‘Oh God! Look at you, player. I honestly wouldn’t have known. You were so cool about it. “Yeah, that’d be good,” ’ she said, affecting my voice. ‘We’re practically stealing your innocence.’ My belly swirled at the thought of June thinking of me as a little kid. Not in a good way. Also I knew she used ‘we’ as a collective term to mean her and Heath, which didn’t help. ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to. A lot of people don’t.’ The way her voice went up at the end of the sentence let me know she was lying.

But I wanted to get drunk. Stupid drunk. It wasn’t that I had avoided drinking in the past; I had just never thought about it that much. But here it was. And I was willing to do anything to stop thinking.

The table at the back of the basement had the beer cans I had seen people drinking in movies and other stuff in bigger bottles that ranged from clear to a sort of unhealthy piss-coloured brown. Next to plastic bottles of Coke and Sprite and orange juice. Mixers, I guess.

‘What do you think you’d like?’ June asked, eyeing the table and idly scratching the back of her head. ‘Well, no one really likes any of this. What do you think you can tolerate?’

‘What do you, uh, put with the orange juice?’ I felt like an idiot. Naïve. But if June was thinking the same thing, she didn’t let on.

‘Vodka, normally. Want that?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I, uh, like orange juice.’ Oh, wow, that was cool. That was a cool thing to say.

June laughed. ‘Well, you won’t like vodka.’ She filled a red cup nearly to the top with orange juice, then dashed some Smirnoff in like an afterthought, then handed the concoction to me.

‘That’s all?’ I asked.

She smiled, her eyebrows furrowed. ‘Try it, then,’ she said, like a dare.

I did as she said, unhinged my jaw and practically downed the whole thing in one go. The orange juice was there but underneath was this sort of empty burn that clung to the back of my throat and fizzed up to my nose and made my eyes water. I had to conceal a retch.

‘Whoa! Easy, killer!’ June said, snatching the cup I’d just emptied. ‘The night is young. The night hasn’t even been freaking conceived yet. Relax.’ Someone behind us called her name. ‘Oh, hey! Here, come on, let me introduce you …’

When she left, I pressed the mouth of the clear bottle to mine, and sipped.

I remember clinging to June like a leech at first. Being too nervous to be left alone.