The thing is, I am a person who prepares. The very essence of who I am is my preparedness, my to-do lists, my thorough research, my above-and-beyond reading, my colour-coded spreadsheets, my first-hand-in-the-air-I-know-the-answer energy. Before I moved out, I had a typed, itemised list of things I needed to buy, grouped by store, and then each item assigned to a person, so Mum and my older sister Lauren and I could get through the Boxing Day sales with the most efficiency. (Lauren looked at the list when I handed it to her and said, ‘No. Absolutely not. Brooke, why do you do this? I’m not coming anymore.’) And yet I didn’t research what to do when a mouse appears in the bedroom of your share house in the middle of the night. I should have screamed. But I didn’t scream when I first saw it, and it really feels like the appropriate window of time in which to scream has now passed.

This is my first night living away from Mum, Lauren and Nanna. The first night of my shiny new university-student life in a shiny new city. Is turning on a lamp and seeing a diseasecarrying rodent a bad omen? Not necessarily. This can still be a good sign. Maybe the mouse and I will become friends, have little adventures together. He’ll travel around in my pocket, I’ll call him Cornelius, it could be a charming period of my life that I will write about when I’m older.

I shift my arm ever so slightly and the spell is broken. The mouse races off, and even though it’s going away from me, I finally scream. Louder than I thought I could scream. I jump up into a defensive standing position, legs slightly bent, hands in a ready-to-strike pose I vaguely remember from year-seven self-defence class. The mouse has very quickly gone from my friend Cornelius back to foul creature again.

‘Brooke?’ There’s a knock on my door and Harper pokes her head in. ‘Are you okay?’

‘There’s a mouse. It was in the corner and then it ran out the door,’ I say, trying not to sound like I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t have any pants on, just an oversize T-shirt and underwear, and I think the T-shirt is long enough to provide me with a tiny bit of dignity, but I still hope we can both pretend in the morning that Harper never saw the uppermost parts of my thighs.