I sit on my bed and push my face into my hands. Of course they did. She knows Jesse, a little, from our town, but I’m not sure she’s ever spoken to him before now. She used to dislike him in support of me, not that she ever actually knew why I didn’t like him, until I told her earlier this year we didn’t need to do that anymore. Now she’s been here for fifteen minutes and she will have charmed him and made him feel like they’re best friends. That’s one of Lauren’s superpowers. She can get you to skip levels, to make you feel like you’re better friends than you are. People have said to me, ‘I’m friends with Lauren,’ and when I mention their name to her, she will say, ‘Who?’ with genuine puzzlement.

I decide I am going to force myself into a more positive frame of mind. This is good, this is going to be fun. Forget rewriting my story, forget Jesse, put on a happy face.

‘We’re going on a pub crawl,’ Lauren says, appearing in my doorway.

‘Great!’ I say, in my most upbeat voice. She opens her bag and starts pulling clothes out and throwing them on the floor. I pick up each thing she tosses and fold it neatly in a pile, almost without noticing.

‘You don’t want to go, I can tell,’ she says, putting her hands on her hips.

‘I do. Sort of. I just wish you’d told me you were coming, because I have so much uni work to do over the next few days,’ I say.

‘For which subject?’ Lauren asks.

‘All of them.’

‘Come on Brooke. Just do what I used to do when writing essays.’

Lauren used to google phrases she could use instead of a single word, to pad out her word count, and she would write ‘as noted in my previous paragraph’ in every paragraph. I would then go through and cut it all when I proofread her essays and she would yell, ‘If you’re deleting things, you better think of some new words to add,’ and then we would argue and I would stop helping her until she cried and Mum told me if I helped her write the essay just this one time, then Lauren would clean up the kitchen the next day when it was my turn, but she never did.

‘I need to rewrite my entire short story,’ I say.