‘Cool. You get first pick. I’ll unpack in a minute. This itinerary they’ve sorted out is blowing my mind.’

I woke up brand-new. Patrick was awake before I was and he’d already spoken to Bianca, who’d said she thought that for our first day she should drive us out to the beach. Apparently she was our designated driver for the week we were on the west coast, before we flew over east to Sydney. I’d texted the Core Four: We have a limo driver! and received a slew of jealous emoji responses in reply.

‘Ready, ready, chicken jelly?’ Patrick shouted from his bedroom.

Ready, ready chicken jelly?

‘I beg your pardon?’ I yelled back. ‘What … are you even saying?’

He appeared at the doorway in a pair of pressed navy shorts, Birkenstocks and a rumpled Oxford shirt in a blue check. His hair was ruffled and unkempt, twenty-four hours’ worth of stubble lending him a dishevelled aura that suited him, like he was officially in off-duty mode. In one hand he had a beach towel, in the other a tote bag weighed down with what I could tell, from the hard corner poking through the fabric, was a book.

‘My mum – Mama Jess, to my friends – used to say it when we were kids.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t think I have ever said it as an adult, except for randomly just now.’

‘What’s your dad’s name?’

‘Mark.’

‘Jess and Mark. What a son they’ve raised.’

He looked at me, then, for the first time. He sort of blinked in rapid succession and I swear I could see him recalibrating his brain, a computer that needed a moment to open a new tab because it already had so many other tabs on the go. I wondered if we were destined to keep dipping in and out of formality for the whole trip, losing ourselves and then pulling back as we realized there was actually still so much we didn’t know about the other. I couldn’t tell which camp he was currently in. I wanted to skip this part – the getting comfortable with each other bit – and just be cool. I supposed that’s the problem with bringing a virtual stranger on holiday with you – there was so much unknown ground. I wanted to fast-forward into the comfort of friendship.

‘You look pretty,’ he told me. I flared my nostrils and made myself go cross-eyed.

‘Fanks,’ I slurred, self-consciously. There was something about how his pupils had dilated that made an innocent compliment feel more loaded than it was. It made my skin tingle.

There was a beat where we looked at each other awkwardly and he said, ‘Do you have sun cream? I forgot mine.’

‘I do,’ I replied, trying to switch up the mood. ‘To the beach! Yee-haw!’