

He nodded.

Chris L reached under his shawl and withdrew two bottles of screw-topped beer. The bottles had been against his body, which was not my favourite thing, but I watched him unscrew the bottles and accepted one anyway, thinking about the possibility of sweat and skin flakes.

‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

‘That’s a funny story,’ I said.

I took a drink of my beer.

‘And I guess I’ll tell it. I found this guy online and he just gave me a lift here. And he didn’t even want anything. He just, like, gave me a ride.’ I took a deep breath. I smiled and kept drinking.

‘Do you mean like Uber?’ he said.

‘What? No, I —’

‘Hey.’