‘You should never tell him anything,’ I said to Holly. ‘He’s terrible.’

‘I’ve noticed.’ But she was smiling. ‘So come? I need backup.’

‘She needs someone to pretend to be her girlfriend,’ Nic said.

‘I do not!’ Holly squealed. ‘I just hate going in there when it’s just me and Nic. He’s so obvious.’

‘Does he do that googly-eyed thing at her for you?’

‘Yes! He’s so gross. Please?’

I closed my eyes and took a long, deep breath. ‘Okay.’

She squealed again. When I looked up, Nic was sitting back in his seat, satisfied, like this had been his plan all along.

And that was how I ended up at the casino, sitting in one of the hundred near-identical cocktail bars under a gold and crystal chandelier the size of my bedroom, so big it could have crushed us all into the ridiculously patterned carpet, drinking Black Russians until four in the morning, arguing with Holly about whether Clueless was better than Mean Girls and listening as she told me about her band—‘we’re like punk you can dance to’, she said, with a growl and a flurry of drunken air guitar—and how they were putting together songs for their first EP but their drummer was in their final year of law so they never got any time to play. Her enthusiasm lit up the vodka in my belly, making me warm all over, making me laugh.

We watched Tegan make cocktails and plotted and told silly stories with no endings that got sillier and more endless the more we drank, the tinny melodies and shrill songs of the pokies such a constant soundtrack that eventually I stopped hearing them.

I got too drunk too fast and I should have gone home but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be cold and I didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want to stare at that water-stained ceiling for one more second, and it didn’t matter that it was the cocktails talking but I felt almost human, almost normal, almost like someone else. A normal girl who could do anything—laugh and drink and talk and not be constantly thinking about what would happen to all of us if there was an earthquake, a tsunami, a catastrophic structural failure. Someone different.

And that was how I ended up outside Tom’s building, silence ringing in my ears, staring through the glass at the rows upon rows of letterboxes and wishing I knew which one was his, wishing I had his number. Not for any reason—just because Holly and Nic had gone home and I was wide awake and my bones were cold but my skin was hot and I wasn’t ready to stop talking, and I had liked talking to him, more than I wanted to admit.