I take a breath. Okay, so the ice-queen plan didn’t last long. I’ve gone in the opposite direction, complete verbal meltdown. But, I can recover this. I just need to be firm and take charge. I swallow, lower my voice, bring it a few notches down from hysteria.

‘I think we just need to act friendly to each other when we’re around Harper,’ I finish, folding my arms.

‘Sorry, can we back up a second. You heard the name Jeremy and you thought you were going to be living with a professor?’ Jesse says.

‘A very young one, yes, maybe.’ I really wish I had not said that part.

‘Who wears a bow tie?’ he says.

‘Yes. And a tweed blazer. With those leather patches on the elbows.’

‘You spent quite a bit of time imagining this Professor Jeremy,’ he says, and I can see a smile tugging at the edge of his lips.

‘I was imagining him as a mentor,’ I say huffily. I was actually imagining him as a handsome, floppy-haired, bow-tie-clad post-grad student who loves the library and has a posh accent and would bring me a strong cup of tea every afternoon while I was studying and we would make intellectual and deeply insightful jokes about Hemingway or some other dead author I haven’t read yet, but no one ever need know that level of detail.

‘Mmmm. I’m sure,’ Jesse says.

‘Anyway. The plan. We’re nice to each other when we’re around Harper, and we get through this year—’

‘I told you my real name was Jeremy,’ he interrupts.

‘No you didn’t.’

‘Yes I did. We were sitting together on the bus, and you said if you ever published a book, you wanted it to be under your nanna’s name, which I’m pretty sure you said was Evelyn or something like that, because you don’t like your name, even though you have a perfectly fine name, and I said if I ever did, I would publish it under my real name, Jeremy.’

He’s right. The memory floods back instantly. I remember not just the conversation, but the way we were sitting, turned towards each other, elbows bumping, and that it was afternoon and we were heading home. We were fourteen, and our friendship was new and exciting in the way it is when you suddenly and unexpectedly click with someone and you feel like you could talk forever.

I push the memory away as fast as possible. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I say, looking away.

‘Okay,’ he says.

I’m not sure he believes me.

‘So what about when we’re not around Harper?’ he adds.

‘What do you mean?’