When we woke a few hours later, Chloe announced that because the sun was shining we would have a swim in the pool before breakfast on the deck. This was what I’d been looking forward to most since receiving the handwritten invitation from Chloe the Monday before. I’d been on holidays with my family in Queensland earlier that year and had managed to convince my mother to buy me a bikini. My first ever. I thought it was beautiful. It was pale blue with a navy blue trim and had a stencilled, navy blue hibiscus flower on the left triangle and right buttock. I hadn’t told anyone I had the bikini and had been waiting impatiently for the weather to warm up so that I could make my debut. We hastily stripped off our pyjamas and pulled our bathers on. Chloe was the only other girl with a bikini, I noticed smugly. We filed outside and stood shivering by the pool in the cool spring morning. Overtired, over-sugared and more than a tad cranky, I was frustrated that the others hadn’t been making a fuss of my new bathers, so I took matters into my own hands. Slyly, I said to Sarah: ‘I like your bathers.’ Actually, Sarah’s were childish and pink and plain, except for the Adidas logo in the middle of her chest.

As I’d hoped, this caused Sarah to cast an admiring eye over my bikini in return. But, rather than complimenting me, as I was anticipating, Sarah’s eyes bulged.

‘Lucy’s got boobies!’ she shouted gleefully to the others, pointing to my chest. ‘Look!’

As the girls gathered around me, goggling, I looked down at my chest and saw that Sarah was right. The cold had made my nipples go hard and I saw that the flesh around them was visibly raised; my fledgling breasts, accentuated by the bikini triangles, were quite discernible through the lycra.

Even though the change was slight, in that moment, it seemed to me that a gulf had opened between my friends and I. It wasn’t so much that they all seemed smaller and younger; it was that all of a sudden, I felt I was much bigger than them all, more bumbling, something like an oaf (although, in reality, I was shorter than Sarah and Bonnie, slimmer than Jacinta and Maggie and older only than Chloe). Inexplicable guilt welled up in my chest.

The second recollection was of getting changed after PE in the dingy change room of my high school gym. It was some years later and, despite my early start, a significant portion of the girls in my year had overtaken me. It had been, perhaps, six months since I realised that my breasts had stopped growing. Each morning, I would put on my humble bra and notice the way in which it cupped my breasts snugly, but not too snugly, and would feel a pang of bitter disappointment. Meanwhile, I watched the way in which other girls wobbled in glee. They would loudly complain that their backs and necks hurt from holding them up, and I’d nod along like I knew what they were talking about.